Our History
Gumstix manufactures computing hardware applications that can be customized and manufactured for embedded devices and systems. Designed to meet the demands of next generation IoT and Edge computing machine-learning applications, Gumstix modular hardware is developed to connect to multiple networking capabilities, sensors, and components that are required for machine learning and neural networking.
For engineers developing devices from the iPhone to Mars satellites, Gumstix devices have been used by thousands of hardware engineers, software designers, and educators since 2004 in over 45 countries.
Corporate Timeline
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2014 - Present |
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| 2003 -2013 |
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Corporate Offices
Gumstix, Inc.
48501 Warm Springs Blvd.,
Suite 103, Fremont
CA 94539, USA
Gumstix Research Canada, Ltd.
Vancouver, BC Canada
Trivia
Is it true that Gumstix had something to do with the original iPhone?
From “Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution”:
“Jobs wanted the iPhone to run a modified version of OS X, the software that comes with every Mac. But no one had ever put a gigantic program like OS X on a phone chip before. The software would have to be a tenth of the size, and even then there wasn’t a phone chip being made in 2005 that could run it fast enough and with a long enough battery life.
The chips that run Apple laptops were never considered because they generated too much heat and would suck a phone battery dry in minutes. Millions of lines of code would have to be stripped out or rewritten, and until 2006 engineers would have to simulate chip speed and battery drain because actual chips weren’t available until then.
Initially we just worked on Gumstix boards [cheap circuit boards hobbyists buy],” said Nitin Ganatra, one of the early software engineers. “We started with the Mac address book -- a list of names -- and to see if we could scroll [on a screen] at between thirty to sixty frames a second. We just wanted to figure out if there was any way to make this [OS X on a phone chip] work -- whether we were even in the ballpark. We wanted to know if we could push bits fast enough to get that iPhone look and feel. If we couldn’t get it to work on a Gumstix board, we knew we might have a problem.”
–Fred Vogelstein, Macmillian, 2013
Some things we’re proud of:
- More than a decade and a half of innovation in phones, drones, instrumentation, and robotics
- Mentioned in more than 2,200 scholar articles and research reports
- More than 100 patent references
- Pioneered the entire COM (Computer-On-Module) marketplace
Quotes from the Community
“I have designed embedded systems for more than 10 years using various platforms and development tools, but the Gumstix beats them all!”
–Michael Schukat, University of Ireland
“Gumstix, the company behind the Overo computers-on-module (COMs), has recently announced an online platform called Geppetto that allows anybody with a proper web browser (e.g. Chrome or Firefox) to design and order a complete baseboard for the Overo COMs. You don’t need to know anything about schematics, PCB layout, or other electrical engineering knowledge. The program lets you set the board size, add modules (e.g. USB, HDMI, Ethernet…) as you wish, tells you which connections are required, and once the board is done, you can see your 3D rendered board. You can then save it to the cloud with an option to share it with the community, and you can just order it. The learning curve is very short, and once you know how to use it, it probably takes around 10 minutes to design a complete board.”
–CNXSoft, Embedded Systems News
“The platform makes PCB design as easy as playing Sim City.”
–Michael Questo, Embedded Processing Field Applications at Texas Instruments Incorporated