Building the Balloon Project

The purpose of the project is to be used as a computing module in embedded devices, development projects, or educational settings as it creates an open hardware development board known as Balloon.

The components included in the Balloon consists of CPU, RAM, NOR and NAND Flash, serial, buffered expansion bus, CPLD or FPGA, I2C, I/O header, USB client/host/OTG, simple 8-bit bus, and Compact Flash. Since most projects need their own bit of hardware or I/O, the Balloon can concentrate on that part and add it on to the base Balloon so it should be viewed as a versatile computer component. It can be used with university or corporate research needing physically small, high-performance, low-power, lightweight computing, robotic control, low-power instrument monitoring, wearable computing, and battery-powered devices.

A high-performance ARM board known as Balloon 3, designed for use by OEMs and higher education, was produced by this Balloon project. The board operates in 2 basic configurations. The single-sided component mode is thinner which keeps the GPIO connectors, LCD connector, and audio stages but loses the buffered A/D buses. The double-sided mode allows plugging into other boards since it has the buffered buses making it thicker.

Rest of the project