A20-OLinuXino DualCore Cortex-A7 prototypes work fine

A10-OLINUXINO development started long long time ago back in September 2012, we had first prototypes made in November 2012, but they didn’t work correctly as we wired the DDR3 memory a bit differently than the Allwinner and their SDK didn’t support them, we lost months trying to initialize the DDR3 correctly without proper DDR3 controller description and finally gave up and focused on the new A10S processor, but keeping the work on A10 in background with low priority.

A10S prototypes and production is completed, so we forced again A10-OLinuXino work. Meantime Allwinner released their double core A20 which is almost pin to pin compatible with A10, we did review the differences in our blog https://olimex.wordpress.com/2013/04/05/allwinners-a10-and-a20-are-they-really-pin-to-pin-compatible-and-drop-in-replacement/ and modified our A10-OLinuXino to accept both A10 and A20 processors.

The new boards A1X-OLinuXino-MICRO were designed with these features:

• A10 Cortex-A8 processor or A20 Double core Cortex-A7 processor running @1Ghz
• DDR3 memory 512MB or 1GB
• SATA connector and power supply
• HDMI output
• VGA output
• LCD connector to connect A13-LCDxxx with 4.3″ 480×272 pixels, 7″ 800×480 pixels and 10.1″ 1024×600 pixels with touch screens
• 2x USB high speed hosts
• USB-OTG
• ETHERNET 100 MBit
• 4GB NAND Flash
• 160 GPIOs on friendly 0.1″ connectors which connects to ribbon cables
• Audio In
• Audio Out
• micro SD card
• SD/MMC card as second
• Power managment IC with Lipo battery support, allow stand alone work and USB host working on LiPo battery power supply
• 9 user buttons with Android functions
• 6-16 V DC input power supply can work with any power supply adapter and automotive power 12V

We assembled yesterday 3 boards with A10 and 3 boards with A20.

The boards had some things to be tweaked around the power supply, but ran successfuly relatively easy and we tested the A10 with Android image.

It worked fine, so today we start with A20, we got A20-SDK from Allwinner few days ago so Dimitar has prepared Android 4.2.2 images for it, which for our surprise were flashed and run from the first attempt! Well done Allwinner!

Here are some pictures of A20-OLinuXino in action:

Android image of latest A20-SDK is 4.2.2:

The first time boot log: http://pastie.org/7951976

Android boot log and cpuinfo: http://pastie.org/7951979

What’s next? As we got 50 pcs A20 samples from Allwinner next week we will assembly them i.e. will have A20-OLinuXino developer’s edition with 1GB RAM and 4GB NAND in stock for sale. The price of A20-OLinuXino with 1GB RAM and 4GB Flash will cost EUR 65.00 (later we will have also version without NAND Flash for EUR 55.00), meantime we will start working on the Linux support. The mass production of A20-OLinuXino will follow in June it will be produced in both versions with and without NAND Flash.

Low cost EUR 25.00-30.00 A20-SOM module with only A20, power supply and DDR3 memory will follow, which will allow everyone to build his own computer based on A20 with low cost 2 layer motherboard with the peripherials of choice.