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:
The box comes with all necessary fasteners for board assembly inside the box and four rubber feets.
Opening for external antenna is provided although current A64-OLinuXino revision has no WiFi module with U.FL connector inside. We work on next revision where this will be fixed and A64-OLinuXino board will be possible to order with internal or external antenna.
Few days ago I blogged about the KODI build scripts for A20 and A64 OLinuXino ad promised pre-build images on our server. This is now done and the images can be downloaded from our ftp for A64 and A20.
A20 HDMI audio currently do not work, but Dimitar and Stefan work on this and they say this will be fixed soon. So crossing fingers we may have good news for Christmas!
After the blog for KODI image lot of people sent emails asking if we will release metal box for A64-OLinuXino, as it actually works very well as media player and can play 4K video @30fps according to Jernej:
Some remarks about blog post content:
"Both A20 and A64 decode up to 4K movies but of course can’t
display such resolutions." - A64 is actually capable displaying
such resolutions. It supports up to 4K@30Hz. Kodi will render
hardware decoded 4K videos without downsizing when connected
to 4K TV/monitor.
So we start working on this and here is the result:
Now we have to laser-cut and bend some boxes and see if it’s done right 🙂
LibreELEC is small OS which has everything to run KODI on top of it. Thanks to Dimitar Gamishev and Stefan Saraev now A20 and A64 OLinuXino has support for it.
Linux kernel 5.0 was just released and as we were working this week to the release of mainline Linux image for A64-OLinuXino (as till now it has the ugly android based 3.10 kernel) we decided to release latest kernel.
LCDs are not supported yet, HDMI output is only available, we need one more week to figure out how to automatically detect if the Ethernet or LCD are enabled (there is jumper on the board which switch between LCD or Ethernet as both share pins and can’t work together). So to make the DTS configurations automatic at boot time.
eMMC do not work in the fastest possible mode yet. We need some time, right now 50MB/s is the max speed to read write instead of 100-200MB/s which the installed eMMC supports, we will update the image soon with HS200/400 modes enabled.
No CPU thermal. A64 has 3 thermal zones – CPU, GPU0 and GPU1. The driver doesn’t support monitoring them.
SOM204 is SODIMM form factor System-On-Module we are working for a while (actually from so long time ago that SOM204-EVB platform is made in Eagle which we dropped to use officially from quite some time ago).
The SODIMM connector has these signals:
Power supply: +5V, GND, LiPobattery, RTC_backup, Stepup-Output, Stepup-enable, USB+5V
You can see complete SOM204 platform signals here.
The idea behind SOM204 is to make Universal interchangeable SOM with different performance and resources.
Our first SOM204 module is with A20 processor, it’s now in production and will be available for purchase next week.
The second SOM204 module is with A64, the third is with RK3328 which we expect to be ready for production around June. Next to follow is AM335X which will be ready by end of the year together with RK3399. The goal is to have 5 different modules by the end of the year.
A20-SOM204 comes with 1GB RAM, optional SPI Flash or eMMC Flash up to 64GB, two native Ethernets (this is the only A20 board with dual native Ethernets) Gigabit and Megabit, SATA and so on. The USB3.0 interface and PICe interfaces are not wired. On top on SOM204 platform LCD and additional GPIOs are exposed on FPC connectors:
This Saturday 21st of October we will have TERES I assembly workshop!
Customers from Bulgaria who placed orders for TERES I DIY Open Source laptop will have their laptop kits ready and are invited to come and we assembly them together!
Good news is that Gigabit interface works well with Micrel/Microchip PHY and result is real Gigabit bandwidth. A20 although having Gigabit interface can’t make more than 700 Mbit I guess this is related to A20 capability to handle the data from GMAC. With A64 the speed is 932Mbit i.e. very close to 1Gb:
root@A64-OLinuXino:~# iperf -s
------------------------------------------------------------
Server listening on TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 85.3 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[ 4] local 10.0.0.4 port 5001 connected with 10.0.0.1 port 41144
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth
[ 4] 0.0-10.0 sec 1.09 GBytes 932 Mbits/sec
For eMMC we followed the advice to make it dual voltage 3.3V and 1.8V with aim to have faster transfers and we implemented it in the hardware, but the tests show that transfer is same even at 1.8V is a bit lower. I don’t know if this is due to lame software settings we do in the eMMC drivers, or just the eMMC we use have same transfer on both voltages (we check datasheet and the eMMC we use have same speed quoted on both voltages), so this may be useless for our eMMC chip:
eMMC clock: 52 Mhz
eMMC@3.3V
root@A64-OLinuXino:/home/olimex# dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/output conv=fdatasync bs=384k count=1k; rm -f /mnt/output
1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
402653184 bytes (403 MB, 384 MiB) copied, 33.0437 s, 12.2 MB/s
eMMC@1.8V
root@A64-OLinuXino:/home/olimex# dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/output conv=fdatasync bs=384k count=1k; rm -f /mnt/output
1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
402653184 bytes (403 MB, 384 MiB) copied, 37.9408 s, 10.6 MB/s
SDMMC clock: 40MHz
SDMMC@3.3V
root@A64-OLinuXino:/home/olimex# dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/output conv=fdatasync bs=384k count=1k; rm -f /tmp/output
1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
402653184 bytes (403 MB, 384 MiB) copied, 41.1578 s, 9.8 MB/s
With SDMMC as we don’t know what SD card will be inserted the clock is set to default 40Mhz.
After re-checking that everything works, we make last cosmetic changes to audio part we noticed in the last moment and will run Rev.C in production.
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