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Gumstix is a US-based technology company that designs, builds and sells full function miniature computers and related products to customers in over sixty (60) countries around the world. The company is focused primarily on the network computer, Product Design, digital telephony and robotics markets. In reality, Gumstix' products have a much more general applicability because the gumstix "is just a computer".
Gumstix has become synonymous with their product line of very small cased and single board computers, which is a motherboard-and-daughtercard computer based on Intel XScale processors.
All gumstix computers and motherboards come preloaded with the Linux operating system. The motherboards measure just 80 mm x 20 mm x 6.3 mm, which is comparable to a stick of chewing gum. A range of daughtercards is available which can extend the I/O function of the system in a wide range of possible ways. I/O options via daughtercards include synchronous and asynchronous serial, USB, Ethernet, Bluetooth and Wifi wireless interfaces.
Motherboards
The gumstix line of motherboards are single-board computers featuring the two main motherboards: connex, and basix. Both the basix motherboards and the connex motherboards provide an Intel XScale PXA255 processor running at 200 MHz or 400 MHz as well as 64 MB of SDRAM, Linux 2.6 and a userspace toolkit based on the uClibc C library with the BusyBox utilities. The software is a full-blown Linux environment and a large range of Linux applications can run on the device.
Additional features can be added to all motherboards with expansion cards connected via one or both onboard buses. The motherboards draw less than 250 mA @4V at 400 MHz without Bluetooth and less than 50 mA while idling, waiting for input.
connex
The connex motherboards also feature on-board 16 MB strataflash, an onboard 60-pin Hirose I/O header, a 92-pin bus header for connecting additional expansion cards and Infineon Bluetooth as an option.
basix
The basix motherboards features 4 MB strataflash, an onboard 60-pin Hirose I/O header, an onboard MMC slot and Infineon Bluetooth as an option. Basix-xm models extend the 4 MB of flash to 16 MB.
Computers
Gumstix has two cased computer product lines: netstix and waysmalls.
netstix
The netstix computers, based on the connex motherboard, provide 10/100 Mb Ethernet connected computers with CompactFlash (CF) for storage.
waysmalls
The waysmall computers, based on the basix motherboard, have USB and serial connectivty with MultiMediaCard (MMC) storage capability.
Software development kit
The gumstix [http://docwiki.gumstix.org/Software development kit SDK] is available at no charge and does not require gumstix hardware.
External link
* [http://www.gumstix.com/ Gumstix website]
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