TERES-I Do It Yourself Open Source Laptop update

We are glad to tell you that we finally have TERES-I released!

It was long way but finally we have laptop which works satisfactory to be released.

What we changed since revision B?

Main board now is with 2GB DDR3 ram and 16GB eMMC Flash memory. We add two new connectors CON3 and CON4 to interface the further FPGA module which will turn TERES-I in oscilloscope and Logic Analyzer.

The debug UART multiplexes now with Headphones, so you can plug serial cable to headphone jack and re-direct Debug console UART to Headphone jack. After you finish debugging you can restore Headphones functionality to this jack. We work on USB-Serial cable with headphone jack for the laptop.

We got new 9500mAh battery which now is in TERES kit.

Another improvement is 5V 3A adapter which allow battery to be charged to full in 3 hours. The adapter has charge indicator and comes with convenient 3 meter cable, so you can lay on your bed while your laptop is connected to power supply.

Please give us some days to update all latest Hardware files on Github.

Work-in-progress User manual and Assembly instructions are here.

The software is let’s say about 90% ready state, but works satisfactory even now.

The laptop comes with pre-installed Ubuntu 16.04 LTS with Mate, Firefox browser, Video player, Open Office, Arduino IDE and IceStorm for FPGA development. We will try to include KiCAD later.

Python libraries to access I2C, SPI, UART, GPIOs will be add when ready.

FPGA module with ADC/DACs/IOs will be ready in the next months, it will be easy to insert inside with the other existing boards.

TERES-I is now for sale.

This project took lot of time and we have long list of registered interest for ordering, bigger than the number of laptops we could build in the first run. We guess many of these registered users are duplicated for black and white version and will take just one, but be prepared that after you order your laptop will not be shipped immediately but in 2-3 weeks (or less) depend on workload and number of orders to be processed. Once/if the first run is sold we will make the laptop out of stock and will work on second run which may take few months to complete, but we will produce this laptop until there is interest for it, so if you do not succeed to order during the first run, do not give up 🙂

 

EDIT: very important notice to add: TERES-I is not designed to scratch everyone’s itch. If you want high performance laptop. If your work involve 8-16-24 core processor power and 4-8-16-32GB RAM memory to do video editing or to compile Linux kernels and Android distributions etc. this is not your laptop! TERES-I software is far for complete and not using 100% performance and features of A64 chip yet, it will work much better and faster in future, now it’s work satisfactory for daily work in motion.

When TERES-I was designed we wanted to make laptop which allow you to travel and do internet browsing, emails check, embedded code development, programming arduino, making PCBs etc. With the further modules it will become more like traveling laboratory to sniff protocols on hardware level, to generate signal patterns etc.

 

New Universal System On Module in SO-DIMM 204 pin form factor

We have now several SOMs for A13, A20, AM3352, RK3188.

Each of them with different layout and pinouts as our initial intention was to expose all possible features of every processor.

The experience we got from selling the SOMs for the past 5 years is that 99% of customers do not need all specific interfaces, but few common interfaces.
For instance very few customer need 12 UARTs and 6 I2C in their design, but almost all need Ethernet, HDMI, SATA etc.

Another important point is that soon or later the project they working on scale up and they need more memory or more processor power and with the current SOMs they have no option but redesign.

Every big customer need longevity assurance. They do not want to change their design every couple of years when the SOC manufacturer obsolete their processors, they do not want to re-design every 6 month when new processor with 4-6-8-10-12-24 cores appear to the market with preliminary buggy software support.

So with the years one another idea evolved – we should try to make one universal SOM layout with known interfaces on known pinout, so if customer need more memory he just switch to SOM with same pinout but more memory, if need more power he switch to SOM with same pinout but more powerful SOC.

We have experience with Allwinner, Rockchip and TI, so we considered these processors as potential new SOM SOCs:

A20, A64, RK3399, AM335X

After long discussions we decided that the universal SOM should have these signals:

• USB-OTG
• USB-HOST1
• USB-HOST2
• HSIC
• USB3
• PCIe
• Ethernet1 Megabit/Gigabit
• Ethernet2 Megabit/Gigabit
• WiFi+BLE
• SATA
• SD-CARD
• CAN
• IR
• CSI
• HDMI
• VGA
• Audio In
• Audio Out
• SPDIF
• UEXT1 -> SPI1, I2C1, UART1
• UEXT2 -> SPI2, I2C2, UART2

   

The first SOM204 we made is obviously for A20.

Here are the schematics of A20-SOM204 and SOM204-EVB.

Here is our A20-SOM204 prototype:

Features are: 1GB RAM, 4/8/16/32/64GB eMMC Flash, Gigabit Ethernet interface, 2K EEPROM,
Optional features not assembled by default: SPI Flash with hardware WP, Second Megabit Ethernet.

With this SOM we tested A20 with two Ethernet interfaces: one Gigabit and one Megabit working together. The practice prove A20 can have two separate working Ethernets, but there is one issue both share same clock, so if the both Ethernet works together they can be only Megabit.

The second SOM204 module we work on is with A64.
The features are 2GB RAM, 4/8/16/32/64GB eMMC, Gigabit Ethernet interface, 2K EEPROM
Optional features not assembled by default: SPI Flash with hardware WP, Second Gigabit Ethernet (USB-Gigabit), SATA (USB-SATA), CAN.

The third SOM204 module we work on is with RK3399.
The features are 4GB RAM, 4/8/16/32/64GB eMMC, Gigabit Ethernet, PCIe, USB3, 2K EEPROM
Optional features not assembled by default: SPI Flash with hardware WP, Second Gigabit Ehternet (USB-Gigabit), SATA (USB-SATA), CAN.

A20-SOM204 and SOM204-EVB will be for sale in November. Prices will be comparable to existing A20-SOM A20-SOM-EVB.

A20-SOM204 is separate product and not meant to replacement A20-SOM neigher we have intentions to discontinue A20-SOM. Both products will be active and in production.

Software support for all SOM204 modules will include Android and Linux.

A64-OLinuXino Open Source Hardware board with 64-bit Cortex-A53 processor is in released

A64-OLinuXino OSHW board is now released. Current revision is Rev.C.

Features are:

• A64 Cortex-A53 64-bit SoC from Allwinner
• AXP803 PMU with Lipo charger and step-up
• 1 or 2GB or DDR3L @672 Mhz
• 0 / 4 or 16GB of industrial grade eMMC
• SPI Flash in SO8 package with hardware WP (not assembled)
• USB-OTG and USB-HOST
• HSIC connector (not assembled)
• Gigabit Ethernet
• BLE/WiFi module
• HDMI and MIPI display connectors
• microSD card
• Debug console serial connector
• Audio In and Out
• LCD display connector
• GPIO 40 pin connector (not assembled)
• UEXT connector (not assembled)
• 5V power jack
• Dimensions: 90×62.5 mm

For the moment we have three models:

• 1G0G with 1GB RAM, no Flash, no WiFi/BLE
• 1G4GW with 1GB RAM, 4GB eMMC and WiFi/BLE
• 2G16G-IND with 2GB RAM, 16GB eMMC with industrial grade components -40+85C

The optional connectors and SPI Flash etc may be assembled upon request for small fee.

A20-OLINUXINO-MICRO now available also in Industrial temperature grade -45+85C

We are selling for some time already A20-OLinuXino-MICRO Rev.J where few things were improved:

1. We changed the LAN PHY from Realtek to Microchip as latter is more reliable supplier for both commercial and industrial temperature components, we searched desperately Realtek PHY in industrial temperature grade but without success.
2. We extended the input working voltage from 6-16VDC to 8-24VDC
3. We changed the NAND Flash to eMMC (but old NAND style flash is still possible to assembly)

The Ethernet PHY change requires new patches on the Uboot and Linux images which are already uploaded.

A64-OLinuXino update, the Rev.B design will be possible to produce in industrial grade -40+85C, dual voltage eMMC 3.3/1.8V

A64-OLinuXino first prototypes were made in March and lot of people wonder why we do not release for mass production this board yet 🙂 so we got lot of e-mails and I see there is need for blog post with update.

Here is the recap from the first prototypes:

• RAM memory works at amazing 667Mhz clock much more than A20 and other boards and the board works stabile under stress tests for many hours
• eMMC works fine, we didn’t test NAND Flash due to the missing Linux support probabbly this will stay just as option and we will assembly the boards with eMMC which is faster, better and in industrial temperature
• Linux Kernel is 3.10.65 and works fine, we managed to run all peripherials
• Audio In and Out is working
• HDMI is working
• USB host is working
• USB-OTG is working
• WiFi+BT is working
• MIPI interface – no display which to use to test, any ideas?
• HSIC interface – don’t know how to test, any ideas?
• LiPo charger and step up works
• LCD works
• Ethernet Gigabit interface works just in master mode

While we worked on this board we found new PHY from Microchip which can be ordered in industrial temperature, we tested it with A20 and it works fine (we already have LIME2 version with it which is on prototype), so we decided to re-design the Ethernet part of A64-OLinuXino with it, this will allow us to produce A64-OLinuXino in industrial temperature grade -40+85C.

Another major upgrade for Rev.B is around eMMC interface, we re-designed it as per your feedback to be possible to work on programmable 3.3V and 1.8V thus to allow faster transfers.

Rev.B is routed at 90% we need 1 more week to complete it and run new prototypes. If everything goes smoothly we will be ready by end of the month.

 

Embedded World 2016

Today is last day of Embedded World, really spectacular exhibition.

Lot of peoples from 9.00 to 18.00 on our booth and leg pain at the end of the day.

We are exhibiting our IoT platform and The DIY Laptop.

ST has interesting display on their booth showing how many STM32 devices they have sold and this display is interractive as the numbers go up every second, if this is real or just show it not so interesting, the number of 1.5 billion devices sold is impressive! And this is just one ARM vendor, I wonder what is the total number of all ARM devices sales.

NXP had interesting truck on their booth:

Lot of companies were exhibiting metal formed boxes, we already stolen few ideas to experiment with when we come back 😉 Time to learn LibreCAD for 2D drawing!

H3-OLinuXino-NANO update – it work with 8Gb DDR3L too so this small board can have 1GB RAM also

H3 has dual DDR chip select so when we routed the board connected both to the DDR package but were not sure if it will work, now when we had prototypes decided to replace the 4Gb DDR3L memory with 8Gb DDR3L memory.

The result was success! H3 booted and show 1GB available memory, this means we can assembly 8Gb memory to next revision of H3-OLinuXino which have two chips and have 2GB RAM on it.

The bad news is that 8Gb memories are very new and their prices per chip are almost x4 times more expensive than 4Gb memory chips (i.e. 1GB made with 8Gb chip cost 2 times more than 1GB made with 4Gb chips).