Some hardware doesn’t make a lot of noise when it’s being used. It doesn’t come in fancy boxes or get a lot of attention at consumer tech events. It just ships, is put in a machine or a gateway enclosure, and leaves to do the work that everything else depends on. The SolidRun HummingBoard is just that kind of hardware, which makes it more interesting.
SolidRun is an embedded computing company that has been making improvements to the HummingBoard line for a while now. They have spent years making ARM-based platforms for industrial and IoT uses. The first boards in the family were based on the NXP i.MX 6 processor, a solid and reliable chip that powered the Edge, the Gate, which focused on connectivity, and the Pro, which was a bit smaller. Each board had Gigabit Ethernet, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, HDMI output, and a good number of GPIO headers. Nothing new or revolutionary, but always useful.
In the beginning, it wasn’t just one feature that made the HummingBoard family interesting. It had to be able to work in a wide range of temperatures, from 0°C to 70°C for commercial grade and all the way up to -40°C for industrial grade. It also had to have a small enough footprint to fit in small enclosures. That kind of thermal tolerance is important when putting hardware in industrial equipment, outdoor infrastructure, or places where climate control isn’t a given but is nice to have.
The more recent HummingBoard i.MX8M IIoT SBC, which SolidRun has been marketing for use in industrial IoT and human-machine interface, goes a lot further. The NXP i runs it.MX 8M Plus is a more powerful chip with four Arm Cortex-A53 cores that can run at up to 1.8GHz, up to 8GB of LPDDR4 memory support, and built-in neural processing for AI workloads at the edge. That last part seems important right now, since more and more industrial deployments need some kind of inference to be done on the device itself instead of sending everything to the cloud.
The carrier board has many of the connectivity options that engineers working on real-world installations need. It has two Gigabit Ethernet ports, two MIPI CSI camera connectors, CAN FD support for compatibility with automotive and industrial protocols, RS232/RS485 serial ports, and an M.2 B-key slot for a cellular modem in case wireless connectivity is needed. Power input ranges from 7 to 32 volts and protects against reverse polarity. It also supports 802.3at Power-over-Ethernet for situations where running a separate power cable would be difficult or impossible.
It’s hard not to notice how the hardware was carefully made with real-world deployment scenarios in mind, not just benchmarks. The industrial temperature ceiling, the wide voltage input range, and the PoE option aren’t features that you add to steal the show on a spec sheet. You add those features after hardware has failed in the field and someone doesn’t want that to happen again.
SolidRun also announced the IIOT-200-8M Gateway, which puts the same core hardware in an aluminum chassis and is ready for edge computing and network gateway roles. This is for teams that don’t want to deal with custom enclosures. It no longer supports displays at all, which makes sense for what that product is meant to do.
At this writing, the price hasn’t been set in stone, but you can already buy HummingBoard variants based on the same underlying module in the SolidRun store for around $279. We still don’t know if the newer boards based on i.MX8M will be priced the same. It’s clear that SolidRun isn’t going after the hobbyist market. People who need this to work, not just exist, paid a lot of money for it and built it to last.
