Allwinner keep their promise for long term supply of T2 (industrial A20) SOC. If you wonder how 60K of Allwinner T2 SOC looks like you can see now

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.

Open Source Hardware Linux board with industrial grade -40+125C temperature STMP1-OLinuXino-Lime2 prototype is live

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.

MOD-IO got beautiful DIN rack plastic enclosure from Giuseppe Mascolo

We noticed this Twitter post from Giuseppe Mascolo @linuxpeppe
He designed beautiful plastic enclosure for MOD-IO which could be attached to DIN reel:

the design files are uploaded to Thingiverse

Open Source Hardware Industrial Linux computers STMP1-OLinuXino-LIME2 prototypes are ready for testing

First prototypes of the Open Source Hardware Industrial grade operating at -45+85C Linux Single Board Computers STMP1-OLinuXino-LIME2 are assembled.

We build couple of boards with STM32MP153 and STM32MP157 for the first tests.

Now time to add Linux mainline support for it in OLIMAGE building and to add Ubuntu and Debian minimal and base images for it in http://images.olimex.com

Industrial grade -45+85C STMP1-SOM is almost completely routed and pin to pin compatible with A13-SOM

A13-SOM-256 and A13-SOM-512 are low cost Linux running System on Modules which are very popular but lack industrial grade operating temperature.

STM32MP1XXX series of SOC from ST is the first mass produced SOC which operates from -45 up to +125C by default, so we decided to design SOM module with STM32MP1XX SOC which to be pin to pin compatible with A13-SOM and offer same interfaces and signals so it could be drop in replacement for A13-SOM without need to re-design the complete product.

As you can see for STMP1-SOM we decided to put the SOC on opposite side of the connectors, this allow if necessary to add aluminum heatsink without interference with mainboard.

Also we add AXP209 PMU which allow lower power operating modes and LiPo battery backup and operation on battery only which is missing in the original A13-SOM.

STMP1-SOM will be offered with three SOC choices STM32MP151, STM32MP153 and STM32MP157.

The prices will start from EUR 15 for the non industrial grade memory which are similar to A13-SOM and EUR 18 for the industrial grade -45+85C memory version.

We expect first STMP1-SOMs to be available in July 2020.

Full mainline Linux support will be available at http://images.olimex.com/