My Business Card Can Run Linux

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This article is authorized to be reprinted from the public account Open Source China (ID: oschina2013)

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George Hilliard is an embedded systems engineer who spends a lot of time looking for cheap Linux computers. Until one day, the idea of making a Linux board the size of a business card came to his mind.

Previously, George had seen some electronic business cards with various interesting features, including simulating USB flash drives, blinking indicator lights, and even wireless transceivers, etc. However, none of them ran the Linux operating system. So, he quickly got to work and succeeded.

This is the finished product. It is a complete and the smallest ARM computer running a custom Linux firmware built with Buildroot.

The business card is printed with George’s name, position, email, and other regular content, and one corner has a USB port. When this card is plugged into a computer, it will boot in 6 seconds and can serve as a flash drive, containing a README file, a copy of his resume, and some photography works. It also features various games and classic Unix functionalities such as a small 2048 and a small MicroPython interpreter.

George introduced that all of this was done on just an 8MB flash chip. The Bootloader size is 256KB, the kernel is 1.6MB, the entire root filesystem is 2.4MB, with some available space left.

The most surprising part is that the entire card costs less than $3. The processor is the key to keeping costs low, and after extensive research, George chose the F1C100, which contains both RAM and CPU. He also revealed that this was sourced from Taobao.

However, due to size and cost reasons, this card lacks I/O, cannot connect to the network, and does not have enough storage to run heavyweight programs.

Currently, George has open-sourced his Business Card Linux.

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