We’ve already seen how the Arduino microcontroller board, based on 8-bit Atmel AVR, became a runaway success behind the “maker movement.” Meanwhile, the Raspberry Pi — originally developed for the education market — has opened the door to a host of hobbyists looking for a single-computer board, with more processing power, to run Linux.

The story, however, doesn’t end there.

The popularity of the Raspberry Pi has also given birth to a host of new single-board computers such as TI’s BeagleBone(s) and AMD’s Gizmoboard.

Then, there is pcDuino.

It turns out that the pcDuino is based on Allwinner’s A10 (based on ARM Cortex A8 single-core CPU); and its newest version, pcDuino version 3, announced last week, comes with Allwinner’s A20 (ARM Cortex-A7 dual-core CPU).

A graduate of Carnegie-Mellon University and an EE who worked at Marvell in Silicon Valley as a chip designer for hard disk drives, Liu founded pcDuino a few years back. He describes it simply as “Mini PC + Arduino.”

the pcDuino differs from other single-board computers in that it’s designed to work with hundreds of Arduino “shields” and a variety of add-on modules. The pcDuino makes them pluggable