iMX233-OLinuXino-Mini specifications changed

Our first intention was iMX233-OLinuXino-Mini to have just one USB host and no Internet connection, but after discussion both here on blog and on OLinuXino Yahoo groups, we came to conclusion that: 1 USB host is not enough, Linux board without Internet access is not very usefull (well the interest for Micro prove me wrong here, but anyway we do not need to have two Linux boards with no Internet – Mini and Micro!).

So after evaluation of different options we add GL850G USB hub to iMX233-OLinuXino-Mini which increase the number of USB hosts to 3, and we spared one internal ON-board USB host where to connect the nice RTL8188CU WiFi modules which will add WIFI to iMX233-OLinuXino-Mini! The WIFI module will be optional, so you can order iMX233-OLinuXino-Mini or iMX233-OLinuXino-Mini-WIFI later with on-board WIFI module.

We run prototypes and will test them in 1-2 weeks, if everything works as expected the production is to follow and these boards will be ready in stock mid July.

STM32-E407 prototypes are ready

STM32-E407 prototypes are ready: STM32F407ZGT6 Cortex-M4 210DMIPS, 1MB Flash, 196KB RAM processor with 100MBit Ethernet, 2 USB OTG, Arduino shield connectors, all GPIO ports breakout to 0.1″ connectors, UEXT, JTAG.

+6-16VDC power supply, battery backup connector

iMX233-OLinuXino-Micro Doube Side Design works at full speed

Our first attempt to route DDR memory at 2 layers in iMX233-OLinuXino-Mini didn’t went very well as we wanted to put all components on one layer thus to make manufacturing with single reflow for lower cost.

Unfortunately the board didn’t work reliable at higher than 64 Mhz DDR data bus clock as with the 2 layers design we couldn’t make all signals lenght same, but split it on two groups, anyway. We decided on iMX233-OLinuXino-Micro to try again 2 layer design but this time to put the DDR memory under the iMX233 chip and to make signal paths not even but very short. After all this is just 133Mhz not 1333Mhz as it will be on A10-OLinuXino

We routed the board and run prototypes which got assembled on 23th of May 16.00 oclock, so we could’t test them until today due to our Holidays.

Today we run the tests and board works great at 133Mhz DDR clock.

First the board was designed with USB-mini connector for taking 5V power supply, then I told our developers to change it to standard power supply barrel jack, but they didn’t understood correctly nor I have double check the PCB files before we ran the prototypes, so now first prototypes have USB-B connector for power supply , don’t worry it will be fixed in the production run, which is to follow. Also these prototypes were produced in Green color instead Red as they will be in production.

The CAD files of this working 2 layers design are uploaded on GitHub.

We are about to run few other tests tomorrow and put this board on tail for mass production. This means we will have these boards in stock about end of June (or earlier ).

Mouse traps in A13 reference schematic

 

Yesterday we discovered that the reference A13 schematic we got have some mouse traps inside.

The DDR3 RAM ball assignments are shifted with +1, this means if A0 address signal is assigned as K3 on Hynix datasheet it’s labeled K4 on A13 “reference” design schematic.

I still don’t know if this is intentional or not.

As explained on this tread http://lists.phcomp.co.uk/pipermail/arm-netbook/2012-March/002881.html the factories in China which produce electronic devices have no or little R&D, they rely on the SoC manufacturer to provide them with chips, schematics, reference PCB layout and everything they need just to start production, so they just pay for the design to “solution companies” and do what they can best – assembly cheap devices.

There may be other traps as well, but this will not stop us to complete our schematic, my great worries now are if the processor pin assignments are correct in the A13 datasheet as we have nothing to compare with.

I already ordered one A13 tablet from China as these are still not available on ebay, so we will be able to do some reverse engineering and track if all ports on the A13 are defined correctly but this will delay a bit the project.

Hopefully I will got the A13 tablet next week and will tear it on parts, then post my findings here

I already wrote note in the GitHub A13-PDF readme.txt about this problem with the schematic so other people who watch this project beware.

HDMI doubts

I got many e-mails from people who want to use A13-OLinuXino as home multimedia center and intend to port different media players on it. All they ask can Olimex add HDMI to this board???

I did a little research and actually there are cheap HDMI transceivers which could take the LCD-RGB signals and convert them to HDMI.

One of these ICs is SIL9022A for instance, it seems perfect and we could easily build HDMI shield with it which to connects to the GPIO connector where the LCD signals are present and to make easy connection with HDMI TVs and other appliances.

Silicon Image, the company which produce SIL9022A is very skinny on datasheet and info for this IC though.

I did request info about it and this is what I got as reply:

To provide you with the requested data it is essential to get more detailed information regarding your project.
The whole documentation is under NDA. Please find attached the NDA-Request. Please fill out very carefully.
The most important information are those of the project. After receiving the filled NDA-Request will we forward it to the manufacturer who will generate the data and the agreement.
For using the requested ICs is it binding to be a HDMI licensee. This licensing is related to a yearly fee of 10.000US$ for HDMI-Membership.
The procedure will be directly executed by the HDMI organization. Further information can be found by the help of the following links: http://www.hdmi.org/

So if we have to build the HDMI shield we will have to pay $10 000 yearly fee to may buy the chips

For A10 processor which have build-in HDMI I guess this licensee is paid by the SoC vendor i.e. Allwinner, as there is no requirement to have HDMI membership in order to buy these processors and make something with them.

So we may drop the idea for HDMI output for A13 and leave the HDMI output for the next A10-OLinuXino which we will develop after we finish with A13

EDIT-18.05.2012:

After posting this article I did some more search for HDMI transcievers, TDA9981 seems to be similar to SIL9022A and about same price (well a little bit up) but the datasheet is free to download, so I upload on OLinuXino  GitHub repostory and we are about to make one prototype and test if it works correctly, then prepare the A13-HDMI-SHIELD.

I’m still puzzled why Silicone Image have this weird policy to not allow development with their IC if you first do not pay HDMI organization membership, this stops all small volume projects for sure, but it’t their choice, fortunately for us there are also Analog Devices, NXP and many others who offer similar solutions.

EDIT 21.05.2012:

I’m just looking CH7009B datasheets http://www.chrontel.com/products/7009.htm
it have both DVI and analog RGB video, so will be possible to implement both HDMI without sound (as DVI and HDMI encoding is same) + VGA with one single chip

This may be the best approach as DVI have no royalties, and we will be able to make resolutions 1980x1080p via DVI and 1024x768p by VGA

iMX233-OLinuXino image with TV video output for console

Dimitar Gamishev generated Linux Kernel image and rootfs with console using the framebuffer and the TV video output. I uploaded these image in SOFTWARE/TV-CONSOLE folder at GitHub.

Now you do not need USB-SERIAL-CABLE to work with iMX233 in console mode as you can do same with USB keyboard and TV attached to the board.

There is still something to tweak on the Kernel as the first left column of characters are missing and the last line of the rows is also missing, I guess this is something with the Kernel setup.

If somebody have worked with iMX233 and TV video output with PAL settings please help

 

A13-OLinuXino 1Ghz Cortex-A8 development started

We got last friday 4 samples of Allwinner A13 ICs and AXP209 and we begin the new board design.

We also got finally the A13 datasheet and there is GREAT news inside it, Allwinner A13 operates in INDUSTRIAL temperature range also, so -25+85C is what this chip can work and there is no problem to be used in INDUSTRIAL applications too.

I worked this weekend for the specifications and this is what I came with:

1. A13 Cortex A8 1Ghz processor
2. 512 MB of DDR3 memory
3. 6-16VDC input power supply
4. 4x USB hosts – one reserved for optional WIFI
5. 1x USB OTG
6. VGA
7. Audio Output
8. Audio Input
9. RTC PCF8536 on board for real time clock and alarms
10. SDcard
11. 5x Keys on board for navigation
12. UEXT connector for connecting addtional UEXT modules like Zigbee, Bluetooth, Relays, etc
13. GPIO connector with 68/74 pins and these signals :
- 17 for adding NAND flash
- 22 for connecting LCDs
- 24 GPIOs, 3x I2C; 2x UARTs;  1x SDIO2
- 5 system pins: +5V, +3.3V, GND, RESET, NMI

Another great news which came right on time was that there was leak of A10 Linux 3.0.8 kernel source and Android 4.0 sources http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=25978796&postcount=121 where the support for A13 is not cleaned so we have now linux and android 4.0 sources which support A13 processor, so releasing the proper software for A13 will be easier than I though first.

OLINUXINO.COM confusion

OLinuXino project started on March 7th and for the last two months made significant progress.

We designed and produced 10 prototypes, send them to community developers and they implemented LTIB, OpenEmbedded, ArchiLinux support in matter of weeks.

Now we have the boards in mass production and they will be for sale by the end of this Month. This is less that three months from the development start to boards ready for sale in stock!

All this shoot OLinuXino in the news. Olimex’s blog page got over 6000 hits in one day when we announced the intention to develop the new A13 board.

Soon after we started the project Don McKenzie from Dontronics who is our Australian distributor made the www.olinuxino.com domain and start copying there the web pages of Olinuxino boards we made on olimex.com and all articles I wrote in Olimex’s blog.

At first I didn’t see anything wrong with this as Don is just trying to help and promote the Olinuxino, but in the last weeks I saw that this web page actually confuses the people that this is an official source for Olinuxino information.

Don put on this web lot of advertising of Dontronics and other boards and this mix confuses many people who expect to read on this web for Olinuxino.

For instance Don put on the very top of this page description of another board of ours Duinomite and this author -> http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2012/05/02/pi-heralds-compact-revolution/1 decided that OLinuXino will have Arduino shield connectors, which is wrong, and reading the article is seems the author understood that OLinuXino is made by Olimex Bulgaria but didn’t quite understood that olinuxino.com is not official page for OLinuXino project at all.

Another author from Sweden goes further and writes here: http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=sv&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.etn.se%2Findex.php%3Foption%3Dcom_content%26view%3Darticle%26id%3D55961 the man behing OLinuXino project is Don McKenzie…

Now I understand why Massimo Banzi and Co. chase and shut down every web site with Arduino in their URL, they just want to be sure that Arduino source of information is one – their original web site.

I asked Don to link olinuxino.com to Dontronics web shop and if he want to put info about Olinuxino to do this on Dontronics web domain so to the people to be clear that this info is not from the official Olinuxino web site.

So with this blog post I would like to make it clear that OLinuXino project source for official information are: OLIMEX.COM web site, https://github.com/OLIMEX/OLINUXINO where the open source files are hosted, Olimex’s blog which you read now and OLinuXino Yahoo discussion Group http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/olinuxino/.

Can Open Source desing be COPYRIGHT?

I admit I confused these two not long time ago, and because I guess many others may be also confused and mix these things I will try to explain what I learned about it.

I still do remember August 2011, there were few months since we launched our Open Source Hardware design Pinguino and I got e-mail from customer of ours in Australia who pointed me to some Australian blogger who also does some online electronics talk show on his web site. 

So this guy IIRC his name was Dave was commenting our Pinguino design, well actually it was hard to tell he was commenting, as he was yelling around 10 minutes and as English is not my native language I was able to catch just some words like: “shame” , “olimex”, “open source”, “copyright?!?”.

What Dave was very annoyed was the fact that we put COPYRIGHT(C) text on our board silkscreen next to OSHW logo and according to him this is mutually exclusively i.e. Open Source Hardware Design can’t have COPYRIGHT message at all.

Well I will admit I was not open source nor licensee expert so I was confused for a while too. 

SO I told our developers to put “DESIGNED BY” instead of “COPYRIGHT” to our new projects which we release under Open Source Hardware Licensee. There were not so many Open Source Hardware designs to take as reference anyway and on Arduino Board (which is still most popular Open Source Hardware design)  was written “Designed in Italy” so I assumed this is the correct way to do it.

Recently we finish STM32-H407 board and I got in touch with Garry Bulmer, we start discussing these issues and he explained to me what is the connection with Copyright and Open Source, which I accept as it have quite logic in it.

Garry said: When you design or develop something as an AUTHOR you have the COPYRIGHT on this, PERIOD.

Then you as COPYRIGHT owner can LICENSEE this product of yours under whatever LICENSEE you want i.e. GPL, BSD, CC-BY etc.

You CAN’T LICENSEE something under any terms IF you are not the author who have the COPYRIGHT.

Thinking logically this is perfectly true.

That you create something which you release under Open Source Licensee do not waive your COPYRIGHT as AUTHOR of the project. So it’s perfectly OK you as Author and Copyright holder to put on your products the COPYRIGHT text even if you licensee it under Open Source Licensee.

If you want your product to be closed source you can write “COPYRIGHT(C) 2012 by YOURNAME Ltd, All rights reserved” this means you have the rights for this product and one want to licensee it have to contact you and to negotiate the licensee terms under which you will licensee the product to him.

If you want to create Open source project and licensee it under Creative Commons Share-Alike Licensee you can put on your board: “COPYRIGHT(C) 2012 by YOURNAME Ltd, released under CC-SA-3.0 Open source licensee” and this will be enough. 

In both cases the COPYRIGHT text identify you as the AUTHOR and COPYRIGHT holder of this design, but this is not in conflict with the fact that in second case you Licensee your work under open source licensee terms.

 

NOTICE: I’m not lawer and this is just my point of view, your comments are welcome!

 

iMX233-OLinuXino-Micro the EUR 20 Linux single board computer is routed nice and clean

We finished the iMX233-OLinuXino-Micro routing and the files are push to GitHub.

Tomorrow we will run the prototypes, we were very tempted to see if we can make the design 2 layers first, we placed the memory directly under the iMX233 processor so the signal paths are very short and should be not problem for 133 Mhz, but the cross talk may play bad joke for us with no ground planes to separate the signals. Well crossing fingers and … we’ll see in few days on what frequency it will run.

Meantime the software developers did enormous amount of work. The iMX233-OLinuXino have now Open Embedded Layer and Raivis now is having fun with Linux Kernel 3.3 trying to move the 2.6.x drivers to the latest Kernel.