System-On-Module

[Bernd Walter]

On Wed, Jan 28, 2015 at 05:36:00PM -0700, Ian Lepore wrote:
> On Thu, 2015-01-29 at 09:12 +0900, Lundberg, Johannes wrote:
> > Ah now I see it has EDM connection. I didn't look carefully enough. All the
> > images are with the expansion board attached..
> > 
> > Spec-wise and portability-wise it seems like a good option but my hardware
> > guy keeps warning me about Freescale that they often have hardware bugs and
> > rather than fixing the bugs they pretend they are not there.. In other
> > words, Freescale is good for software developers because of open
> > documentation but not so for hardware manufactures. Any experiences with
> > this?
> 
> The imx6 manuals include an errata list, so it would be good to check
> that for anything specific that would matter to your projects.

If you use a prebuild module then you don't get much in touch with
the freescale chip fropm the hardware side.
On the other hand, there are countless iMX6 boards out there with
schematics online.
My recently bought Novena even came with printed schematics and they
open sourced the HW design files as well.
I don't think there are hidden surprises on the hardware side.

> For the devices we use in our products everything is good so far with
> the hardware.  That's emmc, sdcard, ethernet, i2c, uarts, usb, and lots
> of gpio (inputs and outputs).  The ethernet is gigabit but has a known
> limitation of 40MB/s due to the bus it's connected to in the chip.  (But
> hey, it's documented so it's not a problem, right? :)
> 
> You mentioned video, and we don't have that working on freebsd imx6 yet,
> but there's not a ton of work to do.  There's a framebuffer driver for
> imx5 and it has pretty much the same framebuffer hardware.  Getting
> video output to a TTL LCD is probably just hours of work.  Getting it to
> an LVDS LCD or HDMI probably needs days of work (entire drivers written,
> potentially, I haven't looked into it).

Sounds interesting for my Novena.
The one I already got are board only (with some FPGA breakout, ...).
They have HDMI though.
But I'm also awaiting for the one with case and LCD panel.
Not to forget that I have a fairy EDM carrier with LCD already.
That said I'v always wondered how much work is it to get the camera
interface running, since the Hummingboards can connect to the RPi
camera modules.

> Some audio support was recently committed, but I don't know much about
> it yet.
> 
> -- Ian
> 
> 

-- 
B.Walter <bernd at bwct.de> http://www.bwct.de
Modbus/TCP Ethernet I/O Baugruppen, ARM basierte FreeBSD Rechner uvm.