[fit2rule]

There are really great cheap SOC's out there, in ARM land, to play with.

Just look at these guys: http://www.acmesystems.it/aria

Look, the rPi started off as a play-thing for kids, and there is now a valid rPi generation. It is expanding as a platform. But: in the industrial world, the rPi is a small fish. You can get an rPi precisely because some other industry has already driven the demand/price/costs down for it to be affordable/profitable to build a new brand around what is, a common industry practice/device mind-set.

[tcas]

There are, but they aren't close in specs and price to this one. The AT91 series are completely different in terms of functionality vs the Broadcom. The AT91SAM9 series don't even have a floating point unit last time I checked. This chip can do full 1080p h264 encoding/decoding/and support that resolution for display output (HDMI and DSI). This also has flash storage and 2x more ram onboard.

This might be a close equivalent, but is more expensive, and will almost certainly require a large order to get those prices: http://www.variscite.com/products/system-on-module-som/corte...

If this brings down prices of the commercial SoM vendors that benefits all of us however.