Quectel shows a “smart single-board computer” concept that keeps the Raspberry Pi mechanical footprint and 40-pin GPIO header, but replaces the usual discrete SoC + SD-card approach with a shielded smart module aimed at commercial IoT. You prototype with Pi-style I/O, then ship with fixed SKUs, known memory/storage, and cellular options that look more like an embedded product than a hobby board. https://www.quectel.com/product/lte-sc200u-smart-module-series/
On the LTE side, the SC200U smart module integrates Qualcomm’s SM6115 (Kryo CPU with Arm Cortex-A73/A53 cores) and an LTE Cat 4 modem in one module, with DDR and eMMC already inside the shield. That eliminates microSD as a reliability bottleneck and collapses power management, RF, and high-speed layout into a pre-qualified block, while still letting you run Linux (kernel 5.15 class) or Android on a familiar carrier board.
The next rung is Quectel’s SG560D family built around Qualcomm QCM6490/QCS6490-class silicon, where the carrier stays similar but the compute and connectivity step up to 5G Sub-6 (on cellular variants) and a stronger multimedia pipeline. In the demo, on-device AI acceleration is framed around roughly 12 TOPS for vision tasks like face landmarking, and the module layout even leaves a thermal opening so a heatsink or fan can couple directly to the hot spot for sustained load.
A key theme is modularity: the same smart module can be “plopped” into bigger boards for richer I/O, or into smaller designs when BOM, certification, and footprint start to dominate. The interviewer also gets a glimpse of why this matters—each module bundles DDR, storage, PMICs, RF front end, transceiver paths, and lots of passives, easily north of 200 parts you don’t want to re-engineer for every revision. The booth examples span an edge compute box, a retro-gaming handheld with active cooling, and a cashierless checkout vision demo.
Quectel also hints at what comes after: higher-tier smart modules around newer Qualcomm IoT platforms, including QCS8550-based options that pair Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.3 with around 48 TOPS for heavier vision and multimedia, and a newer Dragonwing Q-8750 class that Qualcomm rates at about 77 TOPS for larger on-device AI workloads. Filmed at CES Las Vegas 2026, it’s a useful snapshot of how “Pi-like” developer ergonomics are converging with production-grade module integration for edge compute at scale.
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