Searching for more info about their new H313 SOC I found old news from August 2020, where Allwinner announce the development of AP SOC with RISC-V and praising Open Source Hardware and the open ISA of RISC-V.
They say in this announcement that they will have AP (application processor) SOC with RISC-V in 2021!
There is lot of development around RISC-V in the last years. Espressif have their ESP32-C3 which is with RISC-V SOC, but it can’t run Linux as has not enough memory and video. We still can’t see affordable silicon capable to run Linux.
There is announcement for BeagleBoneV but still not in production and at quite higher price compared to ARM boards on the market.
Allwinner is known to be able to design and produce low cost SOCs. Let’s hope the semiconductor crisis caused by Covid19 will not delay their plans.
So is the year 2021 when we will see $35 Linux running boards with RISC-V?
I’m crossing fingers!
As soon as we can get our hands to these SOC we will make OSHW OLinuXino with it!
OSHW design and affordable SOC will lead to affordable boards and boost of the software development of RISC-V too.
The PCB routing of our most complex board – IMX8QM-Tukhla is complete and ready for first prototype build.
We started this project June-July 2020. Due to the Covid19 the development took 10 months although only 6 month of active work was done, due to lock downs, ill developers and so on troubles.
Now the board is completely routed and has these features:
Main SOC MIMX8QM5AVUFFAB which is member of iMX8 Quad Max series – the most powerful iMX8 SOC line from NXP.
MIMX8QM5AVUFFAB has 8 cores:
x2 Cortex-A72 running at 1.6Ghz
x4 Cortex-A53 running at 1.2Ghz
x2 Cortex-M4F running at 264Mhz
Memory:
64-bit LPDDR4 @1600 MHz
Connectivity:
1× PCIe (2-lanes)
1× USB 3.0 with PHY
1x USB 3.0 dual role with PHY
1× SATA 3.0
2× 1Gb Ethernet with AVB
1× CAN/CAN-FD
1x HDMI Rx
GPU:
2xGC7000 XSVX
16× Vec4 shaders with 64 execution units
Dual independent 8-Vec4 shader GPUs or a combined 16-Vec4 shader GPU
OpenGL 3.0, 2.1
OpenGL ES 3.2, 3.1 (with AEP), 3.0, 2.0, and 1.1
OpenCL 1.2 Full Profile and 1.1
OpenVG 1.1
Vulkan
VPU:
H.265 decode (4Kp60)
H.264 decode (4Kp30)
WMV9/VC-1 imple decode
MPEG 1 and 2 decode
AVS decodeMPEG4.2 ASP,
H.263, Sorenson Spark decode
Divx 3.11 including GMC decode
ON2/Google VP6/VP8 decode
RealVideo 8/9/10 decode
JPEG and MJPEG decode
2× H.264 encode (1080p30)
Display:
Supports single UltraHD 4Kp60 display
or up to 4 independent FullHD 1080p60 displays
2× MIPI-DSI with 4 lanes each
1× HDMI-TX/DisplayPort
2× LVDS Tx with 2 channels of 4 lanes each
Camera:
2× MIPI-CSI with 4-lanes each, MIPI DPHYSM v1.
Security:
Advanced High Assurance Boot (AHAB) secure & encrypted boot
Operating temperature:
Automotive AEC-Q100 Grade 3 -40+125C
To the best of our knowledge there is no Open Source Board so far which to be so complex and advanced.
Now we are running the first prototypes and crossing fingers everything to work 🙂
With the current state of the semiconductor industry production will not be possible to be run soon.
Linux support will need attention as NXP has no mainline Linux for this SOC, but only Yocto build for old kernel (4.14.98_2.3.3).
If there are people with experience and interest in this SOC we may share one of the first samples we build, so they can help on the Linux support.
The schematic of IMX8QM-TUKHLA Revision A is uploaded for review on out ftp.
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
A64-OLinuXino is Open Source Hardware Quad core 64 bit Linux Computer.
We also offer nice metal box for it named BOX-A64-BLACK:
The only problem was that A64-OLinuXino have option for on board WiFi-BT but it uses PCB antenna and when put in box the communication range was decreasing signiificantly.
New revision of A64-OLinuXino board now supports both internal PCB antenna and U.FL externally attached 2.4Ghz antenna.
So A64-OLinuXino can be put inside the metal box and have the antenna outside:
ESP32-S2 is new SOC from Espressif, compared to ESP32 it has no Bluetooth and Ethernet connectivity, but offers plenty of GPIOs and has native USB-OTG interface.
Our first version uses USB to Serial converter as Espressif IDE at that time didn’t support programming via the native USB interface, but now their SDK supports USB programming, so we released new version without the not necessary USB-Serial converter.
To the best of our knowledge this is the first board to the market where USB-OTG is implemented and the board can work both in device and host mode ( at least as hardware 🙂 )
The hardware now is ahead of software as USB host functionality in SDK is missing yet, but at least we provide hardware platform for the future.
ESP32-S2-DevKit-Lipo-USB is OSHW so the CAD files are available on GitHub if someone want to see how we implement the USB-OTG. It’s really complicated as we wanted to keep the handheld battery operation and keep the LiPo charger and battery circuit. This leads to quite some over engineering around the power supply as the battery should charge when USB-OTG works in Device mode, and source 5V to the USB-OTG when it’s in Host mode!
It took us 2 revisions until we made it right, so thanks for your patience, now the board is in stock and orderable.
ESP32-S2-WROVER-DevKit-Lipo-USB with WROVER module with 2MB RAM is also available for these who want to write big applications.
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.
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