The biggest Free Libre Open Source Software and Open Source Hardware event in Europe – FOSDEM 2022 will be again online on February 5th and 6th. Check the devrooms and mark the talks you want to attend.
My talk will be in Computer Aided Modeling and Design devroom and I will speak about how we push the limits of KiCAD with our most complex OSHW board the iMX8QuadMax.
Silicon Labs stopped selling Si3204 POE controllers which were inside our very popular ESP32-POE and ESP32-POE-ISO boards. There is no stock anywhere neither information when they will be back in stock. So back in August we start searching for alternative and we evaluated several other solutions. We liked most Texas Instruments and made some prototypes and verified that they works fine.
Then we run blank PCBs in production but unfortunately we hit two major Chinese Holidays, so instead the blank PCBs to arrive in the normal 2 weeks we had to wait 5 weeks to produce our order then another week to arrive here.
Meantime we sold out all our stock of ESP32-POE and POE-ISO and created solid backlog before we stop the sales on the web.
We are glad that this week we shipped all backlog orders and now the boards are again for sale!
The new revisions of the boards are REV.G and the PCB info will be updated on GitHub tomorrow. From user point of view nothing changes – the new revision operates exactly the same and have same functionality as the previous Silicon Labs based solution.
Industrial grade -40+85C (STMP157-OLinuXino-LIME2H-IND) version running on 650 Mhz with HDMI output (when HDMI works operating temperature is commercial as HDMI convertor is not industrial grade)
Extended temperature -20+85C (STMP157-OLinuXino-LIME2H-EXT) version running on 800 Mhz with HDMI output (when HDMI works operating temperature is commercial as HDMI convertor is not industrial grade)
User Manual for the boards is available on the product web page.
Debian and Ubuntu Linux images are pre-build and ready to install and run.
The images are build with Olimex script Olimage which is available on GitHub.
Olimage user manual explains what is included in it and how you can modify uboot and kernel to include drivers for devices which are not included in Olimex official images.
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:
olimex 
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