ESP32-POE and ESP32-POE-ISO back in stock

Silicon Labs stopped selling Si3204 POE controllers which were inside our very popular ESP32-POE and ESP32-POE-ISO boards. There is no stock anywhere neither information when they will be back in stock. So back in August we start searching for alternative and we evaluated several other solutions. We liked most Texas Instruments and made some prototypes and verified that they works fine.

Then we run blank PCBs in production but unfortunately we hit two major Chinese Holidays, so instead the blank PCBs to arrive in the normal 2 weeks we had to wait 5 weeks to produce our order then another week to arrive here.

Meantime we sold out all our stock of ESP32-POE and POE-ISO and created solid backlog before we stop the sales on the web.

We are glad that this week we shipped all backlog orders and now the boards are again for sale!

The new revisions of the boards are REV.G and the PCB info will be updated on GitHub tomorrow. From user point of view nothing changes – the new revision operates exactly the same and have same functionality as the previous Silicon Labs based solution.

STMP157-OLinuXino-LIME2 Open Source Hardware Industrial Grade Linux computer is in mass production with 4 variants

STMP157-OLinuXino-LIME2 Open Source Hardware Linux computer running Mainline Linux is in mass production in four variants:

• Industrial grade -40+85C (STMP157-OLinuXino-LIME2-IND) version running on 650 Mhz
• Industrial grade -40+85C (STMP157-OLinuXino-LIME2H-IND) version running on 650 Mhz with HDMI output (when HDMI works operating temperature is commercial as HDMI convertor is not industrial grade)
• Extended temperature -20+85C (STMP157-OLinuXino-LIME2-EXT) version running on 800 Mhz
• Extended temperature -20+85C (STMP157-OLinuXino-LIME2H-EXT) version running on 800 Mhz with HDMI output (when HDMI works operating temperature is commercial as HDMI convertor is not industrial grade)

User Manual for the boards is available on the product web page.

Debian and Ubuntu Linux images are pre-build and ready to install and run.

The images are build with Olimex script Olimage which is available on GitHub.

Olimage user manual explains what is included in it and how you can modify uboot and kernel to include drivers for devices which are not included in Olimex official images.

New iMX8QuadPlus System on Module is ready for prototyping

iMX8Quad Max board we developed is still waiting for components to verify the first prototypes, but we decided to develop one more SOC from iMX8 Plus series which we thought is filling niche where we do not have product.

This is how iMX8MPLUS-SOM was designed:

• MIMX8ML8DVNLZAB – Quad Core Arm Cortex-A53 running at 1.8Ghz with Arm Cortex-M7 co-processor running at 800Mhz and 2.3 TOPS Neural Processing Unit.
• 6GB LPDDR4 RAM
• Power management
• configuration EEPROM
• status LED
• LCD LVDS connector compatible with LCD-OLinuXino displays
• MIPI DSI connector
• 2x MIPI CSI comera connectors with Raspberry Pi compatible pinout
• 220 signals on 6 0.05″ step connectors with essential peripherials like:
  • PCIe-3.0
  • 2x CAN FD
  • HDMI 2.0a
  • SPDIF
  • SAI
  • 2x USB 3.0
  • 2x Gigabit Ethernet one of them with TSN
  • eMMC 5.1
  • SDIO 3.0 200Mhz
  • 4 UART
  • 6 I2C
  • 3 SPI
  • JTAG

MIMX8ML8DVNLZAB operating temperature is -40+105C which makes it perfect for both industrial and automotive applications.

Evaluation board iMX8MPlus-SOM-EVB is now designed with Dual Ethernet, Dual USB 3.0, PCIe, HDMI.

NXP is going to provide mainline Linux support for this SOC.

It’s impossible to comment any pricing at the moment, but it will be very competitive compared with similar industrial grade products.

Open Fest 2021 is back! Free your agenda for 14 and 15 of August when the biggest open source event in Bulgaria will take place in Sofia.

It’s good to see that slowly things come back to normal!

Open fest 2021 will be provided in normal face to face format in the open space – the King Boris garden – “Maimunarnika” where up to 1200 people can be hosted.

As always the participation is free of charge.

There will be the traditional soldering party with the help of the Open Fest 2021 volunteers from the Technical University club of Robotics.

Olimex is donating 50 pcs of our new Musical badge kits, which contain only PTH components and are very easy to solder even for beginners:

Musical badge is board with two sensor buttons which start and stop music play when touched.

The Open Fest dates are during our Summer Break so we are not be physically present there but will watch online the event.

Low Cost Open Source Hardware LoRa modules based on SX1276 are now in stock!

Open Source Hardware LoRa modules in two versions now are available for sale on our webshop:

868 Mhz is the free band for LoRa in Europe and we have six basic modules for this frequency.

LoRa868 is breadboard friendly and can be soldered directly on PCB or to be used on breadboard with headers.

LoRa868-ANT which includes +2dBi PCB antenna:

Created with GIMP

and LoRa868-EANT which includes +3dBi antenna for external panel mounting:

Created with GIMP

MOD-LoRa868 has UEXT plug connector and can be easily attached to any of our boards with UEXT connectors.

MOD-LoRa868-ANT and MOD-LoRa868-EANT variants are also available.

For North America 915Mhz is used. We have LoRa915, LoRa915-ANT, MOD-LoRa915, MOD-LoRa915-ANT.

At the moments we can’t offer EANT option for 915Mhz.

STMP157-SOM-EXT, STMP157-SOM-IND and STMP1(A13)-SOM-EVB are in stock!

Now our first STMP1 boards can be ordered on our web:

STMP1(A13)-SOM-EVB evaluation board (requires separate SOM)

STMP157-SOM-EXT extended temperature range -20+85C running on 800Mhz

STMP157-SOM-IND industrial temperature range -40+85C running on 650Mhz

Donald Knuth’s MIX computer implemented in iCE40HX8K-EVB

Donald Knuth’s “The Art of Computer Programming” is still a popular monograph which covers many types of programming algorithms and their analysis.

Although the first publishing was back in 1968, the book has been updated many times and is still a good source for learning algorithms.

Inside the book Knuth uses a hypothetical computer named MIX for writing all of his algorithms. The MIX computer has 9 registers and about 70 machine instructions.

Today in our Project section we got a submission of a MIX computer implementation on iCE40HX8K-EVB by Michael Schroeder.

The project is hosted on Gitlab:

https://gitlab.com/x653/mix-fpga

Several examples were created to demonstrate the MIX implementation such as generating the first 500 prime numbers.

The project is well documented and includes a manual: https://gitlab.com/x653/mix-fpga/-/raw/master/manual.pdf

Thanks Michael for the nice project!

We moved our irc chat channel #olimex to Libera.chat

Following the recent developments with Freenode we moved our IRC channel #olimex to Libera.chat.

You can access it via web or with other irc client.

May 2021 production delays and updates!

Everything is moving extra slowly this year.

On top of the Semiconductor shortages, now PCB factories also experience lack of raw materials and delay the production times more than double.

This is the reason our plans to release S3-OLinuXino, RK3328-SOM, STMP15x-OLinuXino-LIME2 and STM32MP15X-SOM to produced with delay.

At least we got the STMP15x-SOM and STMP1(A13)-EVB blank PCBs and by the end of next week they will be ready to order.

We used the time to update the product page with schematics and user manual.

Production updates for S3-OLinuXino, RK3328-SOM and STMP15x-OLinuXino-LIME2 will follow!

Let the RP2040-PICO-PC fun begin!

This is update to our previous post about RP2040-PICO.

We have had the RP2040-PICO-PC prototypes for more than week and have tested all of its peripherals.

It’s amazing what amount of code the Raspberry Pi community generated for such a short time after the launch of RP2040-PICO.

Video, USB keyboard, SD-card storage, Audio, all tested and working. Sure, we did need a few wire patches but hey this is Revision A after all 🙂

What you see above is the RP2040-PICO-PC running from a LiPo battery and moving two sprites on the screen with quite a decent speed!

Code taken from https://github.com/Wren6991/PicoDVI

A small All-in-one pocket computer which can run from a LiPo battery.

Programmable with Python, with video, audio and keyboard.

Perfect tool to teach kids how to make their first Python games. Or just to emulate BBC micro and play all good old games.

Now RP2040-PICO-PC is ready for production!