Well, today has been a disaster. After hunting around I found a couple of connectors and 12V power supplies but no joy. I haven’t got the board to boot. I think the first connector was too hollow and the 12V (the internal connection of the plug wasn’t touching the internal pin of the socket on the board. With a few other tries I was able to get connectivity but the board just vibrated when powered up. I did briefly get a blue or purple LED to momentarily light up. At one stage touching the board under the power socket burn my finger! I have logged the issue with Arrow.
Also Dragonboard v RPI2
Just a note: The board clearly says that the 12V rail is the internal connection and GND is the external connection which is the default for most plug packs.
The connector is a coaxial power connector:
On a the Microsoft IoT Forum the question was asked, how does the Dragonboard stack up against the Raspberry Pi 2 , especially in the Windows 10 IoT-Core context. My brief answer is that its like comparing chalk and cheese. No comparison!
The Microsoft IoT Forum post does a pretty good comparison of many of the raw features so I won’t plagiarise that here. I’ll do my own at some stage. The thing is that the RPI2 is a maker or hobbyist target. The Dragonboard once it gets its full approval later this month represents a device that you could use in a Consumer or Industrial device. You wouldn’t use a RPI2 in a commercial production. Remember that Qualcomm make a large proportion of the phones currently available, or at least the main components. Also I have seen a video captured with one when zooming into map data and going street view and the frame rate is excellent. The board has a function GPU (in the IoT-Core context). I would expect that any GPIO, UART etc features that are incomplete will quickly be driven up to speed, I will test these when I get a working board. Hope this helps.
Others please chime in with your opinions, thx.