In February, Novasom Industries launched its Linux-powered, Rockchip RK3328 based SBC-M7 single board computer, which Novasom now calls the Novasom M7, along with an SBC-M8 board based on a Snapdragon 410E. Now, Novasom has followed customer feedback to upgrade the somewhat Raspberry Pi-like Novasom M7 with a Novasom M7+ (or M7Plus) model that provides a variety of hardware and software improvements.
SW Difference With M7
The M7plus is totally SW compatible with any M7 and RP3 on the market.
As usual, plug and play, not pray… The specific GPIO mapping library we include in our SW package is the only thing you need to include in your RP3 SW, in order to make it run with Armbian-Debian without any trouble.
And our tech support is there to help you. A real technical support, not a simple blog…
HW Difference With M7
USB Power
On the M7plus, it’s possible – not mandatory – to power the unit by a 5V coming from the USB type A connector in addition to having the usual protected 12V power input option.
A Stronger Backlight Driver for display
When driving the backlight of a display, with whichever technology you would like to use, the direct drive of the backlight allows us to dim or switch it off and on the display by software. Things you cannot do if the unit is not powering the display. And in order to drive a brighter display, we have up-scaled to 6A (@5V) the drive capability of the novasom board.
FCC cable for the HDMI output
The HDMI output it’s a huge video connector. But in some applications the cost – dimension of the HDMI cable and it’s rigidity, makes it hard to industrialize the solution “Novasom display” that we call NovaPC. So we have added an FCC connector that replicates the HDMI’s output so an easy cable and path can be used.
More Outputs on strip pin
We know that the famous J3 pin strip is considered almost a standard in the market, but we saw several applications where the USB bus, not present on the J3 RP3 “standard” would be more than welcome. So we added those outputs.
Read more: RK3328-BASED INDUSTRIAL SBC EASES RASPBIAN PORTING
