There’s even an unpopulated footprint for a DFN8 QSPI flash chip – with a lightweight enough OS build, you could perhaps dedicate your MicroSD card to storage only. On top of it, we can see the CPU itself, a small buck regulator and a DDR3 RAM chip, as well as tightly-packed passives. Having power of Linux in such a small footprint is certainly something to behold! The back of the module is mostly flat, save for a few decoupling capacitors on the other side of the CPU – it seems, an Allwinner H616. More importantly, this module is as small as an SD card itself – or as an OLED display that we hobbyists sprinkle onto our projects.
This is a decent set of interfaces, rivaling what we’d expect out of a Pi Zero! As such, it’s very capable of running Linux, and even sports an HDMI output! Taking a closer look at the devboard picture, we can spot traces for three USB 2.0 ports, what seems to be two SDIO interfaces for MicroSD or WiFi cards, and an Ethernet MagJack with its termination network.
Today’s Diminutive Device is a small castellated System-On-Module (Twitter link, nitter proxy) from called M-Core, with a quad-core A53 CPU and 1 GB of RAM.
