Bifferboard – Linux in 3 Inches

The Diminutive Bifferboard

The Bifferboard is a 486 processor running at 150Mhz, one or two USB ports depending on model, 24Mb RAM and a paltry 8Mb of flash storage. This is easily fixed with a £2 USB hub and a £7 2Gb memory stick.

As shipped the Bifferboard comes with a very minimal Linux system but even this contains a webserver. In order to make things more comfortable you need to put a full Linux distribution onto a memory stick. Things get confusing as there are numerous choices including Debian and Slackware. Installing Debian was a breeze, there is a script to copy it onto a memory stick and a ready-made kernel for the Bifferboard hardware.

Once done you have an all singing dancing Linux box albeit based around 15 year-old technology.

What’s exciting is that these things only cost £35 and can run off a battery. So you have a very powerful computer you can deploy anywhere.  I’m very tempted to stick one on the roof of my building plugged into a webcam. I’m already using USB wireless networking, 3G would be equally doable.

I bought one for an electronics project as the board has several GPIO (General Purpose Input Output) lines, and can support the I2C bus, a popular way of interfacing microcontrollers.

The complete setup