iMX8MPlus-SOM is alive and boots!

This board development started in April 2021 and finished August 2021 but the semiconductor shortages didn’t allow us to test the prototypes until recently. We assembled 4 boards and all theyare alive and boot.

The features are:

• MIMX8ML8DVNLZAB – Quad Core Arm Cortex-A53 running at 1.8Ghz with Arm Cortex-M7 co-processor running at 800Mhz and 2.3 TOPS Neural Processing Unit.
• 6GB LPDDR4 RAM
• Power management
• configuration EEPROM
• status LED
• LCD LVDS connector compatible with LCD-OLinuXino displays
• MIPI DSI connector
• 2x MIPI CSI comera connectors with Raspberry Pi compatible pinout
• 220 signals on 6 0.05″ step connectors with essential peripherials like:
  • PCIe-3.0
  • 2x CAN FD
  • HDMI 2.0a
  • SPDIF
  • SAI
  • 2x USB 3.0
  • 2x Gigabit Ethernet one of them with TSN
  • eMMC 5.1
  • SDIO 3.0 200Mhz
  • 4 UART
  • 6 I2C
  • 3 SPI
  • JTAG

Unfortunately we only managed to find 24Gb LPDDR4 for the prototypes so instead of 6GB they are with only 3GB of RAM.

Now is time to prepare Linux and Android images! NXP provide iMX8MPlus with Linux Kernel 5.10 and Android 11.

MIMX8ML8DVNLZAB is industrial grade -40+105C

New Quad Core Cortex-A53 System-On-Module supports DDR3/DDR3L/DDR4 memories from 1 up to 4GB

Our RK3328-SOM prototypes are testing now.

These are with dimensions of only 55 x 41 mm.

RK3328 SOC has:

• 4x Cortex-A53 cores @1.5Ghz
• DDR3/DDR3L/DDR4 support 1/2/4GB
• GPU: ARM Mali-450MP2
• HDMI 2.0
• CSI up to 5Mpix
• Video decode H.264 H.265 4K@60Hz
• Video encode H.264 H.265 1080p@30Hz
• Audio: I2S, Codec
• Gigabit 10/100/1000 Ethernet
• Megabit 10/100 Ethernet with PHY
• USB3.0 host
• USB2.0 host
• USB-OTG 2.0
• SPI/eMMC Flash
• SD-card

RK3328-SOM-EVB is evaluation board and reference design for RK3328-SOM:

Software support:

• Android 10
• Linux Kernel 4.4 is the official SDK of Rockchip. There is just basic mainline support with no drivers for USB3 although these SOCs are on the market for quite a lot of time.

The preliminary prices are:

• RK3328-SOM-1G (1GB DDR3L) EUR 27.00
• RK3328-SOM-2G (2GB DDR3L) EUR 37.00
• RK3328-SOM-4G (4GB DDR4) EUR 57.00
• RK3328-SOM-EVB (no SOM installed) EUR 18.00

Installing and running /e/ pro-privacy open source Android on Open Source Hardware Laptop TERES-I

Few days ago customer asked if we can ship our Open Source hardware DIY Hacker friendly laptop TERES-I with /e/ pre-installed.

For these who has not clue what /e/ is: The /e/ ROM is a fork of Android with focus on privacy. It’s open source  pro privacy compatible with most existing Android applications. The /e/ is alternative to the Apple/Google duopoly on the smartphone.

I have seen Mr. Gael Duval tweet about the /e/ support for TERES-I from March this year, but shame on me I wasn’t try it yet, so I though it’s good time to give it a try.

The install instructions here and are very clear. Unfortunately when I followed them there was no result other than displaying this spash screen for Pine64.

After waiting some minutes I decided that something is wrong and decided to write the image instead with dd command with balenaEtcher.

The image written with balena had same splash for a while then show /e/ install screen:

Be prepared to wait few minutes then the setup screen is shown, it’s same as first Android installation even you can choose Bulgarian language:

After setting up the date/time, your WiFi connection etc you got the home screen:

Settings show that TERES-I now run Android 7 (Nougat):

If you setup account you can go to app store:

Overall /e/ is running fine on A64 TERES-I and people who are used to Android environment, but do not want to be spy by Google service.

 

 

A13-SOM-512 Android image for 4.3″ LCD with touchscreen released

We got request from customer for Android image which supports 4.3″ LCD with touchscreen. He did his development with Beagle Bone, but wanted to optimize the cost for production so A13-SOM512 price was very attractive, but default Allwinner Android image although allow you to define smaller LCD resolutions has no working touchscreen calibration for small LCDs, also default Android screen was not set well and status bar was taking big portion of the screen.

Here is the newly released SD-card image for A13-SOM512 Android with 4.3″ LCD with touchscreen display.

Now you can develop your embedded Andoid application on low cost board with small LCD.

Android scripts for OLinuXino

The Android images for our OLinuXino boards are not the stock images with the Allwinner SDK, some small things were changed to add support for our WiFi modules etc. We wanted to publish the sources for a very long time, but the files are 6 GB for each board and this is not easy to store and serve.

Now the configs are on GitHub with links to the Allwinner stock SDK sources so if you want to build your own Android image you have these as templates.

Building Android Jelly Bean for A13-OLinuXino-WIFI Step by Step Tutorial

Akshay Mathur sent us very detailed step by step tutorial how to build Android Jelly Bean for A13-OLinuXino-WIFI.

Android 4.2.2 image for A20-OLinuXino-LIME

NAND Flash image for Android 4.2.2 with 7″ LCD 800×600 pixels

NAND Flash image for Android 4.2.2 with 10″ LCD 1024×600 pixels

4GB SD-card image for Android 4.2.2 with 7″ LCD 800×600 pixels

Android first Wearable devices tear down

 

Anandtech just posted info about what is inside the first Android wearable devices.

Android wearable technology is a bit of dissapointment for me and lost me when I learned that inside they have only 400mAh battery which you have to re-charge every night.

Also they cost almost as new Chrome book $200-250 retail. I bit high price for actually nothing but remote LCD with touchscreen, attached to your Android phone or tablet.

Android Wearable devices can’t operate stand alone nor you can run code on them, you just receive push notifications and look for return actions like tap, slide on the LCD.

So inside they have LCD with touchscreen, small buzzer and Bluetooth Low Energy, all this controlled with x4 core Cortex-A7 device 🙂 same functionality probably could be done with 8 bit PIC? As one friend says the bloat-ness of the software is in reverse relation with the power of the hardware, the powerful hardware you get more bloated become the software running on it.

By wearable technology first I was thinking for cool sensors which are attached to your wrest and measure your temperature, blood pressure, pulse, your motion activity, siting pose in the front of the computer, ekg, eeg, check your breath for alcohol and log all this info so it could be later used to make your health profile and give you recommendation what and how to improve, so far these first wearable devices do not impress me.

A13-SOM Android 4.2.2 NAND Flash image

We completed Android 4.2.2 NAND Flash image for A13-SOM-512 note that this image will not work on A13-SOM-256 as Android require lot of RAM, also to may use this image you need A13-SOM-WIFI-4GB shield to store the image.

New Product in Stock: A13-SOM-256, A13-SOM-512, A13-SOM-WIFI, A13-SOM-WIFI-4GB

A13-SOM-256 and A13-SOM-512 the smallest SOM modules for Allwinner A13 Cortex-A8 processors are now in stock.

A13-SOM-WIFI add internet connectivity, A13-SOM-WIFI-4GB adds also 4GB NAND to run Android.