The Titan Mini is a smaller and somewhat cheaper version of the RA8P1 Titan board introduced in 2025 for AIoT applications and RT-Thread RTOS development.
It still features a Renesas R7KA8P1 Cortex-M85/M33 microcontroller with an Arm Ethos-U55 NPU, but comes with lower-capacity memory and storage chips (32MB SDRAM and 8MB QSPI flash), drops the RJ45 Ethernet ports with a single FPC Ethernet connector, among other cost-saving measures. The only benefit I see besides the smaller size and slightly lower price is the presence of a microphone and a speaker connector for audio applications.
Titan Mini specifications:
- SoC – Renesas RA8P1 (R7KA8P1)
- MCU cores
- Arm Cortex-M85 clocked at 1 GHz with Helium MVE (M-Profile Vector Extension) with 32KB I/D caches; 7300+ CoreMarks
- Arm Cortex-M33 clocked at 250 MHz with 32KB I/D caches
- GPU – D/AVE 2D drawing engine
- NPU – Arm Ethos-U55 NPU delivering 256 GOPS at 500 MHz
- Memory – 2 MB SRAM, 1MB MRAM
- Manufacturing Process – TSMC 22nm Ultra-Low Leakage (ULL) technology
- MCU cores
- Memory – 32MB 64-bit SDRAM
- Storage
- 8MB QSPI flash
- MicroSD card slot
- Display I/F – 22-pin RGB565 FPC connector for LCD
- Camera I/F – 22-pin camera connector
- Audio
- Speaker connector
- Built-in microphone
- Networking – Ethernet FPC connector
- USB – USB 2.0 FS/HS Type-C port
- Serial
- CAN Bus interface
- 3-pin UART header
- RTC battery connector
- Expansion – 40-pin GPIO header for Raspberry Pi HAT
- Debugging – 10-pin JTAG connector
- Misc
- User and Reset buttons
- 1x LED
- Power Supply – 5V/1A via USB Type-C port
- Dimensions – 65 x 55 mm
You’ll need to use an optional FPC to RJ45 cable if you want to use Ethernet, and a 5MP OV5640 camera module is also offered as an option. You can perform debugging through an optional “HSLink Debug Kit” connected to the JTAG header.
RT-Thread provides an SDK/BSP for the board on GitHub with libraries and various code samples, including a blinking LED, a display and camera demo, an Ethernet sample, an NPU-accelerated AI face detection demo, and a WAV audio player. The docs directory includes some documentation, including some misnamed “Titan_Mini_datasheet.pdf” and “Titan_Mini_user_manual.pdf” files that are generic RA8P1 datasheet and user’s manual instead. At least the PDF schematics look real…
RT-Thread sells the Titan Mini board for $44.23 on AliExpress, but that doesn’t include the Ethernet cable, adding $7.66, in which case the total price would be $51.89, or more than the $50 asked when the Titan board was launched in 2025, although it’s now $62.41. The prices are before shipping and eventual taxes. As a side note, the company told us they do not ship to the European Union due to “regulatory requirements”. That’s probably because the board lacks some certifications, and I asked what these were, but the company couldn’t reply in time for this article.
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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