STM32 are one of the most popular Cortex ARM devices on the market as they are with aggresive pricing and nice features. The semiconductor crisis hit ST as all other semiconductor vendors and STM32 disappeared from the market. Many customers have been left for more than year without MCus.
GigaDevices is well known Flash memory manufacturer, they have range of ARM Cortex M3, M4 devices which are pin to pin compatible with STM32 MCUs.
We check GD32 assembled on our STM32 boards and they work equal the only difference we notice is that GD32 lack two wires JTAG SWD interface and only support the full JTAG, which is not big issue.
All code we test run equal on both STM32 and GD32.
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
Happy New Year! Olimex team wish you health and best of luck in the new 2021. Let all troubles from 2020 go away!
Update on UK shipping:
Brexit brings some troubles for trade with UK. We stopped the shipping to UK on December 23 2020 as we didn’t know how to handle the orders when we are back on January 4th.
When we got back in office we had expected news: The couriers raised their prices with almost 50% due to the extra efforts around the new UK regulations, but this was just the beginning.
From January 1st 2021 all shipments to UK with value under GBP 135 must be with included charged VAT. For this purpose all online shops which ships to UK must register for UK customs EORI and UK VAT-ID. They have to charge the VAT at the time of shipping and to pay to UK government all collected VAT at the end of the month. The shipments above GBP 135 are shipped with export declaration and without VAT as for any other countries outside EU.
The big platforms like Amazon, ebay etc. also need to register (probably they already did) and collect the VAT from their sellers.
We still not have EORI neither UK VAT-ID so we can’t ship small orders. Orders above EUR 200 are processed normally. We are sorry for this inconvenience and apologise to all our small UK customers.
Update on current boards:
iMX8Qmax board high speed signals are completely routed, we now make the connector arrangements on the PCB and hope to be ready for prototypes in March.
S3-OLinuXino revision B of the board prototypes works great. Bootlin reported that their mainline driver for CSI2 work with RaspberryPi IMX219 8 Mpix camera, CSI1 is with OV2640 2Mpix camera connector. Gigabit ethernet, Audio microphone, PoE option, eMMC/SPI Flash option, etc all are tested and work fine. We are making now final touch ups and will run production.
STMP1-SOM small module with STM32MP151/3/7 is on prototype Revision B and everything exept the Audio is working fine. Production will follow in March.
STMP1-OLinuXino-LIME2 is stuck at Gigabit Ethernet. We had many other issues which were solved, but this remains. The original ST design uses RTL8211 which is commercial grade, we put KSZ9031RNXIC-TR instead and there is neither correctly sent neither correctly received package. We use this chip in Allwinner A20 and A64 designs without problems. We used all combinations of delays of the clocks and singnals etc with no luck. Our guess is the port hardware drivers are somehow incompatible with this PHY and are either slow either make rings which confuse the PHY chip. If someone has more knowledge and can help, we can send board.
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
ST32MP1XX SOCs from ST Microelectronics has one unique feature: They operate from -40 up to +125 by default there is no other commercial or industrial or etc temperature range. What does this means – very well done production! It’s not secret that all SOC vendors produce their chips then test them and which pass -40+125 are classified automotive grade, which fail but pass -40+85C are classified industrial and it there are SOC which fail both automotive and industrial grade on tests are sold as commercial grade.
This chip has no other than automotive grade, so ST is confident in their process quality.
For this SOC ST Microelectronics guarantee 10 years rolling availability.
The peripherals ST32MP1XX has are also industrial and real time oriented:
Cortex-M4 co processor, we know Cortex-A series when run RTOS has latency which do not allow fast processed like motor control etc. This is where this co-processor release the main OS processor of such demanding tasks
FD-CAN ST32MP1 has two cans both support FD which offer less latency and faster speed, one of them has also time triggered CAN (TTCAN)
2 × ADCs with 16-bit max. resolution (12 bits up to 4.5 Msps, 14 bits up to 4 Msps, 16 bits up to 3.6 Msps)
2 × 12-bit D/A converters (1 MHz)
8- to 14-bit camera interface up to 140 Mbyte/s
Gigabit Ethernet
6 × SPI (50 Mbit/s)
6 × I2C FM+ (1 Mbit/s, SMBus/PMBus)
Documented Trust Zone and Secure Boot (may be subject to some export restrictions)
We designed our STMP1-OLinuXino to be with same layout as A20-OLinuXino-LIME2, with all connectors on same positions, so people who used LIME2 to may migrate to STMP1 if necessary.
We put the SOC on bottom this time to may attach easier bigger heat sinks or even connect it to the BOX-LIME-BLACK metal and remove the need for aluminum heatsink.
Note that schematic is not verified yet and the PCB is not routed, we just placed the components on their approximate locations.
All preliminary files are put on GitHub so people who are interested how we wired the GPIOs to match LIME2 functionality and existing customers find potential conflicts with their current design may signal while still routing is not complete 🙂
olimex 
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