New more compact design of ARM-USB-OCD-H(L) is released with USB-C connector

ARM-USB-OCD-H is very popular OpenOCD debugger supported by almost all IDEs and platforms. It’s in the Application notes of Intel and ARM processor vendors.

The ARM-USB-OCD-H initial design was made many years ago and some parts are obsolete like the USB-B to USB-A cable, big plastic shell from centronic 36/36 connectors etc.

As the centronic plastic became unavailable this year we decided that it’s good time to re-design ARM-USB-OCD-H completely.

Smaller and more compact plastic box is used. The USB connector now is USB-C, so popular USB phone cables can be used.

Our recommendation is customer to move to ARM-USB-OCD-HL it’s completely same as ARM-USB-OCD-H but supports targets with voltage levels from 0.65-5.5V

New iMX8QuadPlus System on Module is ready for prototyping

iMX8Quad Max board we developed is still waiting for components to verify the first prototypes, but we decided to develop one more SOC from iMX8 Plus series which we thought is filling niche where we do not have product.

This is how iMX8MPLUS-SOM was designed:

• 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

MIMX8ML8DVNLZAB operating temperature is -40+105C which makes it perfect for both industrial and automotive applications.

Evaluation board iMX8MPlus-SOM-EVB is now designed with Dual Ethernet, Dual USB 3.0, PCIe, HDMI.

NXP is going to provide mainline Linux support for this SOC.

It’s impossible to comment any pricing at the moment, but it will be very competitive compared with similar industrial grade products.

Quad Core 64bit Open Source Hardware Linux computer A64-OLinuXino now have version with external antenna

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 popular Olimex ARM OpenOCD JTAG programmer debugger ARM-USB-OCD-H gets better, now has a modification which works with targets from 0.65 up to 5.5V

ARM-USB-OCD-H is a low-cost ARM OpenOCD debugger. It supports targets from 1.65V up to 5.0V. Many SOC manufacturers like Intel, Intel/Movidius, nVidia and others use it in their development work. Intel quotes ARM-USB-OCD-H and ARM-JTAG-20-10 in their appnote “Source Level Debug using OpenOCD/GDB/Eclipse on Intel® Quark™ SoC X1000”.

A few month ago we got an interesting question. A new SOC manufacturer was trying to debug their SOC with ARM-USB-OCD-H, but the problem was that their target was working on 1.2V. They asked us if we could modify our JTAG to be able to work at lower than 1.65V targets.

Our engineers identified a couple of components which we could upgrade to support lower voltages. The final result was that the ARM-USB-OCD-HL new modification of the JTAG can now work with targets from 0.65V up to 5.5V.

This pretty much covers all existing SOCs on the market.

New IP Camera OSHW board in design RFC

We started recently new design with Allwinner S3 SOC.

The board have these features:

• Allwinner S3 Cortex-A7 running at 1.2Ghz
• AXP209 PMU with Lipo charger and step-up for UPS
• internal 1Gb DDR3 RAM at 1333Mhz
• 100Mb Ethernet interface with PoE option
• NAND/eMMC/SPI Flash on socket
• WiFi / BT module with RTL8723BS
• Audio In and Out
• UEXT connector
• Lipo battery connector
• Configuration EEPROM
• LCD connector for LCD-OLinuXino
• MIPI camera connector with RPi pinout
• CSI camera connector
• Dimensions: 60 x 50 mm

S3 SOC is on bottom so heatsink could be add if overheating due to the small PCB area.

We want to build intelligent camera solution which can be powered by PoE and can work with both wired and wireless Ethernet connection.

We add MIPI camera connector with RPi pinout as there are plenty of cheap 5Mpix cameras available.

We also will provide CSI camera with 5-8Mpix separately.

Why we do this board? We want to have intelligent IP camera among our tools and we put features which are necessary to fit our potential projects. This board have also potential for Voice over IP , Video over IP, Security, Home remote monitoring etc.

Initial upload on GitHub is with our schematic and components put on PCB locations, routing is ahead, so we would like to hear your opinion.

Did we forgot something?

Can we do something differently or better?

Let us know what do you think.

New from our forum – experimental NixOS image for TERES DIY OSHW Laptop

Recent post from our forum explains how to build experimental NixOS image for TERES-I  – Do It Yourself, Environmental friendly, modular Open Source Hardware ARM Laptop.

Linux Users Group Bulgaria annual meeting is April 6th in Plovdiv

Linux Users Group is annual meeting of people who use and develop with Linux in Bulgaria. The LUG-BG meeting this year is on 6th of April in Plovdiv. The web page of the meeting is here.

I signed for discussion about how to make one ARM Linux system tamper proof.

This is topic which is very interesting for all our OLinuXino customers. OLinuXino is used in many industrial product and machines and the designers want to be sure that no one except them can change the Linux image as these machines pass safety approvals etc and any intervention in the code is illegal.

The Allwinner SoCs do have TrustZone support and also crypto hardware to support a secure boot path for it, but parts of the ARM TrustZone specifications is under NDA and no one has seen it. The secure boot paths are also undocumented. Last time I attempt to receive any useful information about this I got reply: A20 is 5 years old processor and we do not offer technical support for the old processors, when I asked them for info how TrustZone and Secure boot is implemented in their newer processors I didn’t got any reply. My guess is this is something licensed from ARM which they never used so can’t support.

Currently all Allwinner SOC boot without using TrustZone and Secure boot path, they has so caller BROM a small code located in SOC ROM, which initializes the memory and processor registers with some safe values then try to boot from different peripherals. If UBOOT GPIO is held low they enter FEL mode where you can type some commands and load code via USB, else they try to boot from SD-CARD, if fails then try -> internal NAND Flash if fails then try -> SD-CARD2/eMMC, if fails then try -> SPI Flash, if all fails it go in FEL mode.

This is done intentionally so you can never brick your board if internal NAND or EMMC or SPI Flash get corrupted you can always boot from SD-card or USB and replace the image. This of course is big security hole, as anyone with physical access to your board can always replace your images with his own.

The TrustZone and Secure boot path solve this issue, but no one has documentation how this is done on Allwinner SOCs.

I hope to get some interesting ideas how this could be solved, one radical approach is to remove physically the SD-card connectors 🙂

Nice tutorial for writing and debugging plain C on ARM Cortex-M3 STM32F103

Jacob Mossberg wrote nice tutorial how to program in C ARM Cortex-M3 with GCC and how to debug it with GDB and OpenOCD.

We like very much the hardware he is using 🙂 STM32-H103 and ARM-USB-OCD-H.

 

SPECTRE and MELTDOWN attacks and OLinuXino and SOMs

The #spectre and #meltdown attacks were subject to great concerns in the last weeks.

Eben Upton made brilliant explanation of how and why they work in his blog post.

There is already project on Github which can be used to test if your ARM AArch64 processor is vulnerable to such attacks.

As Cortex-A7 and Cortex-A53 are not affected of these attacks this means all our boards with A20, A33, A64 processors are immune.

For A10, A13, AM335X (Cortex-A8), RK3188 (Cortex-A9) we need to do some further investigation.

The Metal Linux Computer – The first LCD industrial panel prototypes are ready

What you see is our first sample of the metal frame for 7″ LCD with build-in A20-OLinuXino-LIME inside!

Our mechanical designer is getting better and better after the design of A20-OLinuXino-MICRO and A20-OLinuXino-LIME boxes. The box for MICRO was done after three attempts, the LIME box was done right from the second attempt, now the LCD box got perfect from the very first attempt!

The metal frame is done by three parts:

Here above you see two parts, which connect together with single screw. Why this is necessary – LIME has connectors on both ends and it’s not possible to fit inside as the connectors go outside PCB borders

this is the third part it’s bend to hold inside the touch panel and LCD:

here is the frame with LCD and touchscreen in it:

the LIME is attached to back panel with one screw on metal spacer, the left side connectors show outside a bit:

then we attach the right side panel and screw them together:

then the LCD part is snap to the other two and fixed with 4 screws:

here is how it looks on the back side:

the same four mount holes can be used the metal panel to be assembled to other surface there are provisional mount holes on the back side as well.

The whole construction is solid and reliable. The frame dimensions are: 190 x 102 mm the higher back side is 40 mm the lower side is 10 mm thick.

This whole frame have approx same size as MODEL-B box and have just few more bendings so the price I expect is to be same as on MODEL-B box i.e. about EUR 15.00

This means 7″ LCD panel with A20-OLinuXino with the metal frame will cost from EUR 81.00 and if TOUCH screen is add from EUR 89.00