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.

S3-OLinuXino Open Source Hardware Linux dual camera board status uppdate April 2021

S3-OLinuXino is small open source hardware Linux computer with Ethernet, dual camera interface, running mainline uboot and Linux Kernel 5.12.

Our hardware went through few iterations, but last Revision.C now is in production and we will have it for sale on our web at the end of the April.

This board has small PoE plug-on top module which adds PoE functionality, so the whole setup board + cameras can be powered via Ethernet.

The camera connectors are made compatible with OV2640 2Mpix camera and Raspberry Pi Camera.

S3-OLinuXino has LCD connector where LCD-OLinuXino displays can be connected.

WiFi/BT module adds wireless functionality.

Open Source Hardware S3-OLinuXino update – The new board targeting industrial vision applications is now with mainline Linux support

S3-OLinuXino is board we create to may add vision to the PTH components Soldering Robot we are working on for some time.

Revision.B now is a bit different than the first prototype we made. It has these features:

• S3 SOC Cortex-A7 running at 1.2Ghz
• 1Gb DDR3 RAM inside S3 SOC up to 1333Mhz
• MIPI Raspberry Pi camera interface up to 8Mpix camera support
• Parallel CSI camera interface up to 8 Mpix
• Power Management Unit with LiPo battery charger and step-up to allow stand alone battery operation
• 100Mb Ethernet interface with POE support (external optional module)
• SPI, NAND, eMMC external optional module
• LCD connector to connect to LCD-OLinuXino displays with different sizes and resolutions
• LiPo battery connector
• USB-OTG interface
• UEXT connector with SPI, I2C, Serial and power supply
• EXT1 connector for LED PWM lighting
• audio input with microphone
• audio output
• WiFi and BT module with external antenna
• micro SD card connector

We are working to offer Mainline Linux with this board.
Bootlin got sample board and have working MIPI driver.

S3-OLinuXino can take power from USB, LiPo battery or PoE (with optional PoE module).

Different NAND Flash, SPI Flash, eMMC flash options are possible with addon module

The only thing we still didn’t complete is USB-OTG functionality.

Mass production is planned for March 2021.

ESP32 new boards in stock

Espressif never stop to surprise us with new products. Their new ESP32-PICO-D4 IC has build in 4MB SPI Flash and quartz crystal, antenna matching circuit, so this chip requires just 5 external resistors and capacitors to work! If your design has to be small this is the chip for you!

ESP32-PICO-KIT is low cost development board for this new chip and has build in USB serial programmer, antenna and breadboard friendly DIL header connectors at 0.1″ step.

ESP32-CAM is WiFi IP camera with OV2640 2 Mpix sensor it works with internal PCB antenna and needs just 3.3V external power supply to  operate. You also have SD-card connector and GPIOs to which you can connect PIR sensors and other components to control.

There is Arduino support for this board and tons of interesting projects like face recognition, motion detectors with storage of the pictures on the SD card and etc.

Here are few of them:

• ESP32-CAM video streaming and face recognition with Arduino
• ESP32-CAM PIR Motion Detector with Photo Capture (saves to microSD card)
• ESP32-CAM Take Photo and Save to MicroSD Card
• ESP32-CAM Video Streaming Web Server (Home Assistant, Node-RED, etc.)

We also got ESP32-CAM-UFL which is same board but with U.FL connector where you can connect external antennas.

ESP32-CAM-EA is ESP32-CAM with small external WiFi/BT antenna which increased the WiFi coverage.

If you need more coverage we have ESP32-CAM-EAX which has higher gain antenna, but with quite bigger size.

S3-OLinuXino OSHW IP Camera update: board routing complete, next to-do prototype.

S3-OLinuXino is now completely routed and we make prototypes to verify everything is well designed. If the prototypes are OK production will follow in Q1 2020.

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.

Video and Audio Streaming from A20SOM-EVB using crtmpserver

Our A20-SOM-EVB had camera support only in Android for a long time. Now we got e-mail from Ariee Dzig who says:

I created IP Camera using your A20SOM-EVB.
Here you can find the tutorial .

 

We try this tutorial and it works great! Now we prepare new Linux images for A20-SOM-EVB which to include the hardware encoding support for the camera!

A20-SOM 2Mpix 30 fps camera finally works :)

These who follow our blog know that we spent quite lot of time for A20-SOM module. We have it ready since September 2013 but the software support took quite a lot time.

Today the last component – the 2 Mpix 30 fps camera surrendered and works fine.

Here on this video you can see movie captured with A20-SOM camera, Dimitar is happy waveing middle finger to all bugs 🙂

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ix1EZyFxjHQ

So far the camera works only under Android as there is no working linux-sunxi camera support, but this may be fixed soon.

A20-SOM-EVB Camera experiments – it’s alive but still need love to start working correctly

We have fun now with the camera on A20-SOM-EVB, first it was going in standby mode few milliseconds after we enable it, then Dimitar managed to fix this but the allocated memory was too small and the buffers were overflow and freezing the Android, after two days of fun tweaking this or that finally something like picture comes out, you can see above.

Still lot of noise, no focus, and some digital signals mixed in the video stream but at least we see the camera is alive 🙂

There are tons of registers to initialize and hack so to be continued …

Connecting Web Camera to A13-OLinuXino for video streaming

In our previous blog post we setup demo where A13-OLinuXino-WIFI both was running web server with MOD-RGB control and at the same time was streaming video from Web Camera so you can see the result from the MOD-RGB control https://olimex.wordpress.com/2013/02/27/a13-olinuxino-serving-mod-rgb-and-web-cam-for-live-stream/

Here is description how the video streaming was done:

USB video cameras use UVC driver which is not enabled by default in A13-OLinuXino kernel so have to be enabled additionally.

1. Installing UVC

• # git clone https://github.com/linux-sunxi/linux-sunxi.git
• # cd linux-sunxi
• # make ARCH=arm CROSS_COMPILE=arm-linux-gnueabihf- a13_defconfig;make ARCH=arm menuconfig
• select in  Device Drivers -> Multimedia support -> Video capture adapters ->  V4L USB devices -> USB Video Class (UVC) (M)
• # make ARCH=arm CROSS_COMPILE=arm-linux-gnueabihf- -j5 uImage modules
• # make ARCH=arm CROSS_COMPILE=arm-linux-gnueabihf- INSTALL_MOD_PATH=output modules_install
• # cp arch/arm/uImage /<sdcard mount point>/<FAT Partition>/.
• # cp -aRv output/lib/modules/* /<sdcard mount point>/<EXT Partition>/lib/modules/.
• # reboot
• # modprobe uvcvideo

Now you have UVC support in your kernel and can use Web Camera for your Linux apps.

2.  Setup VLC Streaming

• # apt-get install vlc
• # chmod 777 /dev/video*
• # adduser vlc
• # su vlc
• # cvlc v4l2:// :v4l2-vdev=”/dev/video0″ :v4l-adev=”/dev/null” –sout
  ‘#transcode{vcodec=mpg1,vb=1024,vsize=320,hsize=240}:standard{access=http,mux=ogg,dst=:8080}’

last command is actually setting VLC streamer to stream mpg1 video 320×240 pixels at 8080 port, for more details check: http://wiki.videolan.org/