S3-OLinuXino is now completely routed and we make prototypes to verify everything is well designed. If the prototypes are OK production will follow in Q1 2020.
olimex
all fun projects at Olimex Ltd
all fun projects at Olimex Ltd
03 Dec 2019 41 Comments
in Allwinner, camera, KiCAD, OSHW Tags: camera, ip, olinuxino, oshw, s3
S3-OLinuXino is now completely routed and we make prototypes to verify everything is well designed. If the prototypes are OK production will follow in Q1 2020.
olimex 
Dec 03, 2019 @ 10:28:24
Nice! It looks like it supports 2 cameras, is that correct?
Dec 03, 2019 @ 11:28:43
It has MIPI and CSI connectors, but Jon wrote on the previous post that the software driver will not handle both at same time
Dec 03, 2019 @ 17:00:37
This is not a good chip to target for dual camera support. At best you might be able to just get it working for dual 1080P30. But… you will probably need a heat sink on it since that is right at the edge of what the chip can do. And it is missing a whole lot of software.
Use a Lindeni V5 — dual 4K cameras work out-of-the-box. For open source V5 support, the h.264 encode/decode is the same generic Allwinner IP so the bootlin drivers should work after they have been adjusted for pipeline differences.
Dec 03, 2019 @ 17:08:16
If you just want two image sensors with only one h.264 stream, that is probably more doable. You should be able to switch between the sensors. But.. the MIPI interface is missing an open source driver. bootlin is looking for intern to help write it.
If the ISP is working (also missing an open source driver) picture-in-picture should be doable. The ISP would scale the second sensor capture and place it into the first sensor capture before encoding.
One thing you are not considering is the limit of S3 memory bus bandwidth. Dual image streams may exceed the available bandwidth. I have never played with dual stream but I have run into the bandwidth limit on occasion. V5 is designed to have plenty of bandwidth.
Dec 03, 2019 @ 16:43:50
But that is a surmountable obstacle, surely?
Dec 03, 2019 @ 17:14:00
What are thoughts on array mic solution? On previous thread I described four options. It is not hard to get Alexa or Baidu working on S3 with mono mic/speaker. As soon as people build the mono solution they immediate ask for an array mic solution since the mono only works in two foot radius. This can be add-on board.
Dec 03, 2019 @ 17:17:50
this is just first prototype, array mic could be add via UEXT connector
Dec 03, 2019 @ 17:24:24
This AC108 based board has the right hardware if you jumper it in. The device driver needs to be ported but that should not be hard. https://respeaker.io/4_mic_array/
We are using the Knowles IA8201 solution.
Dec 03, 2019 @ 17:30:48
Note that the AC108 works in two modes — one I2S line and TDM for four mics, or two I2S lines and no TDS. The respeaker board only supports TDM mode. If you try to reuse the board on non-Allwinner CPUs you may need the non-TDM solution.
Four mics is enough for 2D. You can use two of the Respeaker boards to build mic cube which will locate in 3D.
Dec 03, 2019 @ 17:18:49
Please use a decent quality TF Card socket with spring ejector, that socket gets a lot of use during software development and it is annoying if it doesn’t work well.
Dec 03, 2019 @ 23:11:34
What is the black 8-pin chip near the “Flash1” header labeled “U2” ?
1. SPI flash memory – why not, footprint and price is so small, but so much better to have it.
2. Low profile/half heigth RJ45/LAN/Ethernet port like this one (first result on google):
https://www.te.com/global-en/product-1888250-1.html
This will reduce board height and enclosure size so much. Bonus: it is more solid 🙂
Mailine linux support for S3 is good progress, for V5 is not even started ?
Dec 08, 2019 @ 00:29:11
According to the (now presumably outdated) schematic, U2 is an EEPROM for MAC address and board specific data:
https: // github.com/OLIMEX/S3-OLinuXino/blob/master/HARDWARE/S3-OLinuXino-Rev.A/S3-OLinuXino_Rev_A.pdf
Dec 04, 2019 @ 17:23:02
In the datasheet for S3 there is a mention of the presence of an RGMII interface, as well as that the MAC supports gigabit mode. Can anyone here confirm that it is possible to get S3 to work with gigabit PHY? If I correctly understood from your question in a previous post about POE with gigabit speed, then there really are no ready-made solutions with a price of $ 4. The H6062NL transformer costs $ 2, but that’s not all, although I haven’t done the calculation yet.
My application needs grayscale YUV stream from a parallel camera at least 20 frames per second, which is 82.944 megabytes per second. In this case, there can be more than two cameras in the system, and the physical distance between the cameras is several meters. Gigabit ethernet seems to be a suitable solution at first glance for my task, and SIP S3 is quite budget-friendly. I know about V5 and many other solutions, but I’m looking for SIP and don’t need special processing on this CPU, I just need to stream it. Allwinner has FEL usb mode + NFS, which allows you to use sip without SPI flash at all, if you download an image from the network at every start, but I have not tried this.
As far as I understand, you do not plan to output DCMI on your stm32mp1 board, in this case PanGu stm32mp1 board has more advantages.
Dec 04, 2019 @ 17:56:08
advantage for one may be disadvantage for another 😉 S3-OLinuXino serves our own need for IP camera running Linux, it’s initial proof of concept which we will use as brick inside few other products, SMT32MP1 is build to be connector compatible with LIME2 for industrial customers. LIME2 has camera interface on GPIO headers and same will be for STM32MP1 board we work on but there will be no particular camera installed on it
Dec 04, 2019 @ 20:44:54
Thanks for the tip about dcmi-gpio on LIME2 stm32mp1.
Dec 04, 2019 @ 19:56:58
I would use analog output camera (AHD) for this application. Run the coax several meters back to a central SOC that digitizes the frames. You can buy analog output cameras for $10 on Aliexpress. Many of the Allwinner SOCs support analog camera input.
Dec 04, 2019 @ 21:10:01
One of the proposed modes of operation in my solution is stereo vision. Sensors with a global shutter must be synchronized and even lossy compression is undesirable, so an analog signal is not suitable here.
Dec 04, 2019 @ 21:23:57
I would not write off the analog solution so quickly. You can send a sync signal from the central SOC out to the cameras. Also, the digitizer at the central SOC is not doing any compression, it is simply digitizing the analog signal. You can also easily send the analog signal over several meters of coax.
Or you can use the Lineni V5. It has hardware support for stereo vision and it can generate a depth map in real-time. Binocular vision works out of the box. The S3 is not designed to do this. Maybe you can force it work, but that is going to require considerable software effort.
Dec 04, 2019 @ 21:26:40
Note that analog TV signal are not compressed at all.It is basically just a shift register out of the sensor chip and onto the analog line. You can get 1080P analog cameras for $10.
Dec 04, 2019 @ 23:12:09
Even if you imagine that AHD can provide the quality of transmitted frames without additional noise, you still need additional equipment to capture the signal, which will increase the cost and reduce reliability. We will not get a time stamp when using AHD, and we cannot hard match paired frames. Switching an analog signal is much more expensive and inconvenient, unlike ethernet in which ten single gigabit data channels can be transferred simultaneously to one 10 gigabit ethernet port of the server.
Thank you, I already looked at v5, this is a really powerful solution, but … my task is to centrally process various streams from a specific pool of cameras, including creating a depth map using various algorithms that can change due to progress in this scientific area. Also, the choice of algorithm can change dynamically during the execution of the main cycle, to improve accuracy or increase speed. V5 is a stereo vision task, but it does not solve all the problems of computer vision, which one such CPU still cannot handle in the pipeline, so in my case there is no sense in trying to do all the processing completely locally on V5.
In addition, as soon as we begin to use specialized hardware processor units in our solution, we find ourselves in an undesirable dependence on the vendor, and since all processing cannot be performed on one CPU, then it makes no sense to rely on a hardware solution, in connection with the rapid development of this in this scientific field, the software solution is more flexible. I don’t think that the “BDII based on CVE” in V5 is significantly different from SGM, which is now an outsider in the ranking of stereo algorithms, while the recent development and increase in processing speed in this area is due to CNN.
In any case, S3 is an interesting and cheapest solution and it is suitable for such simple streaming tasks.
Dec 06, 2019 @ 16:24:34
Will you sell any camera modules directly compatible with this? A Sony STARVIS based camera module of known quality would really help. Most things you find on the usual Chinese sites are of questionable quality (refurbished etc.). I really see this as a great way of having a reasonably more secure IP camera solution than the crap that’s usually available to buy.
Dec 15, 2019 @ 14:22:31
That is great news, lots of possibilities with this chip.
Will you make available S3 and R11 chips in your store ? Would be great to be able to source those chips from you, can’t get them otherwise in Europe
Jan 28, 2020 @ 17:29:47
What is the IO-voltage for the MPIO-CSI port? I guess 1.8V because I am not seeing any level shifters on the RPi cameras but the S3 documents do not say.
Mar 02, 2020 @ 11:06:48
Is the product mass produced？
Apr 15, 2020 @ 09:05:11
Keep it up OLinuXino, you guys come out with unique boards rather than the standard Raspberry Pi clones.
What’s the resolution limit on the MIPI and CSI camera interfaces? Does the ISP and video encoder have mainline kernel support yet? Is the built in temperature sensor broken like on a lot of Allwinner SOCs?
May 29, 2020 @ 18:49:47
How is this coming along guys?
Jul 07, 2020 @ 17:32:14
Hello, was this project stopped?
Jul 07, 2020 @ 19:19:35
Definitely not, we are on hardware revision B now. The mainline Linux software support is completed. Everything except MIPI camera is working.
Jul 09, 2020 @ 14:53:43
MIPI camear supported in mainline Linux https://github.com/aodzip/sun6i-mipi-csi
Jul 09, 2020 @ 15:06:02
check again the repo you link has CSI not MIPI
Jul 09, 2020 @ 15:30:14
I confirm that the mipi-csi2 interface is supported. We are tested on a S3 developed board with OV5640 MIPI-CSI2 interface.
Jul 09, 2020 @ 15:06:59
Any idea when the first boards will be for sale?
Jul 09, 2020 @ 15:13:42
follow this blog, when we got stock we will blog
Jul 09, 2020 @ 15:33:52
I confirm that the mipi-csi2 interface is supported. We are tested on a S3 developed board with OV5640 MIPI-CSI2 interface.
Sep 16, 2020 @ 19:13:49
When can I buy this board?
Oct 07, 2020 @ 19:43:56
Seems this project does not exist anymore: The routing was done 10 months ago!
Oct 13, 2020 @ 19:20:52
Hey guys,
I´ve also wondered as to how this project is going and saw you had trouble with the MIPI CSI driver support.
I´ve found a guy on Github who (apparently) wrote his own driver and even has made one to enable hardware acceleration:
https://github.com/aodzip
I´m not sure if this is useful to you. I hope it is.
I´m very interested in this project and would love to hear how it´s going along. Do you plan on publishing any updates? I´m trying to build my own S3 board for experimenting but I also hit a wall when it comes to software support. Allwinner has great SoCs for makers but the software is something they really have to work on.
Oct 24, 2020 @ 03:36:22
I am posting my interest here so that I can get an update when new comments added. Any idea how I can get proper update when the board is for sale?
Oct 24, 2020 @ 10:00:10
follow the blog information will appear
Nov 25, 2020 @ 17:50:27
Does anybody know if the Allwinner S3 is being discontinued?
This project is not going anywhere and the chip is out of stock world wide…
Aug 02, 2021 @ 11:35:01
No news from Olimex about this new S£ board for almost a year?