RK3328-SOM-EVB is evaluation board and reference design for RK3328-SOM:
Software support:
Android 10
Linux Kernel 4.4 is the official SDK of Rockchip. There is just basic mainline support with no drivers for USB3 although these SOCs are on the market for quite a lot of time.
These who follow our account in Twitter know our small teaser posted on March 1st.
It’s small base board for RP2040-PICO the $4 module with the Cortex-M0+ processor made by Raspberry Pi foundation.
We were ready with the prototype for a long time but the RP2040-PICO modules were tricky to source 🙂
Raspberry Pi suffer from the same problems the semiconductor industry have now – no enough components to organize production and the PICO modules are hard to obtain.
From the picture above you can see what our idea is:
Small board taking power from the USB on the right just below the RP2040-PICO module.
LiPo battery charged for handheld operation and power backup.
Reset button.
Micro SD card
Audio output
HDMI connector with DVI signals to connect to monitor
UEXT connector with UART, SPI, I2C, 3.3V and GND to attach different sensors
JST2.0 4 pin I2C + power supply connector
Debug connector for Serial adapter
The price of RP2040-PICO-PC including the original RP2040-PICO module from Raspberry Pi with soldered headers all in one ready to use computer will cost EUR 12.00
As RP2040-PICO modules now are not available in production quantities for purchase, we decided that until we wait we could make our own version of RP2040-PICO, which to be pin to pin drop in replacement.
Fortunately some RP2040 processors are available now, so we can make our own DIL40 board, this is how our RP2040-Py board was born:
It’s mechanically same as size, with connector signals like the original RP2040-PICO.
Functionally RP2040-Py is same as RP2040-PICO, but has some imoprovements:
RP2040 SOC
2MB of SPI Flash
USB micro connector on the right hand
Power supply DC-DC with 3.3V up to 2A (if the 5V source can provide)
Reset and Boot buttons
two 20 pin rows on the side with same signals making it drop pin to pin compatible.
uUEXT connector on bottom
As the board still had plenty of not used space we decided to add USB JTAG debugger, which will allow you to debug your RP2040 SOC with step by step execution, to watch variables and set breakpoints while you develop your code.
There will be three versions of the RP2040-Py:
Basic: same as RP2040-PICO but with higher current DCDC power supply (3.3V up to 2A output) additional UEXT connector and RESET button. The price of this module will be EUR 5.00
Basic+ same as Basic but with soldered headers and additional left hand side micro USB, which can be used to power the board while the left hand side micro USB can be used as USB device or USB host. The price of this module will be EUR 8.00
Debug: same as Basic+ but with populated JTAG parts, which allow real time programming and debugging. The price of this module will be EUR 19.00 The JTAG debugger is tested to work with OpenOCD/Eclipse/Visual Studio, ARM (Keil) IDE and IAR Systems EW.
Searching for more info about their new H313 SOC I found old news from August 2020, where Allwinner announce the development of AP SOC with RISC-V and praising Open Source Hardware and the open ISA of RISC-V.
They say in this announcement that they will have AP (application processor) SOC with RISC-V in 2021!
There is lot of development around RISC-V in the last years. Espressif have their ESP32-C3 which is with RISC-V SOC, but it can’t run Linux as has not enough memory and video. We still can’t see affordable silicon capable to run Linux.
There is announcement for BeagleBoneV but still not in production and at quite higher price compared to ARM boards on the market.
Allwinner is known to be able to design and produce low cost SOCs. Let’s hope the semiconductor crisis caused by Covid19 will not delay their plans.
So is the year 2021 when we will see $35 Linux running boards with RISC-V?
I’m crossing fingers!
As soon as we can get our hands to these SOC we will make OSHW OLinuXino with it!
OSHW design and affordable SOC will lead to affordable boards and boost of the software development of RISC-V too.
The PCB routing of our most complex board – IMX8QM-Tukhla is complete and ready for first prototype build.
We started this project June-July 2020. Due to the Covid19 the development took 10 months although only 6 month of active work was done, due to lock downs, ill developers and so on troubles.
Now the board is completely routed and has these features:
Main SOC MIMX8QM5AVUFFAB which is member of iMX8 Quad Max series – the most powerful iMX8 SOC line from NXP.
MIMX8QM5AVUFFAB has 8 cores:
x2 Cortex-A72 running at 1.6Ghz
x4 Cortex-A53 running at 1.2Ghz
x2 Cortex-M4F running at 264Mhz
Memory:
64-bit LPDDR4 @1600 MHz
Connectivity:
1× PCIe (2-lanes)
1× USB 3.0 with PHY
1x USB 3.0 dual role with PHY
1× SATA 3.0
2× 1Gb Ethernet with AVB
1× CAN/CAN-FD
1x HDMI Rx
GPU:
2xGC7000 XSVX
16× Vec4 shaders with 64 execution units
Dual independent 8-Vec4 shader GPUs or a combined 16-Vec4 shader GPU
OpenGL 3.0, 2.1
OpenGL ES 3.2, 3.1 (with AEP), 3.0, 2.0, and 1.1
OpenCL 1.2 Full Profile and 1.1
OpenVG 1.1
Vulkan
VPU:
H.265 decode (4Kp60)
H.264 decode (4Kp30)
WMV9/VC-1 imple decode
MPEG 1 and 2 decode
AVS decodeMPEG4.2 ASP,
H.263, Sorenson Spark decode
Divx 3.11 including GMC decode
ON2/Google VP6/VP8 decode
RealVideo 8/9/10 decode
JPEG and MJPEG decode
2× H.264 encode (1080p30)
Display:
Supports single UltraHD 4Kp60 display
or up to 4 independent FullHD 1080p60 displays
2× MIPI-DSI with 4 lanes each
1× HDMI-TX/DisplayPort
2× LVDS Tx with 2 channels of 4 lanes each
Camera:
2× MIPI-CSI with 4-lanes each, MIPI DPHYSM v1.
Security:
Advanced High Assurance Boot (AHAB) secure & encrypted boot
Operating temperature:
Automotive AEC-Q100 Grade 3 -40+125C
To the best of our knowledge there is no Open Source Board so far which to be so complex and advanced.
Now we are running the first prototypes and crossing fingers everything to work 🙂
With the current state of the semiconductor industry production will not be possible to be run soon.
Linux support will need attention as NXP has no mainline Linux for this SOC, but only Yocto build for old kernel (4.14.98_2.3.3).
If there are people with experience and interest in this SOC we may share one of the first samples we build, so they can help on the Linux support.
The schematic of IMX8QM-TUKHLA Revision A is uploaded for review on out ftp.
The last issues with STM32MP1 mainline Linux kernel support were resolved and now we run STMP157-OLinuXino-LIME2 in production!
Revision B fixes all hardware issues in the initial prototype. STMP157-OLINUXINO-LIME2 is complete analog of A20-OLinuXino-LIME2 which is one of our best selling Allwinner board.
Mainline uboot and Linux kernel 5.12 images are available with all periperials working.
We will have STMP157-OLINUXINO-LIME2 on our web for sale by the end of April.
This is also our first board with Ethernet supporting Precise Time Protocol and Time Sensitive Networking implemented.
The weak demand in 2020 made many silicon companies stop producing and simply sell what they had in stock.
Now that the economy is reviving, they can’t start producing again because the raw materials are also missing. Restarting the industry takes time and in the meantime even basic voltage regulators and digital logic are missing on the market.
The DDR memory prices became x2 times higher. The 7 and 10″ LCDs vanished from the market due to the high demand for tablets for remote learning.
Microcontrollers from ST, NXP, Microchip are with lead times of 45 weeks!
This is why we at Olimex decided to write off 2021 as a year for electronics manufacturing and to move out for the next 45 weeks to Caribbean beaches!
The Time Sensitive Networking (TSN) is for real-time communication with hard, non-negotiable time boundaries for end-to-end transmission latencies.
The main use of TSN is for industrial machine controllers, robots etc.
For this purpose all devices in this network need to have a common time reference and therefore, need to synchronize their clocks among each other. Only through synchronized clocks, it is possible for all network devices to operate in unison and execute the required operation at exactly the required point in time.
The time in TSN networks is usually distributed from one central time source directly through the network itself using the IEEE 1588 Precision Time Protocol, which utilizes Ethernet frames to distribute time synchronization information.
Linutronix helped to implement IEEE 1588 PTP on STMP1-OLinuXino-LIME2.
For Uboot changes Olimex Uboot was used as base. The Kernel patch is sent upstream and can be seen on the mailing list
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