Open Source Hardware STMP1-OLinuXino-LIME2 industrial grade Linux computer update – Debian Buster and Ubuntu Focal with mainline Kernel 5.10.12 now supports almost everything

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STMP1-OLinuXino-LIME2 Industrial grade Linux Computer project took us almost an year of work to build proper software support for our hardware with mainline uboot and kernel.

ST demo board uses Yocto with kernel 5.4, our images use Linux Kernel 5.10.12

These who monitor our Official images at https://images.olimex.com probably nottice that we already have images with Debian Buster and Ubuntu Focal for STM32MP1 where almost everything now work with mainline Linux Kernel 5.10.12.

• We had lot of troubles around the Ethernet, but now it works pretty well!

• CAN-FD – works!

• Two USB High speed hosts with 1A current – works!

• LCD – works

• HDMI – works!

• eMMC Flash boot – works!

• PMU and LiPo charger battery support – works

Two things on this board left not complete:

• low power modes
• USB-OTG

New prototypes rev.B now are in production, the Chinese New Year will delay them to end of February. We hope meantime to solve these two last issues and run production.

UPDATE: As some people wanted to know what was the Ethernet issue we were struggling so long, I posted in the comment section.

For the USB-OTG my guess is that it’s also some silly issue so people may help:

STM32MP1 has two High speed USB hosts and one Full speed USB-OTG, here is snip from their Hardware development document:

Here is our schematic which follows above guide:

The two High Speed USB hosts work as expected, but the USB-OTG has issue summarized here: https://pastebin.com/i6G90kdg

What makes us a little bit suspicious is that STM in their own demo board didn’t follow their Hardware Guide and were wiring one of their High speed USB as OTG and connecting USB hub to the other, ignoring the Full speed USB at all.

The Open Source Hardware OLinuXino boards are with new Linux Kernel 5.6 scripts to move Linux OS to eMMC or SATA are included

We are pleased to announce that now the images at http://images.olimex.com/release/ are with the lates Linux Kernel 5.6

All these are build with our Olimage script.

We still keep Ubuntu Bionic 18.04 LTS distribution and didn’t move to 20.04 LTS yet.

To addition for script which set boot from eMMC we add new one which allow you to boot from SATA.

The boot from eMMC and SATA is enabled for OLinuXino boards which has SPI Flash on them like:

• A20-OLinuXino-LIME-e16Gs16M
• A20-OLinuXino-LIME-e4Gs16M
• A20-OLinuXino-LIME-s16M
• T2-OLinuXino-LIME-e8Gs16M-IND
• T2-OLinuXino-LIME-s16M-IND
• A20-OLinuXino-LIME2-e16Gs16M
• A20-OLinuXino-LIME2-e4Gs16M
• A20-OLinuXino-LIME2-s16M
• T2-OLinuXino-LIME2-e8Gs16M-IND
• T2-OLinuXino-LIME2-s16M-IND
• A20-OLinuXino-MICRO-e16Gs16M
• A20-OLinuXino-MICRO-e4Gs16M
• A20-OLinuXino-MICRO-s16M
• T2-OLinuXino-MICRO-e8Gs16M-IND
• T2-OLinuXino-MICRO-s16M-IND
• A20-SOM-e16Gs16M
• T2-SOM-e8Gs16M-IND
• A20-SOM204-1Gs16Me16G-MC
• T2-SOM204-1Gs16Me4G-C-I
• T2-SOM204-1Gs16Me8G-MC-I

To make board booting from eMMC you have to boot from SD-card then execute:

$ sudo olinuxino-sd-to-emmc

then wait until script moves the OS to eMMC, remove the SD-card and reboot.

Similar if you want to make board boot from SATA you have to boot from SD-card then execute:

$ sudo olinuxino-sd-to-sata

Olimage – Mainline Linux images building script for all of our OLinuXino and SOM boards

We work for more than 6 month on our own Linux building script and now we are ready with it’s initial release, which is now on GitHub .

• olimage – the building script
• olinuxino-overlays , arm-trusted-firmware-olinuxino , olinuxino-rtk-hciattach , teres1-ledctrl  used for building the debian repositories at Olimex
• u-boot-olinuxino uboot
• linux-olimex linux kernel
• olinuxino-tools scripts to select LCDs and overlays, copy to flash from sd, image resize etc.

Why do we need it? The number of our boards with all variant hit over 70 pcs when you add to them the different LCD combinations and other peripherials the support and test of these images became little hell. Our latest Armbian based image was released 3-4 months ago as we didn’t manage to properly test all board features in the newer images.

So we first made universal images for all our groups of boards (based on the SOC used) and EEPROM where we store info so uboot and kernel to may recognize the board and configure properly the parameters at boot time.

Then we decided to make one-for-all build script which will automatically build images with recent kernel and uboot automatically.

We had to leave Armbian as we wanted things to be more under our control and decision. Also we wanted everything to be 100% tested when released. Armbian official builds are not tested at hardware level other than to see board boots, so many boards are with peripheral conflicts and we had to apply our patched on Armbian anyway to adjust the images for our boards.

Our official images now are at http://images.olimex.com.

There is release folder where we have minimal and basic images for Debian and Ubuntu and testing folder where new uboot and kernel images will be built and kept until properly tested. For instance Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and kernel 5.6 images will be put there in the next couple of weeks.

The Olimage script and repositories are developed in our internal Gitlab and will be only push to Github when everything is properly tested and images moved to release folder. Also we push all our patches upstream.

With the current kernel and uboot users can easily generate any Linux distribution as it’s matter of building rootfs.

Moving to the next release would be possible simple by

sudo apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade

then re-boot of the board, so when we release new images all you have to do is to run the above commands and you will have the latest images.

For the moments the builder has A10, A13, A20, A64.

iMX233 and RK3188 SOCs are obsolete and not produced anymore by Rockchip and NXP, so they will be not included in the script. We still produce and sell these boards, but they will be discontinued when we use our existing SOC stock.

AM3352-SOM and AM3359-SOM will be included in the script, but we have no fixed date when, as we have to put earlier S3-OLinuXino and STMP1-OLinuXino-LIME2 which are with higher priority.

Open Source Hardware LIME2-SERVER user manual is uploaded and explains how to assembly and how to install Linux images of popular projects

LIME2-SERVER is Linux server with only 2W consumption, A20-OLinuXino-LIME2 and option for HDD or SSD.

The server has bild-in LiPo battery which allow it to run for hours without external power supply, Gigabit Ethernet connection and power adapter 5V 2A.

Today we uploaded on GitHub the initial version of the user manual which explains how to assembly the boxes in case you didn’t bought it assembled.

Also basic instructions to use Ubuntu Bionic and Debian Buster images we provide.

KODI and NextCloud installation.

Additional info how to build and install Home Assistant, Yunohost, TOR server will be included in the next revision.

New mainline Linux images with Kernel 5.3.8 for A13-OLinuXino and A13-SOM are uploaded

A13-OLinuXino and A13-SOM got new mainline Linux images based on Kernel 5.3.8 on our ftp.

The two distributions we usually release are Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Bionic and Armbian/Debian buster next with build instructions and ready to burn to SD card images.

New Debian 10 Buster images released for A20 and A64 boards and SOMs

We have released Universal A20 and A64 images with Debian 10 Buster.

There are few known issues which we work on:

• Certain types of eMMC memories might start in HS-200 mode instead of SDHS mode. This causes eMMC installation and boot problems.
• HDMI always takes precendence over LCD. This is even if you have enabled a
  display manually (interrupted u-boot and executed “olinuxino monitor set XXX”).
• Boards with 5.x eMMC chips are unable to boot directly from eMMC;
  this is caused by poor eMMC 5.x support in eGON BROM;
  this issue is not related to the Linux image
• The board currently cannot store rootfs on usb driver. The init script
  starts before the usb subsystem initialization.
• If the board has eMMC and SPI, it’s not possible to boot from SPI and rootfs
  on SATA. This is due to the fact that u-boot searches first the eMMC storage
  for boot scripts.
• LCD-OLinuXino-15.6FHD is not fully supported.
• The GT2005 camera module in A20-SOM-EVB and A20-SOM204-EVB is not working.

New release is preparing and will be updated by the end of the month.

 

 

New univeral A20 image released which works with all our A20 boards and auto detect and configure on boot

We are releasing universal A20 Linux image which will boot and work on all our A20 boards:

• A20-OLinuXuno-LIME
• A20-OLinuXino-LIME2
• A20-OLinuXino-MICRO
• A20-SOM
• A20-SOM204

The image is based on Armbian with modifications necessary to support OLinuXino specific features.

There are two image releases – Ubuntu Bionic Desktop image which is the recommended image for beginners or when you want to evaluate the board’s hardware fully – it has good HDMI, audio support and Debian Stretch Server image which contains no binary blobs but is headless and has poor video and audio support.

Currently, our latest Ubuntu Bionic A20 image uses kernel 4.19.10, or to be more specific:

root@olinuxino:~# uname -a
Linux olinuxino 4.19.10-sunxi #5.65 SMP Tue Dec 18 14:19:16 EET 2018 armv7l armv7l armv7l GNU/Linu

Our Armbian Ubuntu Bionic image can be downloaded from FTP or Torrent.

Our Armbian Debian Stretch image can be download from FTP or Torrent.

Username is according to Armbian documentation: root and password: 1234

Since we have a large array of A20 boards and numerous variants there is auto-detection enabled in the image. Information about the model of the board is stored in the EEPROM of each A20 board that had been recently manufactured and this information is used by the new images to load the proper configuration. The EEPROM contents are described here.

The images can be used with boards from early revisions which has no EEPROM or has EEPROM with wrong content after one time set up of the EEPROM during in the first u-boot of the new image. If you have trouble booting interrupt u-boot by pressing space and type “olinuxino”. An example configuration for manually setting the EEPROM of A20-OLinuXino-LIME-e16Gs16MB hardware revision K is given at the end of the post.

The new images have support for both legacy resistive and new capacitive/resistive touch displays with auto detection feature (please bear with us they are not released yet on the web as we test them). The newer versions of the displays has suffix -CTS for capacitive touch screen and -RTS for resistive touch screen and are offered in 5″, 7″ and 10″ size with different resolutions. These displays are automatically detected by boot and drivers properly configured for them. If the LCDs are not detected HDMI output is only enabled and the image can be configured one time at first boot manually as described in this wiki article.

Please note that mainline Kernel now do not support NAND Flash, so if you wish to boot from the flash memory, consider either using the legacy 3.4.xx images which are still available or switch to A20 boards with eMMC. The eMMC boot is supported via armbian-config (nand-sata-install). Due to lack of reliable eMMC 5.X support by Allwonner boot0 and for future compatibility we are adding 16MB SPI flash for all A20 boards with eMMC, this way the board first boots from the SPI then continue to eMMC with properly set configuration. Allwinner Boot0 can’t handle correctly eMMC 5.X and sometime boot sometimes do not boot, as this is binary blob inside SOC there is nothing we can do than to use SPI boot to fix eMMC boot parameters.

Build instructions for the new images can be found here.

An example configuration for manually setting the EEPROM of A20-OLinuXino-LIME-e16GB hardware revision K is given below:

=> olinuxino 
olinuxino - OLinuXino board configurator

Usage:
olinuxino config info - Print current configuration: ID, serial, ram, storage, grade...
olinuxino config list - Print supported boards and their IDs
olinuxino config erase - Erase currently stored configuration
olinuxino config write [id] [revision] [serial] [mac]
arguments:
[id] - Specific board ID
[revision] - Board revision: C, D1, etc...
[serial] - New serial number for the board
[mac] - New MAC address for the board
Format can be:
aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff
FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF
aabbccddeeff
olinuxino monitor list - Print supported video outputs
olinuxino monitor set - Set specific LCD

=> olinuxino config list

Supported boards:
----------------------------------------
A20-OLinuXino-LIME - 7739 
A20-OLinuXino-LIME-n4GB - 7743 
A20-OLinuXino-LIME-n8GB - 8934 
A20-OLinuXino-LIME-s16MB - 9076 
T2-OLinuXino-LIME-IND - 9211 
T2-OLinuXino-LIME-s16MB-IND - 9215 
T2-OLinuXino-LIME-e4GB-IND - 9219 
A20-OLinuXino-LIME2 - 7701 
A20-OLinuXino-LIME2-e4GB - 8340 
A20-OLinuXino-LIME2-e16GB - 9166 
A20-OLinuXino-LIME2-n4GB - 7624 
A20-OLinuXino-LIME2-n8GB - 8910 
A20-OLinuXino-LIME2-s16MB - 8946 
A20-OLinuXino-LIME2-e16Gs16M - 9604 
A20-OLinuXino-LIME2-e4Gs16M - 9613 
T2-OLinuXino-LIME2-IND - 9239 
T2-OLinuXino-LIME2-s16MB-IND - 9247 
T2-OLinuXino-LIME2-e4GB-IND - 9243 
A20-OLinuXino-MICRO - 4614 
A20-OLinuXino-MICRO-e4GB - 8832 
A20-OLinuXino-MICRO-e16GB - 9042 
A20-OLinuXino-MICRO-e4GB-IND - 8661 
A20-OLinuXino-MICRO-IND - 8828 
A20-OLinuXino-MICRO-n4GB - 4615 
A20-OLinuXino-MICRO-n8GB - 8918 
A20-OLinuXino-MICRO-s16MB - 9231 
T2-OLinuXino-MICRO-IND - 9223 
T2-OLinuXino-MICRO-s16MB-IND - 9235 
T2-OLinuXino-MICRO-e4GB-IND - 9227 
A20-SOM-n4GB - 4673 
A20-SOM - 7664 
A20-SOM-IND - 8849 
A20-SOM-n8GB - 8922 
A20-SOM-e16GB - 9155 
A20-SOM-e16GB-IND - 9148 
T2-SOM-IND - 9259 
A20-SOM204-1G - 8991 
A20-SOM204-1Gs16Me16G-MC - 8958

=> olinuxino config write 9166 k

Erasing EEPROM configuration...
Writting EEPROM configuration...
Writting MMC configuration...

=> saveenv

Saving Environment to EXT4... Recovery required
update journal finished
done
OK

=> reset

New Sitara AM3352-SOM-IND with industrial grade components work from -40C up to +85C

Our popular AM3352-SOM module now is available in industrial temperature grade -40+85C under name AM3352-SOM-IND.

MT41K256M16HA-125IT:E memory used is with -40+95C operating temperature.

AM3352BZCZA100 processor used from Texas Instruments  is with -40+105C operating temperature.

AM3352-SOM-IND module can be evaluated with AM3352-SOM-EVB.

Debian Linux distribution is officially distributed, but recent patch add support for AM3352-SOM in Beaglebone kernel

Debian 8 (Jessie) is finally released for OLinuXino boards

Hurray! We finally managed to move from Debian 7  Wheezy to Debian 8 (Jessie)!

The new images use Kernel 3.4.103+ which is rather old, but have all video and graphics accelerations.

The boards that get the update are: A20-OLinuXino-MICRO; A20-OLinuXino-LIME; A20-OLinuXino-LIME2; A20-SOM (and their respective 4GB versions).

Links to the torrent files with the images are already available at the respective wiki articles of the boards.

What took us so long? Have look at our boards there are tons of peripherals and different LCDs, USB dongles, BT etc etc peripherials we had to test one by one to make sure EVERYTHING works, and when we see mistake we have to re-build the images and start from scratch again, this took us weeks. As you can see we still even didn’t do this for A13 and A10 boards we have as the process is really long and bumpy.

What’s new beside the move to the higher version of Debian? We gain some experience, made the images smaller, also now there is OPTION to install the images directly to the NAND Flash!

All you have to do is to run “nandistall” script and wait for the image to transfer from the microSD card to the NAND memory.

To move to the new Debian all you have to do it to download  the archive containing the image via the torrent from the wiki; then to extract the archive and prepare your microSD card with it. Note: the images are about ~2GB of size after extraction, but you can use bigger SD card as well. We decided to prepare the official images with lower user space in order to speed up the download and extraction time and to lower the time it takes to transfer the image to a microSD card. It is recommended to re-size the user space in order to use all space on your microSD. In the root directory execute the resize_sd.sh script as follows:

# ./resize_sd.sh /dev/mmcblk0 2

The build instructions and all required files are published in GitHub.

For more practical advice and basic starting point for the new image refer to this document.

Note that it is completely fine to continue using the previous Debian 7 (Wheezy) images if you don’t have some particular reason to switch to Debian 8.

Looking forward to your comments and feedback about the new images.

A10, A20 OLinuXino LIME and LIME2 are officially supported in Debian 8.0 Jessie

 

Debian 8.0 Jessie now supports many Allwinner boards including A10-OLinuXino-LIME, A20-OLinuXino-MICRO, A20-OLinuXino-LIME and A20-OLinuXino-LIME2!

more info you can find on https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Allwinner

 

Another interesting article for using mainline Linux uboot and kernel you can read here