Allwinner did it again – New quad core powerful chip pin to pin compatible with A10 and A20!

A10 was one of most successful chips made by Allwinner, for couple of years it was top seller in tablets and other devices, A10 also was selected for our EUR 30 low cost Linux board the LIME.

Then Cortex-A8 single core become obsolete, then Allwinner released A20 – Dual Core more powerful and power efficient Cortex-A7 processor with pin to pin backward compatibility to A10.

This was incredible wise move for Allwinner as people could just re-use their old PCB designs without spending time to change PCBs.

A10/A20 had one nice feature – they have LCD, HDMI, SATA, Ethernet, in A20 Allwinner even add Gigabit Ethernet on top of the normal 100M Ethernet. All other new devices they release have either LCD either HDMI but not both and we miss SATA interface in all new Quad core devices they released.

Now they did it again – we got information from Allwinner that they are about to release Quad core more powerful processor which to be pin to pin compatible with A10/A20 we still don’t know the name, maybe A40 ? 🙂

Anyway this is very clever move as all existing designs which people have can be re-used. This means more modern SoC with more power but without forcing you to re-design your boards.

So expect Quad core LIME soon and I guess at same price range like other LIMEs!

How 50 000 A10 SoCs from Allwinner looks like?

A10 Cortex-A8 chip is the heart of A10-OLinuXino-LIME EUR 30 Linux Open Source Hardware computer. Allwinner start the production of A10 back in 2012 and at the end of 2014 decided to stop it’s production as none of the mass volume producers like tablet or Android IPTV dongle manufacturers wanted to continue to manufacture with it.

For our type of business though – embedded applications it’s not good to change your design every couple of years, so we asked Allwinner if there is minium quantity of A10 which they will be able to run custom production for us and they said 50 000 pcs. We placed our order in December 2014 and they shipped to us on 30 of March as we agreed. Now we have enough stock to keep producing A10-OLinuXino-LIME for a while, and if the stock is over we can make new order to Allwinner, this way we can keep the A10-OLinuXino-LIME production as long as there is demand for it.

As you can see these chips are fresh and left the factory 20/03/2015 🙂

A10-OLinuXino-LIME Debian Build with Kernel 3.4.90+

 

A while ago we put on our Forum wishlist for the next Debian release, now in this Debian release we implemented most of the requests we read on the forum.

Here is Debian image for A10-OLinuXino-LIME with Kernel 3.4.90+

Here is Building description.

Here is List of installed packages.

Here is image description.

A10-OLinuXino-LIME-4GB Android preliminary image

We completed A10-OLinuXino-LIME-4GB preliminary Android image.

The DDR3 is clocked at 480Mhz, RTL8188 and Ralink RT5730 WIFI adapters are supported.

A10-OLinuXino-LIME Wiki page is updated with the new image too.

A10-OLinuXino-LIME-4GB now in stock

A10-OLinuXino-LIME-4GB with 4GB NAND Flash is released and in stock for these who want to run Android from NAND Flash.

NAND Flash is also available as disk storage in Linux as there is working MTD driver, but booting Linux from NAND seems to have still obstracles or at least we didn’t saw official Linux-Sunxi solution. The proprietary Allwinner bootloader from Android can be used but some people say it’s violating GPL, we are not experts and have no idea if this is correct or not.

A10-OLinuXino-LIME is back in stock

We have A10-OLinuXino-LIME back in stock. Sorry for the delay, simple component delivery caused 2 weeks of non-production, then we needed another week to assembly boards and test them, but now they are on stock and we take measures in our ERP to prevent situations like this in future.

For these who waited long our SOM modules we have good news too 🙂

A20-SOM and A20-SOM-EVB first 100 pcs developer edition will be in stock next week, same for AM3352-SOM and AM3352-SOM-EVB. In May these two SOMs and EVBs will be in production state and in stock in volumes.

RK3188-SOM is on prototype stage but there is long way for the software to transform from Android to usable Linux, so if there are people who want to give a hand for this we can provide prototypes.

 

Connecting old TVs with Composite PAL/NTSC to A10-OLinuXino-LIME

 

Received via Twitter: http://wot.lv/tv-out-on-olimexs-a10-lime.html

Step by Step instructions how to connect your old TV to A10-OLinuXino-LIME (actually only two wires are necessary – TVOUT0 (GPIO_1 pin 20) and AGND (GPIO_1 pin 4) and change of the FEX for the video output type.

Windows 8.2 for A10-LIME released! Windows now run on small low cost EUR 30 ARM board

 

We are happy to tell you that we now have Windows 8.2 running on A10-LIME – the EUR 30 low cost ARM board.

On the picture above you see how the A10-LIME desktop looks like.

Instructions how to build your own Windows 8.2 SD-card image from Windows sources will follow, we are preparing it now.

Last week we keep playing with A10-LIME running Windows 8.2 and we are amazing how easy and intuitive is the work with it now, needless to say it runs twice faster than Debian and Ubuntu due to the magical Windows SD card cache accelerator.

A10-LIME HDMI output allow playing FullHD 1080p movies and as it have native Ethernet and SATA it’s perfect for Windows Server applications. The build in LiPo charger ends the era of expensive UPS solutions for server apps, now you just connect small LiPo battery and your UPS is up and running.

 

Digikey’s Wiki for A10-OLinuXino-LIME is up with instructions how to make Debian 7 and Ubuntu 13.10 images

 

Robert Nelson again did a great job with Digikey’s Wiki and instructions how to build Debian 7 and Ubuntu 13.10 images with Linux-Next Kernel and uboot.

Android for LIME image is released

It took us a long time to release this image as CedarX was broken in the oficial SDK and all images we build with it had non working video. Finally we received patch from Allwinner and oh miracle CedarX start working correctly 🙂

The image can be downloaded from here

How to build description will follow next week when we return from Embedded World.