DEV KIT WEEKLY: Digi International ConnectCore 8M Mini Development Kit

Historically, the embedded electronics deployed in industrial applications have been relatively simple, both in order to keep costs down but more importantly to ensure safe, reliable system operation by keep complexity to a minimum. Boy, have things changed. Take the Digi International ConnectCore 8M Mini Development Kit, for example. The development 40 mm x 45 mm module is designed around NXP’s 8M SoC, which integrates four 1.6 GHz Arm Cortex-A53 cores for application processing, a Cortex-M4 for low-power, real-time tasks, a 2D/3D GPU, and a video processing unit (VPU) that supports full HD streaming video. Why would you need all of that performance in an industrial edge device? Well, machine vision and AI are a couple of answers. On the kit baseboard you’ll find an RJ-45 connector that carries 10/100/1000 Gigabit Ethernet, two USB Type A hosts, CAN-FD and RS-485 interfaces, as well as two antenna connectors from Hirose and two surface-mount antenna (SMA) connectors from Bobbintron. Those SMA