96Boards hardware development platforms support add-on boards called Mezzanines, and you’ll find a bunch of them on 96Boards website.
Most are designed and manufactured by companies, but in order to bring more (individual) open source hardware developers on-board, the 96Boards Community Mezzanine initiative was launched to bring industry representatives and community members together.
The idea is to encourage people to submit their KiCad/Altium 96boards’ mezzanine designs to the github repository, and the manufacturing costs of the most popular designs can be lowered by offering them through GroupGets group buying platform.
![](https://www.cnx-software.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/96Boards-GPS-Mezzanine.jpg)
The first of those boards to be launched is 96Boards GPS Mezzanine with the following specifications for the R1 board:
- Adafruit Ultimate GPS Module
- PA6H_1103854 – 66 channel w/10 Hz updates
- MTK3339 chipset
- -165 dBm sensitivity
- External u.FL antenna connector
- Fix and PPS signals brought to down baseboard
- Expansion – USB UART breakout, breakout headers for I2C, SPI, GPIO, and power lines
- Misc – GPS Fix LED, prototyping area, CR2032 battery slot
- Dimensions – 85mm x 54mm
Some of 96Boards already have GPS, but the mezzanine would be bring such capability to any 96Boards CE compliant hardware, since it’s connect via the 40-pin low speed connector. You’ll find the KiCad hardware design files on Github.
If you are interested, you could reserve one or more boards for $75 each, and manufacturing will carry on if the number of reservation exceed 25 boards.
![Jean Luc Aufranc](https://www.cnx-software.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Jean-Luc-Aufranc.webp)
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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