OLIMEXINO-STM32F3 is re-design of our popular OLIMEXINO-STM32 board.
What is new?
STM32F303RCT6TR is used which allow CAN and USB to work at the same time. The F1 Series of STM32 shared same buffer for both USB and CAN which leads to not be able to work with both CAN and USB at the same time. This is solved in F3 series
Increased amount of memory: 256KB Flash, 40KB RAM
Power supply is now from 4.2VDC up to 40VDC which allow OLIMEXINO-STM32F3 to work in Automotive applications without special power converters
Industrial temperature grade -40+85C
Real Time Clock backup battery holder for CR2032 Li battery
Lower cost
The price of OLIMEXINO-STM32F3 is EUR 14.95 for single unit and drops to EUR 11.96 for 50+ pcs order.
We started working on our most complex OSHW board with KiCAD.
iMX8 is broad range of very different ARM architectures under same name which some people may find quite confusing. Here is the table chart:
You can see by yourself:
iMX8X is quite humble with up to x4 Cortex-A35+Cortex-M4F cores, something less capable than Allwinner A13 or STM32MP1XX
iMX8M, Nano/Mini/Plus is x4 Cortex-A53 + Cortex-A7/M4F something in the range of power of Allwinner A64
finally iMX8QuadMax comes with different configurations, but the high end is Octa-core with x2 Cortex-A72 + x4 Cortex-A53 + x2 Cortex-M4F and is more powerful than the popular Rockchip RK3399
Why we did started working on such monster?
Company from EU which values the OSHW recognized the absence of high end open source Linux board and asked us to design one. They offered to cover all associated design costs. They specially requested this to be not yet another RK3399 board, but based on SOC with proper documentation and software support. NXP’s high end iMX8QuadMax matched their requirements perfectly.
Currently all powerful Cortex-A72 comes from Chinese or Korean origin and are always closed projects, the only published info in best case is PDF schematic which can’t be verified i.e. the final product may or may not match what they publish. The popular Raspberry Pi go even further and their “schemaitcs” are just connector diagrams.
This is how the Tukhla project was born, it will have:
MIMX8QM5AVUFFAB Octa-core SOC with: ( x2 Cortex-A72, x4 Cortex-A53, x2 Cortex-M4F, x4 GPUs with 16 Vec4-Shader GPU, 32 compute units OpenGL® ES 3.2 and Vulkan® support Tessellation and Geometry Shading, Split-GPU architecture enables 2x 8 Shader Cores, 4k h.265 Decode, 1080p h.264 encode)
x2 LPDDR4 x32 databus RAM memory with up to 16GB of RAM configuration
PMU taking all power lines from single 12V/4A source
micro SD card
eMMC Flash with differnt sizes
QSPI Flash
x1 SATA for external HDD/SSD drives
x2 single lane PCIe with M2 connectors for NVMe
HDMI input 1.4 RX with HDCP 2.2
HDMI output 2.0 TX with HDCP 2.2 4K
USB 2.0 OTG
USB 3.0 HOST
x2 Gigabit Ethernet
x2 MIPI CSI camera connectors
The price of MIMX8QM5AVUFFAB alone is around EUR 100 in small quantities and currently LPDDR4 4GB cost EUR 35, LPDDR4 8GB cost EUR 50, LPDDR4 16GB cost EUR 180.
So with BOM over EUR 200 this board will not be affordable for the most of Raspberry Pi $35 price range users.
This board targets professionals, who need high performance board and being not dependent by Chinese SOC vendors. With all hardware open, which gives them security for their business as the design is public.
iMX8QuadMax SOC is available in automotive AEC-Q100 Grade 3 (-40° to 125° C Tj), Industrial (-40° to 105° C Tj), Consumer (-20° to 105° C Tj)
Some of the features like HDMI input are not present in the Chinese SOCs at all.
iMX8QuadMax may have DSP and incorporate Vision and Speech Recognition interactivity via a powerful vision pipeline and audio processing subsystem.
The Software support include: Android™, Linux®, FreeRTOS, QNX™, Green Hills®, Dornerworks XEN™.
iMX8QuadMax is fully supported on NXP’s 10 and 15-year Longevity Program
Tukhla means Brick in Bulgarian (and other Slavish languages) and it will be the OSHW building block for whole range of different solutions.
How long it will take to finish this design?
We honestly don’t know. It took more than month just to capture the schematic in the state it is now:
There is long path now to create and verify all component packages (just the SOC is in 1313 BGA ball package), verify the schematic signals, place the components on the PCB, route high speed signals manually.
It may be 6 months or more. We got unofficial info that NXP engineers spent more than year to make the NXP iMX8QMax demo board.
Our popular ESP32-DevKit-Lipo, ESP32-POE and ESP32-POE-ISO now has option with external antenna, so you can use them even with metal boxes. The external antenna extends their range by 20-30%.
We stock now ESP32 modules with 16MB of Flash, so if you run out of memory you can order any of our ESP32 boards with 16MB Flash module too.
Also we have ESP32 modules in extended temperature range -HT (high temperature) which works from -40C up to 105C for demanding applications.
olimex 
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