Piunora is a compact, easy-to-use development board for electronics prototyping with Linux. It has a familiar form factor, legible pin labels, and a design that’s well suited to space-constrained applications.

Piunora includes a USB Type-C port that’s wired for both power- and data-related functions. And, because it draws less power than a full-featured Raspberry Pi 4, it will happily interface with any modern USB port rated for 900 mA or higher. As a result, you can use Piunora simply by plugging it into your computer and connecting to it via USB gadget mode, either through a virtual Ethernet connection or as USB mass-storage device. Then, thanks to Adafruit Blinka (a compatibility layer for CircuitPython on Linux Single Board Computers), you can use Piunora just like any other CircuitPython dev board.

Piunora hosts a number of powerful peripherals that will come in handy for embedded machine-learning applications, including an HDMI port, camera input connectors, and PCI-e support, which is not present on a standard Raspberry Pi 4. By way of example, the M.2 B-Key port on the rear of the board is not only useful for SSD storage, it can also accommodate PCI-e expansion boards like the Google Coral machine-learning accelerator. You can also work with analog signals thanks to a dedicated ADC.

Piunora is open hardware, and we will publish both our design files and our software by the time it ships.

Features & Specifications

• Arduino UNO R3 / Adafruit Metro compatible form factor (3.3 v logic)
• PCI-e through M.2 B-Key connector on the rear of the board
• On-the-fly switching between USB host (USB Type-A) and device mode (USB Type-C)
• A full-sized camera connector that supports all Pi-compatible cameras
• 6x ADC Inputs (10 bits / 200k/s)
• A full-sized HDMI port
• A WS2812 Smart RGB LED for user status
• One user-controllable button
• CircuitPython compatibility—just plug it into your computer and start coding!

More Details Below!