I’ve just got V1.0 of a development board for the ‘Bubble’ embedded ARM module ready for manufacture, and will hopefully have prototypes soon.

It’s designed to make the Bubble board easy to work with, and brings out various useful connectors:

• JTAG ports compatible with Xilinx (14-pin) and ARM (20-pin) dongle pinouts
• Serial port for the console
• USB host, for memory sticks, keyboards and whatever else
• USB slave, for mass storage or USB networking
• Micro SD card
• HDMI for monitor connection
• Ethernet
• Stereo analogue audio in/out
• Raspberry-Pi compatible expansion connector with I2C, SPI and GPIO

It’s all powered from a Micro USB connector which should take a standard mobile phone charger, and is designed to sit neatly in a low-cost plastic box for protection.

Everything except the Ethernet port is already supported by Linux on the Bubble board, though making the HDMI port work will involve some fiddling with the LCD output timings. The Ethernet port is based on the Wiznet W5100 chip, which is popular in the embedded community and is supported by recent Linux kernels.