Geniatech Unveils the XPI-3566, Its Rockchip RK3566 "Raspberry Pi Form Factor" Single-Board Computer
Designed for DIY and "the field of programming education for teenagers," the company says of its latest single-board computer design.
Geniatech has unveiled a "Raspberry Pi form factor" single-board computer, the XPI-3566, built around Rockchip's RK3566 system-on-chip (SoC) — offering four Arm Cortex-A55 cores and up to 8GB of RAM and 64GB of eMMC storage.
The XPI-3566, which Geniatech is very open in admitting is designed to roughly mimic the footprint and layout of the popular Raspberry Pi family of single-board computers right down to the 40-pin general-purpose input/output (GPIO) header to the top of the board, uses Rockchip's RK3566 SoC. As a result it offers four Arm Cortex-A55 processor cores running at up to 1.8GHz and an Arm Mali-G52-EE graphics processor, to which Geniatech has added 1GB, 2GB, 4GB, or 8GB oF RAM and 8GB, 16GB, 32GB, or 64GB of eMMC storage on an external module.
Elsewhere on the board is a gigabit Ethernet pot, along with dual-band Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0 connectivity, plus a microSD slot for additional storage. Oddly, there's only a single USB 3.0 port, along with two USB 2.0 ports — and a third USB 2.0 port, which operates in On The Go (OTG) mode only. A USB Type-C port provides power and a 40-pin header at the top of the board provides access to 28 general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins, while a single full-size HDMI port provides video and digital audio output capabilities.
This isn't Geniatech's first shot at building a better Raspberry Pi: The company launched the XPI-iMX8MM in September last year, offering a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B-inspired layout centered around the NXP i.MX8M system-on-chip with up to 4GB of RAM. Its new design is similar, but not identical: The overall footprint is the same, but the USB Type-C power port has shifted to the other side of the HDMI port, and the 3.5mm AV jack has gone with an infrared receiver in its place.
On the software side, Geniatech has so far only confirmed support for Android 11 and Debian 10 — though it is likely other RK3566-compatible operating systems could be made to boot on the board with a little effort. There are also at least four visible components not disclosed in the company's specifications: Two headers which appear to be MIPI DSI and CSI display and camera connectors, the aforementioned infrared receiver, and what appears to be a physical reset button.
More information on the XPI-3566 is available on the Geniatech website; at the time of writing, the company had not disclosed pricing or general availability.