Kimχ Micro: A powerful alternative to the Raspberry Pi that supports PCIe cards

The Kimχ Micro is a small but mighty single-board computer (SBC). At a footprint of just 65 x 32 mm, the Kimχ Micro is just slightly larger than the Raspberry Pi Zero. However, the Kimχ Micro offers greater possibilities and power reserves than its micro SBC counterpart.

Specifically, the Kimχ Micro includes an NXP i.MX 8M Mini processor, which features up to four ARM Cortex-A53 cores. These cores can clock up to 1.8 GHz and are complemented by an ARM Cortex-M4F real-time core, along with a Vivante GC NanoUltra 3D GPU. The latter will allow the Kimχ Micro to encode and decode 1080p content at 60 FPS.

Additionally, the micro SBC includes 1 GB of LPDDR4 RAM, 8 GB of eMMC flash storage and a micro SD card reader. There is a serial EEPROM too. The Kimχ Micro also features a built-in mPCIe connection for adding PCIe cards like a Wi-Fi card. The board should support LTE or LoRA cards, incidentally.

The Kimχ Micro has 2x 60-pin I/O headers for connecting a camera, a display, Ethernet, GPIO, I2C and SPI among others. The board also has several LEDs and two configurable buttons. There is even a 2-pin header for a LiPo battery.

A USB 2.0 Type-C port handles power and data, but there is no dedicated video output. The Kimχ Micro will be offered through GroupGets. You can read more information about the open-source SBC on its dedicated GitHub page.