Avalue ACP-IMX8-PI-A1R NXP i.MX 8M Mini Industrial Raspberry Pi Alternative with 32GB eMMC and -20 to 70 °C

An OEM device that began on a Raspberry Pi often meets its first problem in the field: the enclosure gets colder or hotter than the board is rated for. The ACP-IMX8-PI-A1R is the build in the Avalue ACP-IMX8-PI series that addresses it, an NXP i.MX 8M Mini industrial Raspberry Pi alternative on an 85 x 56 mm board with a 40-pin header and a -20 to 70 °C operating range.

The NXP i.MX 8M Mini has four Arm Cortex-A53 cores at up to 1.8 GHz and a Cortex-M4 core at up to 400 MHz. Linux applications run on the A53 cores while the M4 can handle time-critical sampling or control loops. The ACP-IMX8-PI-A1R carries 4 GB of LPDDR4 memory soldered to the board and 32 GB of eMMC 5.1, so the operating system does not depend on a removable card, and Avalue supplies Yocto 4.0 as the default image.

On the edge of the board are one GbE RJ45 port, four USB 2.0 Type-A ports (one with OTG), HDMI and a 3.5 mm headphone jack. Internal MIPI DSI and two-lane MIPI CSI connectors take an LCD panel and a camera module, and the 40-pin GPIO header can be expanded to RS-232, UART, SPI, I2C and PWM. A microSD slot adds storage for logs or updates, two debug console headers help with bring-up, and an internal 4-pin USB connector takes an optional Wi-Fi and Bluetooth module.

Power is 5 V at 3 A over USB-C. With CE and FCC compliance and an operating range of -20 to 70 °C, the ACP-IMX8-PI-A1R suits building automation controllers, industrial gateways, small HMIs, data loggers and test instruments in enclosures that see real temperature swings, while keeping the footprint and header of the prototype it replaces.