AVerMedia QL501 Qualcomm QCS5430 (Dragonwing) Arm SBC and Fanless Embedded PC

Smart city and retail projects often need a camera feed analysed on site rather than streamed to a server, from a device small and frugal enough to sit in a kiosk, signage enclosure or street cabinet. The AVerMedia QL501 series covers that with the Qualcomm Dragonwing QCS5430, offered as a bare board for your own enclosure or as a ready-to-mount fanless embedded PC. AVerMedia aims the QL501 range at smart city and smart retail work, and the board’s I/O is compatible with Raspberry Pi 5 expansion, so existing HAT-style designs can often carry across.

Both builds share the same board. AVerMedia rates the QCS5430 at around 3.5 INT8 TOPS dense, which suits lightweight detection, counting and classification models, with 4 GB LPDDR4X, 64 GB UFS 2.x and a microSD slot. Two 4-lane MIPI CSI-2 camera inputs and USB camera support bring video in, while HDMI 2.0 at 3840 x 2160 and 60 Hz, DisplayPort at 1920 x 1080 and a 4-lane MIPI DSI connector drive screens. Connectivity is one GbE port, 2x USB 3.0, 2x USB 2.0 and an M.2 Key B socket with Micro SIM for an optional 4G or 5G module, and a 40-pin header plus a PCIe 2.0 FPC connector handle expansion.

The QL501 is the single board computer, with a screw terminal for 9-20 V DC and an optional heatsink or fan, so it suits OEM designs that bring their own housing and cooling. The QL501 Box PC encloses the same board in a fanless finned chassis with a front DC jack, an antenna hole and wall-mount brackets, and its order codes add an OOB board, a PCIe-to-Ethernet board for a second RJ45 port or a PSE board for PoE devices.

In practice the QL501 series suits signage players, retail analytics, smart city sensing and light industrial vision where a compact, low-power Arm computer covers the workload. Both builds list Windows 11 IoT and Ubuntu 20.04 (by request), with CE, FCC, KC and VCCI marks and RoHS. Where a project needs more AI headroom or onboard Wi-Fi 6E, the AVerMedia QL601 series uses the QCS6490 at 12.5 TOPS with 8 GB of memory in the same two build styles.