Khadas VIM3 & VIM3L SBC’s become Android reference boards

If you need to work on the very latest development version of Android or AOSP, you can either get one of the supported phones such as Google Pixel 5,  one of the reference boards for Android which should be better for development and also fairly cheaper.

We previously reported about Hikey, Hikey960, and DragonBoard 845c single board computers being part of the short list of reference boards for the Android Open-Source Project (AOSP), but Amlogic powered Khadas VIM3 and VIM3L have recently been added to the official devices page which makes them the first AOSP reference boards with a dedicated NPU / AI accelerator.

As a quick reminder, Khadas VIM3 is the most powerful board with an Amlogic A311D hexa-core Cortex-A73/A53 processor with up to 4GB RAM and 32GB flash, and Khadas VIM3L is the light version with an Amlogic S905D3 quad-core Cortex-A55 processor with 2GB RAM and 16GB flash.

Since both are now Android reference board, developers can get the source code directly from AOSP project’s git repository to build an image with the bleeding edge version of Android:

• Get the source code:
  
  Shell

  repo init -u https://android.googlesource.com/platform/manifest -b master repo sync -j8

  1 2	repo init -u https://android.googlesource.com/platform/manifest -b master repo sync -j8

• Prepare the build:
  
  Shell

  . ./build/envsetup.sh lunch yukawa-userdebug

  1 2	. ./build/envsetup.sh lunch yukawa-userdebug

• and build the image for Khadas VIM3
  
  Shell

  make TARGET_VIM3=true -j24

  1	make TARGET_VIM3=true -j24

• or Khadas VIM3L
  
  Shell

  make TARGET_VIM3L=true -j24

  1	make TARGET_VIM3L=true -j24

Then you’ll be able to flash the image to the board using fastboot.

The AOSP website only gives the basic information for building the Android image, the Linux kernel, and flashing it to the SBC, so if you need more details you should still head over to Khadas’ Wiki. [Update: It was brought to your attention that BayLibre was involved in making this happen in close partnership with both Khadas & Google]

Khadas VIM3 and VIM3L can be purchased on Aliexpress with the price starting at $62.99.

Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)

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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