Globalscale's Mochabin-5G Is an Open Source, Feature-Packed Network Board Supporting 10-gig-Ethernet
Design with four native ports plus SFP and SFP+ cages to add more, this PoE-supported network appliances packs in the features.
Embedded computing specialist Globalscale Technologies has launched a crowdfunding campaign for an open source quad-core networking board with support for 5G cellular, 10-gig-Ethernet, and Wi-Fi 6: the Mochabin-5G.
"The Mochabin builds upon the ESPRESSObin community and experience by adding a fanless quad core Arm A72 processor clocked at 1.4GHz," explains Globalscale's Bryan Cheng, referring to the company's 2016 dual-core networking board. "We have increased from the previous maximum of 2GB DDR3 to now 4GB or optional 8GB DDR4. Most importantly the Mochabin has native 10G networking via an SFP+ cage as well as flexible slots for M.2, PCI, and MiniPCIe interfaces."
The board is built around a Marvell Armada 7040, with four Arm Cortex-A72 processor cores running at 1.4GHz. It comes with 4GB of DDR4 memory as standard, with 8GB available as an optional upgrade at the time of purchase, and includes two USB 3.0 ports.
It's the network connectivity that's the real selling point of the Mochabin-5G: Four on-board gigabit LAN ports, plus a single WAN port with the ability to power the Mochabin-5G from Power-over-Ethernet (PoE), plus one SFP and one SFP+ cage for an additional gigabit and/or 10-gig Ethernet port. An M.2 slot provides room to add a 4G or 5G cellular modem, while a second provides SATA connectivity for storage, and a mini-PCIe slot supports an optional NXP 9098 802.11ax and Bluetooth 5 wireless card.
"We will differentiate our product from the previous ESPRESSObin campaign, Cheng promises, "by committing to a plastic enclosure tooling as part of the production. when we hit our goal we will make the commitment for injection mold tooling. Its design to house the Mochabin along with its accessories and to operate without a fan."
The company promises support for a wide variety of workloads, from routing and firewall to SDWAN and network-attached storage (NAS), and includes support for mainline Linux, OpenWRT, and Replica One software.
The Mochabin-5G is now funding on Kickstarter, with physical rewards starting at $159 for early bird backers of the standard model and $199 for those choosing the Wi-Fi edition.
