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.
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 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
STMP1-OLinuXino-LIME2 Industrial grade Linux Computer project took us almost an year of work to build proper software support for our hardware with mainline uboot and kernel.
ST demo board uses Yocto with kernel 5.4, our images use Linux Kernel 5.10.12
These who monitor our Official images at https://images.olimex.com probably nottice that we already have images with Debian Buster and Ubuntu Focal for STM32MP1 where almost everything now work with mainline Linux Kernel 5.10.12.
We had lot of troubles around the Ethernet, but now it works pretty well!
CAN-FD – works!
Two USB High speed hosts with 1A current – works!
LCD – works
HDMI – works!
eMMC Flash boot – works!
PMU and LiPo charger battery support – works
Two things on this board left not complete:
low power modes
USB-OTG
New prototypes rev.B now are in production, the Chinese New Year will delay them to end of February. We hope meantime to solve these two last issues and run production.
UPDATE: As some people wanted to know what was the Ethernet issue we were struggling so long, I posted in the comment section.
For the USB-OTG my guess is that it’s also some silly issue so people may help:
STM32MP1 has two High speed USB hosts and one Full speed USB-OTG, here is snip from their Hardware development document:
Here is our schematic which follows above guide:
The two High Speed USB hosts work as expected, but the USB-OTG has issue summarized here: https://pastebin.com/i6G90kdg
What makes us a little bit suspicious is that STM in their own demo board didn’t follow their Hardware Guide and were wiring one of their High speed USB as OTG and connecting USB hub to the other, ignoring the Full speed USB at all.
OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA) is an open, implemented under GPL 2.0 license, machine to machine communication protocol for industrial automation developed by the OPC Foundation.
The OPC UA protocol specification consists of 14 documents for a total of 1250 pages. Due to this complexity, existing implementations are usually incomplete.
This is why we were puzzled to see on Twitter post by Selftronics that they made OPC UA server running on ESP32-EVB!
T2 is the industrial version of A20 – the most successful SOC in Allwinner history. It keeps selling for more than 8 years now and demand is steady.
We are proud that our OSHW designs with A20 are part of this success story.
T2 can work in extended temperature grade and is more expensive than A20, so the demand is not so big and used just by specific customers like in automotive and industrial equipment. During the last COVID-19 economy slow down these customers decreased and Allwinner stock of T2 was sold out. While NXP, ST etc always keep some kind of guarantee that they will produce this processor for XX years, Chinese companies are practical, they sell as long as it’s profitable for them and if demand is low they just stop.
This is why many people are afraid to place Chinese SOC in their products, they are afraid that this chip may stop being produced at some point of time and their design need to be changed.
Fortunately for Olimex our sales are big enough to be interesting and supported by Allwinner. We have enough business to place custom orders even for chips which are now with status “obsolete” and Allwinner keep producing them for us.
T2 automotive/industrial market for Allwinner now is not big enough for them to justify keeping it in stock, but Olimex placed order for these in January and 60Kpcs hit our warehouse few weeks ago.
The label show these T2 SOC are manufactured 18 of May 2020 🙂
So Allwinner keeps their part of the deal for long term delivery and manufacture for us even SOCs which are not available for sale officially, this means we can keep producing our boards with Allwinner SOC for our customers and they are safe with us.
We have progress on this board software. It now boots, we have been fighting the hardware and of course the issue was RTFM in this case RTFE (Errata) where STM well documented thar this chip requires oscillator and will not work with only crystal. We were misleaded by their kit schematic where they made provisions for both crystal and osciallator and being cheap we first bet on the crystal 🙂 .
Anyway after replacing the crystal with oscillator STMP1-OLinuXino-Lime2 got alive and here is the boot log: https://pastebin.com/ev94Jbk0
Our design is quite different from STM demo kit, we use different PMU, PHY HDMI so many things have to be done on the Linux support, but the results so far are very good.
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