MNT Station is a quiet and space-saving, future-proof, universal open hardware computer for your desktop, homelab, or mounted on a wall as an edge device/router. It’s also a robust enclosure for your existing MNT Reform mainboard(s) and can be turned into a standalone desktop PC, silent home NAS, or low-power entertainment center.

As usual, this MNT Research device is fully open source hardware with all sources publicly available. As a modular, general-purpose computing platform, MNT Station is the most flexible MNT device yet designed!

Your Next Desktop Computer, Router, or Server

Tired of your laptop taking up more space on your desk than it should? Of all the plugging and unplugging because you’ve been using it as a portable and as a stationary device? With MNT Station you get a machine that’s designed to be stationary while maintaining the energy efficiency of a laptop. Connect a monitor and a keyboard, hook it up with a USB Type-C cable for power delivery, and you’re good to go!

MNT Station prototypes

MNT Station has mounting holes on the back (standard VESA as well as keyhole slots) to give you the opportunity to install it on your wall, behind a cabinet, or on the back of a monitor. Its external antenna mounts ensures strong radio reception for Wi-Fi or SDRs, no matter where MNT Station is placed.

Love tinkering with Docker containers, Tailnets, or Home Assistant? Add a flexible and uniquely open ARM-based server to your homelab with MNT Station. Test and develop for a broad range of ARM and other SoCs that fit the modular mainboard (including NXP, Amlogic, Qualcomm, Broadcom (Raspberry Pi) or even an AMD/Xilinx FPGA). And thanks to its native charging and battery monitoring technology, MNT Station has battery backup built-in, running for hours off of 8 LiFEPO4 cells, giving you ample time to shut down in case of a power outage. Or, underneath your TV set, MNT Station can pull duty as a streaming box and retro game console, thanks to its low-power design that doesn’t need ventilation.

Features & Specifications

MNT Station case features

• Fully CNC milled enclosure from anodized, bead blasted aluminum
• Open design, so you can 3D print or order new case parts yourself
• Can lay flat or stand on the long edge, or be mounted to VESA arms/screens or walls
• Compatible with all classic MNT Reform motherboard versions (2.0, 2.5, 3.0)
• Electronic Port Cover with power button, ATTiny microcontroller that talks to the motherboard, and a bar of 10 LEDs that are controllable from Linux (display, for example CPU utilization or network load)
• 2x holes for SMA antenna panel mount connectors
• 2x wall mount keyhole slots in the back
• VESA mounting holes in the back (FDMI MIS-D, both 75 x 75 mm and 100 x 100 mm)
• Designed to be stacked on future case expansions for batteries/USV, hard disks, GPU with internal cable passthrough holes in the back of the case
• Dimensions: 279 x 133 x 26 mm

MNT Reform motherboard 3.0 features

• 3x USB Type-A ports
• 1x USB Type-C for USB-C PD power input and built-in UART-to-USB converters
• for convenient access to SoC/CPU serial console and System Controller UART
• Full-size HDMI port
• GBit ethernet port
• TRRS stereo headphone jack with microphone support

Internal connectors:

• 200-pin Processor Module connector for CPU/RAM/eMMC upgrades
• 2x 4-pin JST PH connectors with USB 2.0
• 1x 4-pin JST PH stereo speaker connector
• 1x 2-pin JST PH direct power input connector
• 1x 4-pin JST SH connector for I2C sensors/displays (connected to main SoC/CPU, Qwiic compatible)
• 1x mPCIe slot with 1x PCIe 2.0 lane, mainly used for Wi-Fi, but can be used for secondary SSD/RAID (with M.2 adapter)
• 1x M.2 key M slot with up to 4x PCIe 3.0+ lanes, mainly used for SSD
• USB Type-C port for NXP LPC11U24 system controller (open source firmware) flashing
• Optional battery/USV system that support 8x LiFePO4 cells in series with monitoring and balancing and open source Linux driver (reform2-lpc), requires cell holders and cables.

MNT Reform Processor Module Compatibility

• MNT RCORE with Rockchip RK3588 (8-core Cortex-A76/A55, 8/16/32GB RAM, Mali G610 GPU)
• MNT RCM4 with Banana Pi CM4 (Amlogic A311D, 6 core Cortex-A73/A53, 4GB RAM, Mali G52 GPU)
• MNT RCM4 with Raspberry Pi CM4 (4-core Cortex-A72, up to 4GB RAM, Videocore GPU)
• MNT NXP LS1028A dual-core Cortex-A72, fully open hardware PCB design, can run totally blob free as a server/headless system (uses SATA on M.2 connector)
• MNT NXP i.MX8M Plus (4x Cortex-A53 @ 2GHz, 8GB RAM, Vivante GPU, from original MNT Pocket Reform)
• MNT NXP i.MX8MQ (4x Cortex-A53 @ 1.8GHz, 4GB RAM, Vivante GPU, from original MNT Reform)
• MNT RKX7 FPGA based SoC (Kintex-7, RISC-V soft SoC based on LiteX/Vexriscv, or custom gateware)
• MNT Quasar with Qualcomm Dragonwing QCS6490, QCS8550 (currently in development)

Open Source

MNT Research is driven by the idea of a digital future that is open-source, accessible, and modular. Giving people the opportunity to modify, update, and customize their devices to their preferences is key to achieving that future. Another one is building a community that shares knowledge and skills as well as inviting everyone to advance and contribute to current MNT developments in software and components. In making our machines repairable and our electronics durable, we provide a high level of autonomy and independence from corporate devices and operating systems controlled by the few rather than the many—which has become more important than ever.

With MNT Station, all sources are available. If purchased with the MNT Reform Motherboard 3.0 and a compatible MNT processor module, the chip on the module is (in most cases) not open source.

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