PWR-SWITCH hides the high voltage problems from the Arduino, ESP32, Raspberry Pi, Beaglebone, OLinuXino developers. It has 1500VAC optically isolation and can drive high voltage up to 230VAC / 16A loads safely.
To switch On or Off the loads from 3 to 24VDC can be used, so you can drive the loads with any microcontroller only 1mA is necessary to trigger the switch.
A20-OLinuXino-LIME2 is with small compact design, this is why we couldn’t put on it all connectors for the functionality this board offers.
The existing 0.05″ step connectors are OK for cables and shields, but are pain when you want to breadboard something or to attach UEXT module.
This is why we made LIME2-SHIELD open source hardware shield. It has these signals available:
LIME2-SHIELD User manual explains how to prepare your SD-card for booting Linux on A20-OLinuXino-LIME2, then how to setup the board with different scripts and device tree.
Demo codes how to work with GPIO, I2C, SPI, CAN with C, Python and console are included:
We started working on our most complex OSHW board with KiCAD.
iMX8 is broad range of very different ARM architectures under same name which some people may find quite confusing. Here is the table chart:
You can see by yourself:
iMX8X is quite humble with up to x4 Cortex-A35+Cortex-M4F cores, something less capable than Allwinner A13 or STM32MP1XX
iMX8M, Nano/Mini/Plus is x4 Cortex-A53 + Cortex-A7/M4F something in the range of power of Allwinner A64
finally iMX8QuadMax comes with different configurations, but the high end is Octa-core with x2 Cortex-A72 + x4 Cortex-A53 + x2 Cortex-M4F and is more powerful than the popular Rockchip RK3399
Why we did started working on such monster?
Company from EU which values the OSHW recognized the absence of high end open source Linux board and asked us to design one. They offered to cover all associated design costs. They specially requested this to be not yet another RK3399 board, but based on SOC with proper documentation and software support. NXP’s high end iMX8QuadMax matched their requirements perfectly.
Currently all powerful Cortex-A72 comes from Chinese or Korean origin and are always closed projects, the only published info in best case is PDF schematic which can’t be verified i.e. the final product may or may not match what they publish. The popular Raspberry Pi go even further and their “schemaitcs” are just connector diagrams.
This is how the Tukhla project was born, it will have:
MIMX8QM5AVUFFAB Octa-core SOC with: ( x2 Cortex-A72, x4 Cortex-A53, x2 Cortex-M4F, x4 GPUs with 16 Vec4-Shader GPU, 32 compute units OpenGL® ES 3.2 and Vulkan® support Tessellation and Geometry Shading, Split-GPU architecture enables 2x 8 Shader Cores, 4k h.265 Decode, 1080p h.264 encode)
x2 LPDDR4 x32 databus RAM memory with up to 16GB of RAM configuration
PMU taking all power lines from single 12V/4A source
micro SD card
eMMC Flash with differnt sizes
QSPI Flash
x1 SATA for external HDD/SSD drives
x2 single lane PCIe with M2 connectors for NVMe
HDMI input 1.4 RX with HDCP 2.2
HDMI output 2.0 TX with HDCP 2.2 4K
USB 2.0 OTG
USB 3.0 HOST
x2 Gigabit Ethernet
x2 MIPI CSI camera connectors
The price of MIMX8QM5AVUFFAB alone is around EUR 100 in small quantities and currently LPDDR4 4GB cost EUR 35, LPDDR4 8GB cost EUR 50, LPDDR4 16GB cost EUR 180.
So with BOM over EUR 200 this board will not be affordable for the most of Raspberry Pi $35 price range users.
This board targets professionals, who need high performance board and being not dependent by Chinese SOC vendors. With all hardware open, which gives them security for their business as the design is public.
iMX8QuadMax SOC is available in automotive AEC-Q100 Grade 3 (-40° to 125° C Tj), Industrial (-40° to 105° C Tj), Consumer (-20° to 105° C Tj)
Some of the features like HDMI input are not present in the Chinese SOCs at all.
iMX8QuadMax may have DSP and incorporate Vision and Speech Recognition interactivity via a powerful vision pipeline and audio processing subsystem.
The Software support include: Android™, Linux®, FreeRTOS, QNX™, Green Hills®, Dornerworks XEN™.
iMX8QuadMax is fully supported on NXP’s 10 and 15-year Longevity Program
Tukhla means Brick in Bulgarian (and other Slavish languages) and it will be the OSHW building block for whole range of different solutions.
How long it will take to finish this design?
We honestly don’t know. It took more than month just to capture the schematic in the state it is now:
There is long path now to create and verify all component packages (just the SOC is in 1313 BGA ball package), verify the schematic signals, place the components on the PCB, route high speed signals manually.
It may be 6 months or more. We got unofficial info that NXP engineers spent more than year to make the NXP iMX8QMax demo board.
Pioneer-FreedomBox-HSK comes with 32GB micro SD card for file storage, this is not enough for many people, so they logically want to have bigger file storage.
What you need is SATA-HDD and SATA-CABLE-SET or the complete BAY-HDD which also includes nice metal box for the disk.
What you need to do is to run Pioneer-FreedomBox-HSK then to connect to it via SSH. To do this you need another computer connected on the same network. If this computer runs Linux you can do the connection by ssh command, if your computer is running Windows you can connect with Putty.
When you connect you should use the username and password which you created during the install process of Pioneer-FreedomBox-HSK
Then to you should run as super user with the commands below and mount the disk:
$ sudo -s
# mkdir /mnt/data
# mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/data
At this point via the web interface of Pioneer-FreedomBox-HSK you will see the hard disk as storage:
Last step is to add the hard disk to fstab so next time the board is reboot the hard disk is automatically mounted. You can see disk UUID with the blkid command, then to edit /etc/fstab file and add on the bottom the disk UUID as per this picture:
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.
ESP32-CAM is small low cost WiFi camera with OV2460 2Mpix sensor. It allows you to stream video and even to perform some small image filterings and face detection / recognition.
Unfortunately the AI Thinker vendor trying to keep cost as low as possible didn’t include USB programmer in it so the setup is a bit odd.
Please go to arduino.cc and download and install latest Arduino IDE.
Step.2
Linux and CH340
CH340 Linux drivers has bad PLL settings for all Linux kernels before 5.5.
If your system happen to be with Linux Kernel before 5.5. here is the GitHub repository with the patch to install.
If you do not have this patch CH340 will work, but will not be able to communicate at speed over 115200 bps, with the patch up to 2Mbps communication is possible.
Step.3
Wire cables:
You need to connect ESP32-CAM and ESP-PROG this way:
ESP32-CAM GND —-> ESP-PROG GND
ESP32-CAM 3.3V —-> ESP-PROG 3.3V
ESP32-CAM U0T —-> ESP-PROG RXD
ESP32-CAM U0R —-> ESP-PROG TXD
For firmware uploading you need one more connection, which is necessary ESP32 to go in Bootloader mode:
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
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.
USB-gLINK is Open Source Hardware Industrial grade -25+85ºC LTE cat 4 module optimized for IoT applications with integrated LiPo Battery power supply charger and Navigation. USB-gLINK operate on all GSM frequencies with 2G 3G 4G/LTE protocols, so you can use it worldwide.
USB-gLINK will work with OLinuXino OSHW Linux Computers, Beaglebone and Raspberry Pi and any other PC running Windows, Linux or Android.
The LTE speed is 150Mbps downlink and 50Mbps uplink, but is backward-compatible with existing EDGE and GSM/GPRS networks. This allows USB-gLINK to connect to any existing 2G, 3G and 4G network.
Inside USB-gLINK there is build in navigation which supports: GPS, GLONASS, BeiDou/Compass, Galileo and QZSS.
USB-gLINK can operate on these bands: B1 / B2 / B3 / B4 / B5 / B7 / B8 / B12 / B13 / B18 / B19 / B20 / B25 / B26 / B28 / B38 / B39 / B40 / B41, which covers every mobile operator anywhere in the world. This allow your solution based on USB-gLINK to be sold globally without hardware changes.
There are number of carriers who already approved the module used in USB-gLINK: Deutsche Telekom (Europe), Verizon/AT&T/Sprint/U.S. Cellular/T-Mobile (North America), Telus/Rogers (Canada)
These regulatory are passed: GCF (Global), CE (Europe), FCC/PTCRB (North America), IC (Canada), Anatel (Brazil), IFETEL (Mexico), SRRC/CCC/NAL (China), KC (South Korea), NCC (Taiwan, China), JATE/TELEC (Japan), RCM (Australia & New Zealand), FAC (Russia), NBTC (Thailand), IMDA (Singapore), ICASA (South Africa)
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