Our campaign has had an amazing first week, and we want to thank you all for being so supportive! It’s super awesome that we’ve hit 40% of our goal, and it’s been incredible to see all the different locations from which people are backing the project. All of this is hugely encouraging, and gives us confidence that we’ll hit our goal. The future of Giant Board is looking great, thanks to all of you!

Behind the scenes, we’ve been putting some final touches on the Beta Giant Boards, getting documentation together, and polishing the software. Accessibility has always been one of our main goals, and we’ve been working hard to tailor both our software and our documentation to ensure that Giant Board is both easy to learn and easy to use.

One feature that was previously missing from Giant Board was a way to keep the RTC and backup power domain of the SAMA5 processor powered while everything else is asleep. By making a minor change to the design, we were able to add a low power regulator that takes care of this whenever the board is connected to a battery or powered through USB. This allows Giant Board to draw less power while sleeping, wake up when needed, and retain access to a reliable clock throughout.

For those of you who have not yet seen it, our website now includes a link to a community forum where you can offer suggestions related to Giant Board, discuss your own projects, or just chat. We look forward to hearing from the community and seeing our backers engage with one another. It’s a brand new forum, though, so things are a little bare right now. We could use your help to get some conversations started!

We also have a public GitHub repository that includes all of the software you will need to build a bootable Giant Board image. If you are a developer – or if you’re interested in learning about embedded development – please have a look and give us some feedback on the forums. We welcome any suggestions you might have about how to improve our documentation or make it easier to use.

Thanks to everyone for all of the support. We look forward to seeing Giant Boards in all of your hands!