And yet another AllWinner A20 development platform shows up in my news stream in about 24 hours. Merrii Technology, a Shenzhen based electronics design house, has showed off their Hummingbird Development Kit to ARMDevices.net. The development board comes with 1GB RAM, 4GB NAND Flash, Gigabit Ethernet, SATA, HDMI output, and more. There’s also an optional 7″ capacitive touch screen display for the board. The company explains the kit can be used to develop application such as media players, game consoles, IPTV, automotive products (GPS & IVI), robots, servers, surveillance products, and home automation systems.
Here are the board specifications:
- SoC – AllWinner A20 dual ARM Cortex-A7 core @ 1 GHz with ARM Mali400-MP2 GPU
- System Memory – 1GB DDR3 (2x 4Gb 16bits DDR3)
- Storage – 4GB MLC 64bit ECC NAND Flash (Hynix H27UBG8T2A), SATA II connectors, and micro SD card slot (Up to 32GB)
- Connectivity – Wifi & Bluetooth (two-in-one module), 10/100/1000M Ethernet (Realtek RTL8201CP)
- USB – 1x USB 2.0 OTG, 2x USB 2.0 Host
- Video I/O – HDMI out, CVBS out, and YPbPr input. Display connector for LVDS and RGB displays. VGA is apparently available via the expansion headers.
- Touch Panel – Support quad-line resistive touch screen and capacitive touch screen with TWI interface
- Audio I/O – Headphone jack, Line-in
- Expansion – 2x 50-pin headers at the back of the board. For detailed pin assignments, please refer to the board product brief.
- Debugging – UART connector
- Misc – Reset and power on keys, IR sensor
- Power – 5V/2A DC. PMIC: AXP209. Battery slot (for RTC?)
- Dimensions – 105 x 70 mm
Although Merrii Technology is supposed to be a design house, the PCB design seem to have been outsourced to WITS as the marking at the center bottom part of the PCB implies. It’s also possible the two companies have the same owner(s), and WITS / Merrii products are jointly promoted.
The company provides support for Android 4.2, and Linux 3.4 (sunxi). They can also provide a graphical interface based on Qt for Linux. Hummingbird Android SDK is available publicly, and support and Linux images will be available via the company’s BBS.
Charbax video starts with an introduction of the Hummingbird development system, followed by a visit of the company mostly with hardware, software development, and SW QA departments. At the end of the video, they also show WITS A31 development platform ($1300), as well as several AllWinner core boards.
Hummingbird development system is available now for 299 CNY (~$50) for the board only, and 499 CNY (~$82) with the 7″ touchscreen display (800×600). At least that’s the price shown on Merrii’s Hummingbird page, as the company has also setup an Aliexpress store where these are sold for respectively $80 and $108 sometimes including shipping, sometimes excluding shipping. The board is said to come with a power adapter,a USB cable, and a SATA Cable.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
Support CNX Software! Donate via cryptocurrencies, become a Patron on Patreon, or purchase goods on Amazon or Aliexpress
Processor? Title says A20, detailed specs say A10
@alfon
Sorry, my mistake. It’s A20 indeed. I’ve corrected the specs.
1000M Ethernet with 100M PHY chip, impressive
>YPbPr input.
im sure there are drivers for it …
>dual-core ARM Cortex-A7 CPU structure, including all the characteristic of Cortex-A15
what???
>Hummingbird Android SDK is available publicly
lol sure, if you consider .doc file and SDK
This is the level of support they provide:
http://www.merrii.com/download.asp
http://www.merrii.com/downFile/20138298328298.doc
404
another shitty 3 students dev house from china with no clue and no documentation 🙁
btw you can tell they are technically minded people by the way they rar their pdf files to save that 0.05% file size (im not joking). This + the way they lik about spec and provide no documentation or code means they are another fly by night nobodies.
@rasz_pl
Lol, I should have clicked on the SDK download link, but I thought it would be another 250 MB or so download with basically the same SDK as others.
“another shitty 3 students dev house from china with no clue and no documentation”. I can’t agree with the beginning of the sentence, as they must have around 50 people in the company, but the end looks to be pretty correct.
@rasz_pl Don’t agree. Merri is actually another company of Wits-tech, wits-tech is definitely one of the best design house of allwinner. Wits-tech made the “official” allwinner dev kits.
@Tom Cubie
one of the best design houses for allwinner means nothing when Allwinner delivers reference designs, and all they do is move few components around in pirated Mentor expedition.
@cnxsoft
You can only see 20 something faces on the clip. A lot of them, but still pretty much kids.
Im sure they support those boards on the domestic market, they looked like designed for educational sector.
Last time I looked for chip specs I stumbled into Chinese students having ALL the datasheets and source code you could ever want while same manufacturer (Samsung in that case) didnt even bother to fully satisfy GPL, not to mention full documentation.
Basically it looks like a political/economical move. Enable Chinese to all the knowledge you can get your hands on, but at the same time limit westerners. This way you secure your place as the only source of cheap and quick designs (third rate quality due to lack of collaboration).
Ill change my mind as soon as Allwinner or Rockchip joins Linaro instead of just taking GPL stuff, heavily modding, and closing it down.
@Tom Cubie
btw real Tom Cubie?
How is TV-input on Cubieboards? any drivers? How is h.264? any drivers? Still no real documentation? Yeah thought so.
@rasz_pl
Most probably Chinese students get all the datasheets and source code, although these are probably released under NDA, because there’s very little IP protection in China. Once I had just a Chinese customer ask for the doc and SDK we paid for. Everything is just an FTP server away, or can be found on sites like http://www.pudn.com/.
Chinese silicon manufacturers have always been terrible. For cost reasons, we had to switch from Renesas to Holtek MCUs, and the documentation from Holtek was just terrible. This was about 10 years ago, maybe they have improved since then, but I’m not very hopefully. In the case of AllWinner, one reason they don’t have very good documentation is that many of their customers probably take the reference design, do some minor modifications, and use the default Android image. For customers that customize a bit more, and need support in China, they probably just send the FAEs.
@cnxsoft This is the so called “turnkey” solution.
@Tom Cubie
so why even pretend this is targeted at hobbyists?
Hi,
don’t by this product, all the link is broken for download,
and no support , no drivers !
i bough merrii a20 board and could not able get any answer from them on hdmi linux setup. they dont even bother replying mails !!!!
total crap. tried Cubietruck with success but bought this one for price difference. testing another board from marsboard.
quality never comes cheap guys!!!!
HI i am from india …i want a board which can play 1080p very good and run other options.
I dont have any idem about the boards..so can you suggest me?
@Niharendu Barman
If you just want to play 1080p (H.264), then just go with the Raspberry Pi board. Your requirements are not really specific, so it’s difficult to select the right board.