In the past 30 years I’ve been responsible for a good many demonstration boards for semiconductor companies. And along the way I’ve received many demo boards over the same period of time. This week I received an Intel ATOM processor demo board that gave me quite a pleasant surprise.

I received the demo board as a result of a client job that led to the loan of the board. One of the things that I’m doing with the ATOM board is developing an off-grid solar system controller, which has a lot of personal interest to me since I live off-the-grid.

The key requirement for the demo board was support of an ATOM processor with some ability to expand hardware interfaces via USB or other techniques.  What I didn’t expect was a nice packaging job. The “demo” board came in a mini-ITX form factor with a great finish and quality connectors. WOW! At 6.75” x 6.75” the board itself is small. It comes six USB 2.0 ports , an IDE interface, two Serial ATA interfaces, VGA,  parallel port, serial port, and a keyboard/mouse interface. Oh, there’s also graphics acceleration, Real Tek Audio, and a PCI bus. I keep forgetting that it also includes an Ethernet interface.

My surprise came from the mini-ITX case. I’m not used to the fit and finish better than a retail product delivered in an industrial product that is intended for development use in a lab. Intel went over the top by supplying a power supply and a base for the mini-ITX case. I’ve always had to rig something on my lab to keep anything from shorting demo boards in the past. What a nice job that saves me time and eliminates one source of potential problems. Of course, If I need internal access I can still get that by removing the case cover, but that’s a small price to pay.

I’ll add a review or more as I start building the software on the demo board. Intel has set the bar high and my expectations are equally high.