The D-Robotics RDK X3 Development Board, recently showcased by Waveshare, is a versatile platform designed for edge AI applications, offering a powerful combination of processing and inference capabilities. The board comes in a form factor similar to the Raspberry Pi 4B, including a 40-pin GPIO for easy expansion.

According to the product page, the board is powered by a quad-core Arm Cortex-A53 processor clocked at 1.5GHz, and features a dual-core Bernoulli architecture (BPU) for 5TOPs of edge inference designed for AI solutions. The board is available with 2GB or 4GB of LPDDR4 RAM and includes a MicroSD card slot for storage.

RDK X3 Development Board bottom view
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The RDK X3 supports H.265 (HEVC) encoding and decoding at 4K@60fps, along with JPEG encoding for up to 16MP images. Key specifications include dual MIPI CSI lanes for camera input and an HDMI 1.4 port for 1080p60 video output.

RDK X3 Development Board pinout
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In terms of connectivity, the board features USB 3.0 and 2.0 ports, along with the 40-pin GPIO expansion header that supports I2C, UART, SPI, I2S, and PWM. Wireless networking is provided through Wi-Fi 2.4/5GHz and Bluetooth 4.2, while wired networking is handled via an RJ45 Ethernet interface.

The RDK X3 supports Ubuntu 20.04/22.04, though the product’s Wiki pages on Waveshare are still being developed.

RDK X3 Development Board interfaces
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Further information

The D-Robotics RDK X3 Development Board is priced at $59.00 for the 2GB RAM version, and $69.99 for the 4GB model. DFRobot is also advertising the 4GB RAM version at $55.00, though it is currently listed as “coming soon.”