Team IoT Drops High-Powered Alternative to the Raspberry Pi with ATOMIC Pi

There are several Atom x5-Z8350 development boards on the market — including DFRobot’s $89 LattePanda, and Aaeon’s $99 UP board, which run on the high side price wise. Team IoT recently took to Kickstarter to crowdfund their high-powered Raspberry Pi alternative ATOMIC Pi, which offers the same Intel Cherry Trail-based SoC, only at a significantly reduced price of $34.

The 130 x 100 x 50-mm ATOMIC Pi dev platform hosts an x5-Z8350 quad-core SoC with an Intel HD 400 GPU, 2Gb of DDR3L-1600 RAM, 16Gb of eMMC, and a micro SD slot for up to 256Gb of additional storage. For communication, the board packs an 802.11ac dual-band Wi-Fi (Ralink RT5572) with IPX connectors, along with a Bluetooth 4.0 via a serial interface, and Gigabit Ethernet port. On the I/O front, the board is equipped with an HDMI port, micro USB 3.0 OTG port, USB 2.0, TTL Serial debug/expansion (3.6Mbps) ports, and 26-pin GPIO header.

Additional features for the ATOMIC Pi include a 9-axis inertial navigation sensor with compass, RTC with battery, 5V input jack, and comes pre-installed with Kubuntu; however, it’s compatible with Windows 10 (64-bit) as well.

Team IoT also offers a breakout shield that pushes the board’s price tag higher to $49, and features screw terminals, a 12V header and a large prototyping area to build your own expansion circuits. Team IoT’s Kickstarter campaign has surpassed its target goal of $3,500 for the ATOMIC Pi with over $19,000 with two weeks left before the campaign ends. The x5-Z8350-based development board is expected to ship in January of 2019.