FAQ

What is MinnowBoard MAX? Is it a PC?

MinnowBoard MAX is an open hardware embedded board designed with the Intel® Atom™ E38xx series SOC (known as Bay Trail). The board targets the small and low cost embedded market and was designed to appeal to both embedded developers and the maker community. MinnowBoard MAX offers great performance, flexibility, openness and standards for the price. MinnowBoard MAX is an open hardware embedded platform intended for embedded applications or product development where interfacing with custom hardware (whether I2C sensors, custom FPGAs through PCIe, etc.) is needed.

Who owns the MinnowBoard MAX?

MinnowBoard MAX is owned by the minnowboard.org foundation, a US-based non-profit organization founded to promote the education, design, and use of open source software and hardware in embedded computing using Intel Architecture. This MinnowBoard.org wiki provides a forum for developers of open source software and open source hardware to exchange ideas, knowledge and experience. You can read more about the foundation on our About Us page.

Who designs, manufactures, and sells MinnowBoard MAX?

CircuitCo, a custom manufacturing company based in Richardson, Texas, designed and manufactured the board with feature, design and component recommendations from Intel Corporation. You can find a list of board distributors selling MinnowBoard MAX on the where to buy page, also linked to on the navigation sidebar.

What is the Yocto Project?

The Yocto Project provides open source, high-quality infrastructure and tools to help developers create their own custom Linux distributions for any hardware architecture. The Yocto Project is intended to provide a helpful starting point for embedded Linux developers. Learn more at http://yoctoproject.org

What is the power consumption of MinnowBoard MAX?

This is not a simple question to answer because it depends on many factors, for example how many peripherals are in use, such as USB, ethernet, expansion boards, etc. The Max TDP of the E38xx series SoCs can be found on http://ark.intel.com/products/family/29035/Intel-Atom-Processor/embedded . This site lists the dual-core E3825 SOC at 6W. You can use these numbers as a starting point for evaluating potential power consumption, but they still don’t tell the full picture. We recommend the use of a 5V, 2.5A power supply with MinnowBoard MAX.

Does MinnowBoard MAX have an LVDS interface?

The Bay Trail-I series SoCs do not include LVDS support. However, if sufficient demand exists in the community for LVDS capability, a small conversion board could be developed to translate the micro-HDMI video signals from MinnowBoard MAX to LVDS. Please sound off in our community if this is an important add-on board you’d like to see.

Does the MinnowBoard MAX support SATA Port Multipliers?

Sadly, no. This is a limitation of the SOC itself, and is not something that can be enabled. If you were to add a SATA chipset to the board (mPCI-E for example) that does support port SATA port multipliers, that should work, within the limitations your OS may impose.

Is MinnowBoard MAX Windows* Compatible?

MinnowBoard MAX has official Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 support at http://msdn.microsoft.com/hardwaredevboard. Check out this page for additional information, including drivers and board setup. Note that windows may have issues installing if the system clock date and time are not correct. Since the MinnowBoard MAX does not have a RTC battery, you should set the system clock correctly in the EFI shell before installing Windows.