Looking for hardware advice

[Dmitriy Fitisov]

Hello Oliver,
may I ask why FreeBSD?
You may take a look at Soekris website.
They used to support FreeBSD very well, AFAIK.
But if you want GPIO, would not it better to go lower level something like ARM
boards from Olimex or similar?

Thank you.
Dmitriy

On 2012-09-27, at 12:26 PM, Oliver Fromme <olli at lurza.secnetix.de> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I'm sorry, this is probably off-topic, but I couldn't find
> much useful information on the web.
> 
> I'm looking for a small board that's well supported by
> FreeBSD (head or stable/9).
> 
> It should ...
> 
> - ... be as small as possible (physical size).
> - ... be available to the public without having to order
>   a crate of 1000.  I need only one, maybe two.
> - ... work out of the box with head or stable/9, without
>   requiring a soldering iron, without having to patch
>   firmware with a hex editor and similar adventures.  :-)
> - ... run from a single power line, preferably 12V DC or
>   something like that, with as low power consumption as
>   possible.  I wouldn't mind if it could run from a bunch
>   of batteries either.
> - ... Support USB and some kind of wireless communication,
>   preferably Bluetooth (either built-in or via a USB-to-
>   Bluetooth adapter).
> - ... boot from flash (SD card, CF card or USB stick).
> - ... have a bunch of GPIO pins to play with.  Actually I
>   would like to port an old piece of software that used
>   the good old parallel port (in bit-bang mode), so I need
>   at least 12 or 13 I/O pins.  Alternatively I could use a
>   USB parallel port adapter, but I'm not sure if those
>   support bit-bang mode.  (And such an adapter would add
>   to the overall size, so I'd like to avoid that.)
> 
> I do NOT need ethernet, VGA, audio, and so on.  In fact
> I'll probably compile a kernel without networking support.
> Performance is not an issue, I don't intend to run number
> crunching stuff or folding at home.  ;-)  RAM should be
> sufficient to boot a stripped-down kernel with the modules
> and software that I need (Bluetooth stuff, a shell, some
> small programs).
> 
> Something like the Raspberry Pi would be cool (except that
> the Pi has many features that I don't need, and it's not
> supported by FreeBSD as of today).
> 
> Any advice will be appreciated!
> 
> Best regards
>   Oliver
> 
> 
> -- 
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