Diamond Systems VENUS : VNS776KL-4GD 3.5″ SBC with Intel Core i7-7660U, PCIe/104 OneBank Plus and -40 to 85 °C

Vehicle systems increasingly run software that needs Core i7 performance, but the board still has to survive vibration, heat and cold in a small space. The VNS776KL-4GD is Diamond Systems’ answer: a rugged 3.5 inch SBC with a 7th Gen Intel Core i7, soldered memory and latching connectors, with true -40 to 85 °C operation and a modest 14 W typical draw.

The Intel Core i7-7660U is a Kaby Lake processor at 2.8 GHz with two cores and four threads. It has 4 GB of DDR4-2133 soldered on board, plus a SODIMM socket for 4, 8 or 16 GB modules, up to 20 GB in total, and Diamond’s RSODIMM rugged memory adds mounting holes that fix the module to the board. Graphics drive HDMI, VGA and dual-channel LVDS as three independent displays, up to 4096 x 2304, and a TPM module and a CSI camera interface are on board.

I/O covers two Gigabit Ethernet ports (one with an I219 PHY, one on an I210), four RS-232/422/485 ports with programmable termination, four USB 3.0 and two USB 2.0 ports, 16 digital I/O lines and HD audio on an ALC892 codec. Storage is a SATA DOM socket, a SATA port and mSATA in a MiniCard socket, all SATA III. A OneBank Plus socket takes up to three PCIe x1 modules and up to four PCI-104 modules, and a second MiniCard socket sits underneath. The JSP-1185G7E-64G-02D is the COM-based alternative on the same footprint.

Input is 9 to 18 V DC. The VNS776KL-4GD runs from -40 to 85 °C on a bottom-side conduction heat spreader with a thermal pad and English and metric mounting holes, which leaves the whole top side free for expansion and memory. It supports Ubuntu Linux 20.04 and Windows 10, both 64-bit.