This week at Embedded World GizmoSphere announced the availability of its Gizmo 2 platform for engineers and makers. The open-source development initiative ramps up the graphics and compute capabilities from the Gizmo 1 in its second-generation SBC.

Users can expect to see a 60 percent increase in performance, decreased power consumption, and a range of interfaces, including GPIO, ADC/DAC, PWM, SPI, USB, SATA, and PCIe. GizmoSphere added an HDMI dedicated port after many requests from the community, and additional expansion in the form of an mSATA port for SSDs and a microSD card slot. The new x86-based board is still a compact 4″ x 4″ like the Gizmo 1.

The compute power comes from the dual-core AMD Embedded GX-210HA SoC, which includes AMD Radeon HD 8210E discrete-class graphics, 85 GFLOPS performance, and a power draw of 9 watts.

On the software side, the included microSD card is preloaded with TimeSys Embedded Linux, an environment with accelerated video plus C/C++ and Python application development. Tt also supports Minoca, Windows Embedded 7 and 8, Qt, and other OSs.

The Gizmo 2 includes features for advanced projects and commercial applications including robotics, jukeboxes, home automation, digital signage, x86 set-top boxes, and pretty much whatever you can think up.