I can often read people hoping for an inexpensive community board for network, storage and connectivity applications with high speed interface like SATA, multiple Gigabit Ethernet port, USB 3.0 and/or mini PCIe, and that’s exactly what Globalscale Technologies is about to offer with their Marvell ARMADA 3700 based ESPRESSOBin development board to go for $39 and up via Kickstarter.
Marvell ESPRESSOBin board specifications:
- SoC – Marvell Armada 3700LP (88F3720) dual core ARM Cortex A53 processor up to 1.2GHz
- System Memory – 512MB DDR3 or optional 1GB DDR3
- Storage – 1x SATA interface, 1x micro SD card slot with footprint for an optional 4GB EMMC
- Network Connectivity
- 1x Topaz Networking Switch
- 2x GbE Ethernet LAN
- 1x Ethernet WAN
- 1x MiniPCIe slot for Wireless/BLE periphereals
- USB – 1x USB 3.0, 1x USB 2.0, 1x micro USB port
- Expansion – 2x 46-pin GPIO headers for accessories and shields with I2C, GPIOs, PWM, UART, SPI, MMC, etc…
- Misc – Reset button, JTAG interface
- Power Supply – 12V DC jack or 5V via micro USB port
- Power Consumption – Less than 1W thermal dissipation at 1 GHz
The board will run mainline Linux & U-boot, and the company will release Ubuntu, ArchLinux ARM, Debian, and OpenWrt firmware, with support for the Yocto Project as well. Some documentation and source code can be found on the Wiki in Github.
Typical applications include NAS, video camera monitor, plex media server, IoT gateway with wireless module and/or dongle with Zigbee, Bluetooth, , Zwave…. The board was first showcased at Computex 2016.
ESPRESSOBin will be launched on Kickstarter in the next few days. Keep in mind that the page is still in draft mode, so information is subject to change, but based on the details currently available, they plan to raise at least $25,000, and a $39 early bird pledge will be asked for the first boards (with 512MB RAM), with the price going up to $49 after (with 1GB RAM). There’s also a model with a wireless module and 12V power supply for $69, and “cluster” rewards with multiple boards. Delivery is scheduled for December 2016 for early bird rewards, and February 2017 for others. If you are interested in the board, and want to make sure you don’t miss out on the early bird pledge, you can register to be notified when the project launched in the KS page.
[Update: ESPRESSOBin board can now be purchased on Amazon or Globalscale Technologies for $49 and up]
Thanks to Ray for the tip.
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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Finally someone turned the cheap Marvell Soho AP and NAS solution into a SBC. NXP is doing the same now with their ARM based networking SoC.
Good to see there are mainline bootloader and kernel support.
@Xiaohai Li
Are you talking about NXP QorIQ LS1023A/LS1043A? I can’t find (or remember) any low cost boards based on those.
@Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)
Or maybe FRDM-LS1012A board ?: http://www.nxp.com/products/microcontrollers-and-processors/arm-processors/qoriq-arm-processors/qoriq-frdm-ls1012a-board:FRDM-LS1012A?&cof=0&am=0&tab=Buy_Parametric_Tab&fromSearch=false
$50 with dual Gigabit Ethernet. No SATA, and only micro USB 2.0/3.0 though.
“…Typical applications include NAS ” ???
NAS with 1 (one) HDD 🙂 lol
may be DLNA ?
hopefully someone cuts two ethernet ports and mpcie to bring the price down to something like 30$
‘Topaz switch with 3xGB ethernet’ sounds not that promising. I thought we would talk about WAN using one SERDES lane to the SoC and the 88E6141 (the 2 LAN ports are behind) another? What’s true?
on the Marvell ARMADA 3700 Block Diagram
i see block ” DMA & RAID 5/6 Acceleration Engines”
ok, where another SATA or SAS 🙂
“Acceleration Engines” with one HDD 🙂 lol
@2mike
USB3.0 with the older Marvell ARMADA 38x (Cortex-A9) is already amazingly fast: 255MB/s means you can attach 3 fast HDDs and still don’t get bottlenecked that much (it’s GbE anyway): http://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic/1925-some-storage-benchmarks-on-sbcs/?p=15265
And you can always turn the mPCIe slot into mSATA and use a mechanical converter to attach a normal SATA disk. There exist also mPCIe cards with 2 SATA ports and so on. This thingie as a NAS baseboard is just great. Also ARMv8 virtualization features available (but with 512MiB not that useful though)
@2mike
This is a development board, it would be easy to use a PCIe based SATA controller to make a NAS out of this. Or you can use a cheap port multiplier.
@tkaiser
It seems like there’s an RGMII interface that’s not part of the SERDES, so maybe they’re using that with a PHY for one port?
I’m curious as to how this is wired, as it doesn’t make sense. The board has more things that what should be possible.
@TLS
You can also turn the mPCIe slot into (m)SATA by defining the SERDES lanes differently (mSATA to SATA requires then just a small mechanical converter). I tested one cheap (and rather crappy/slow) SATA port multiplier with older ARMADA 38x SoC and fortunately it didn’t work (link above — awaits Jean-Luc’s moderation) but I would assume the SoC will support Marvell’s one quality PMs (like 88SM97xx).
@TLS
1x MiniPCIe slot for Wireless/BLE periphereals = not SATA, not storage , only low speed data 🙁
but ok, even if you put there SATA = 2 drive at different speeds is a bad thing, it is not RAID 5/6 anyway 🙂
@2mike Please do a google search for Marvell_88SM97xx_PB-03_product_brief.pdf to get the idea why the SoC has a RAID5/6 hardware engine. I personally would never ever again trust in any hardware RAID implementation unless I have at least one spare part lying aroung (RAID controller being a single point of failure is something people only understand once the controller died and all the data is instantly gone). Also the whole idea of added redundancy gets a bit weird when the host can not rely on RAM contents (no ECC). As already said: With Marvell SoCs you can turn mPCIe into mSATA… Read more »
I think marvell sata usually supports port-multiplier. Also, max 1GB of RAM is too little for a gigabit router.
@Xiaohai Li
That was my take as well. Took ’em long enough. They had credible parts for this for a while.
Performance of ARM based NAS is not as good compared to intel ones. Quad or even dual based cores atom nases smoke this one.
@pug_ster
LOL, sure if you compare with 5 year old 800 MHz single core SoCs. But please don’t tell this my ARMADA A388 based board (and the one we’re talking here about is ‘a bit’ faster)
@Bogolisk
Huh what? Most consumer routers have 256-512MB, in fact, I can’t think of a single ARM based consumer router that has more than 512MB.
Wishful thinking: if the Soc uses 2.5GigE to the onboard switch, then those three GigE ports might be a bit more useful.
Looks alright, but the amount of RAM is a concern. My >2yo Cubietruck has 2GB of RAM (and native GigE + SATA). Why are ARM boards still coming out with 1 GB or less, especially when they’re 64-bit and no longer have the 4 GB limit?
Perfect. Nothing else to say.
@Ian Tester The 2GB of your Cubietruck doesn’t help, the recent Marvell’s are magnitudes faster since ‘made for the job’ (and all their recent ARMv8 variants also support Open Data Plane (ODP) so in best cases the CPU just instructs the special engines to push packets around at maximum speed with minimum CPU utilization). Huge amounts of RAM for what? Sure, caches might be nice for NAS use cases but to be honest: If you use storage that is fast enough there’s no need for large buffers (different with Cubietruck since there the 2GB really help since A20 has a… Read more »
Rewards chart on the draft page shows all reward levels above $39 include 1 GB DDR3!
@TLS
Oops, just looked through ‘marvell_embedded_processors_psg.pdf’. Seems I’ve been wrong and with this SoC mPCIe is really just PCI 2.0 x1 and can not be turned into SATA ‘the usual way’. Let’s hope Globalscale comes up with some clarifications.
Yeah, as @tkaiser pointed out if you have an old ARM NAS (Synology, QNap), It’s probably an ARMv5, which has terrible performance. Even the ARMv6 is bad (Raspberry Pi A/B/A+/B+/Zero). ARMv7’s however are good (which cover most modern SBCs), and these are ARMv8 (potentially great once all the software is upgraded to support 64bit ARM).
For those looking at setting up a ARM based NAS using a SBC like this, this is an interesting option:
http://www.addonics.com/products/ad5hpmreu.php
It’s a 5 port multiplier that supports JBOD, RAID 0,1,3 & 5. It can be accessed through USB 3.0 or eSATA. Reviews on amazon and other places seem pretty positive.
@Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)
Yeah, I only meant the same solution.
And you are right, as the NXP guys themselves said, they were not good at costdown.
what’s the “Topaz Networking Switch”?
@Fan
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You can check the block diagram @
The switch part number is 88E6141. A press release reads “Marvell’s 88E6141 GE switch that supports 2.5 Gigabits per second (Gbps) uplink, and Marvell’s advanced Avastar® Wi-Fi 11AC, Bluetooth and 802.15.4 connectivity solution”.
i don’t see any battery power supply interface, i don’t understand why those custom board designs follow plain basic feature rules.
@tkaiser
how would you rate that cpu in a vpn context, pretty weak i guess ?
@mdel Regarding VPN: Marvell SoCs support CESA (crypto extensions, check status with Turris Omnia — the Turris folks wanted to make the crpyto stuff fully available from OpenWRT/Linux to be used for exactly that: accelerating VPN) and it’s ARMv8 (did not check whether crypto features are available). Anyway: In case all 3 GbE ports are behind the switch for me the only operation mode possible is to use another NIC for WAN access: http://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic/549-banana-pi-r-as-router/?p=15959 A really great idea is to use a cheap H3 board connected to the USB 2.0 port using g_ether module (USB Ethernet gadget) and doing firewall… Read more »
It is so sad that pfSense (FreeBSD based) open source firewall does not support ARMv8/AArch64.
FreeNAS (which also is FreeBSD based) on this could be nice too if not for ARMv8/AArch64.
This hardware could be great for either or of two two as inexpensive firewall or NAS.
Don’t understand why pfSense + FreeNAS doesn’t support ARMv8/AArch64 when FreeBSD do?
Ok, found this
Turns out they’re using the RGMII interface which is connected to the switch, so none of the SERDES lanes are used for the Ethernet on this board and that explains how they managed to get it all working.
@TLS There on Github is the same block diagram available as PDF and also a ‘ESPRESSObin-Quick-Start-Guide-160812A.pdf’. Both interesting or lets better say answering all questions (showing examples with SATA port multiplier, different boot modes/media used and so on). Since both ‘WAN’ and ‘LAN’ ports are behind the Topaz switch I wonder how both are separated (VLANs)? At least this will be the first thing I’ll test when the device arrives next year: Does the switch bridges WAN and LAN ports when the device is bricked (or not already booted) or not. If switch ports are brought up connected on network… Read more »
Hey guys,
this site was the first to release news on this campaign so congrats to the editor. We took some of your feedback in the campaign which just went live. Thanks to the viewers and the article!
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/874883570/marvell-espressobin-board
It would seem that this project intends to lure in people with reasonable pledge amounts required for associated rewards but then exploit pledgers on the shipping costs USD 30 for most countries and even USD 50 for some European countries.
Lots of negative feedback from people about this fee on the “Comments” section of the site, all saying that at these shipping prices (even from the China distribution site to deliver to Hong Kong) they are nor prepared to back the project.
Perhaps the managers of the project should have considered not artificially low pledge amounts and realistic shipping charges.
Hard to reach the people working at the company behind this ESPRESSOBin boards so I will post this as an open letter: Hello makers of the ESPRESSOBin boards! I want to plead to you to please urgently try to make contact with the people behind the pfSense project about adding their support to your Marvell ESPRESSOBin Board If you could donate/gift a bunch of your ESPRESSOBin boards to the pfSense project then they could add their support which would benifit your company a lot too. The owner behind the company that makes pfSense (the worlds most popular open source firewall/router… Read more »
@Harley While I would also love to see FreeBSD on recent Marvell ARMADA SoCs (especially 38x) I fear I have to disagree regarding the use of both pfSense (my favourite firewall!) and FreeNAS (my favourite NAS ‘appliance’ even if have to go own ways for share configuration) on the ESPRESSOBin. In my eyes for pfSense separate NICs are mandatory. On the ESPRESSOBin all 3 GbE ports are connected to the Topaz switch which is connected upstream to the SoC with 2.5GbE. The most important question is whether the switch brings up its ports interconnected at layer 2 before or after… Read more »
@Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)
These are not publicly documented yet. That’s going to be a problem long-term.
See https://www.kernel.org/doc/readme/Documentation-arm-Marvell-README for the known, documented Marvell chips.
The international shipping costs are now a flat $23
globalscaletechnologies please fix your crappy slow ASPX shopping cart!
You can’t even change shipping addresses.
Too bad we have to pay ~ 50% of the product price to shipping. Total seems likẽ $75 delivered Europe.
Maybe it’s better to go together and buy multiple? Armbian devs should get couple of these donated IMO.
@Fossxplorer Now the 1GB variant is available for pre-order on Amazon (US) so I hope GlobalScale and Amazon negotiate something so that it will be available to the rest of the world too soon for a similar price ($50). On the software side everything progresses nicely: forum.armbian.com/index.php?/topic/4089-chosen_kernel-vs-resulting-kernel-package-deb-name-mismatch/&do=findComment&comment=30116 So it’s just a few days until we can also generate an automated OpenMediaVault build for ESPRESSOBin since I added the necessary steps in a generic way to Armbian’s build system within the last weeks which means as soon as Armbian supports a new board, a few minutes later there’s also an OMV… Read more »
Are there any european distributors for espressobin?
tkaiser : Regarding VPN: Marvell SoCs support CESA (crypto extensions, check status with Turris Omnia — the Turris folks wanted to make the crpyto stuff fully available from OpenWRT/Linux to be used for exactly that: accelerating VPN) and it’s ARMv8 (did not check whether crypto features are available). i was taking a new look at this board and unfortunately i can’t find any mention of cesa in Marvel 3700 docs. Also no sign of cesa or crypto in the dts files so i guess i should assume the hardware block is simply ignored at the moment ? http://elixir.free-electrons.com/linux/latest/source/arch/arm64/boot/dts/marvell/armada-37xx.dtsi Not sure… Read more »
@tkaiser
Did you ever test this to see whether the ports are bridged on bootup?
FWIW, the Topaz switch DOES apparently boot up with bridged ports, according to https://archlinuxarm.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=65&t=12325
@RoganDawes
If I follow the 1st link from the Archlinux thread you referenced I understand it’s the opposite and behaviour depends on u-boot version/config used. The switch comes up with forwarding disabled and u-boot and/or kernel later on can change this behaviour.