Actions Technology is a subsidiary of Actions Semiconductor SoC vendor, that makes solutions based on Actions Semi SoCs, and recently joined Linaro. The company is said to focus on “focuses on solutions for smart handheld and smart home devices. Its main products are tablet, over-the-Top (“OTT”) set-top boxes and Bluetooth enabled boombox solutions, along with total product and technology solutions based on the Android platform”. We already know it will soon release a 96Boards compliant board, but in the meantime, the company has officially launched Actduino S500 development board powered by a new S500 quad core Cortex A9 processor.
I actually found out about this board on ARMDevices.net last October, and sent an email asking for information to the company, but I have not received an email yet after 6 months… At the time, the processor was called ATM7059, but now it’s S500, and it’s unclear if they just renamed the processor, or there are significant differences between the two. Nevertheless, we now have some more details about the hardware:
- SoC – Actions Semi S500 (ATM7059?) quad core Cortex-A9 processor with 512KB L2 Cache and a PowerVR SGX544 GPU with OpenGL ES 1.1/2.0, and OpenVG 1.0.1 support
- Memory – Up to 2GB DDR3 RAM
- Storage – Maybe internal flash (eMMC 4.5 or NAND) + micro SD slot
- Video Output – HDMI 1.4b compliant with HDCP 2.1 and 2.0, LCD interface
- Audio – HDMI, Headphone jack, built-in microphone
- Video Codec – H.265 (HEVC) and Ultra HD (4K*2K) video playback. Encoding up to 1080p@60fps.
- Connectivity – 10/100M Ethernet, WiFi and Bluetooth
- USB – 2x USB 2.0 host ports, 1x USB 3.0 port
- Camera – MIPI CSI interface
- Expansion Header
- 1x 8-pin header for PWM and more UART
- 2x 10-pin header with access to I2S, ADC, UART, SPI, and I2C.
- Misc – 5x user keys, IR receiver, power switch
- Power Supply – ACT260X PMIC and Audio codec chip
- Dimensions – N/A
The board and SoC are said to support Android 5.0 Lollipop, Ubuntu 12.04, and Linux 3.10. The company claims “hardware reference design schematic and board layout diagram supplemented by abundant tools, documents, and other necessary resources”, but these are nowhere to be found. The board specifications above had to be derived from the pictures and S500 features, since that’s all they listed on ActDuino S500 product page. I’m not quite sure they understand what “open source” means at all, despite using the string “open source” ten times in their press release.
Pricing and availability of ActDuino S500 board have not been revealed.
Via LinuxGizmos
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.
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GPIOs?
I’ve never seen a physical power switch on a development board before. Bravo.
I have a leaked (early) SDK of this. Unless something changes (not likely) they aren’t releasing full source code and rely on linking prebuilt binaries. I am so sick of GPL violators. We should either start suing them, or stop supporting them.
@bmourit
Money always wins.
Dinosaurs want to keep their sandbox… They can keep it.
Really ? power switch ? Come on , It’s a development board not a refrigerator 🙂 🙂
Power switch? First of all, a jumper would be if necessary much more useful (allowing to connect an external switch). Second, why the hell did you put the switch in that position? At least put it with 90° rotation! Third: the 2 USB ports are higher than the switch, so it becomes even more useless! 🙁