NXP i.MX Category - Page 39 of 70 - CNX Software

August 25, 2017October 30, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 12 Comments

Purism Librem 5 Open Source Linux Smartphone Focuses on Privacy (Crowdfunding)

Purism is computer manufacturer founded in 2014 whose mission is to “provide the highest quality hardware available, ensuring the rights of security, privacy, and freedom for all users”, and so far, they’ve delivered several Intel Core i5/i7 laptops running their PureOS Linux distribution based on Debian with an emphasis on privacy protection. The company has now launched a crowdfunding campaign on their own website to develop and manufacture Librem 5 Linux smartphone with the same philosophy. The phone will use open source software even for the GPU, so the company currently selected i.MX6 for the project since they can use etnaviv open source driver for the Vivante GPU, but they hope to switch to the more powerful i.MX8 processor for the final design, which explains why the hardware specifications are not set in stones yet: SoC- NXP i.MX6/i.MX8 CPU with Vivante GPU System Memory – 3GB LPDDR3 Storage – 32GB […]

August 17, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments

NutsBoard Pistachio 3.5″ Embedded SBC is Powered by NXP i.MX 6Dual/Quad Processor

I don’t write about i.MX6 solutions much anymore, since there are so many options available on the market, but Pistachio SBC has been designed by a company I had never heard of before: NutsBoard, and they’ve released documentation and software publicly, which does not always happen in the industrial/embedded space. Pistachio single board computer specifications: SoC – NXP ARM Cortex-A9 IMX6 Quad/Dual @ 800MHz System Memory – Up to 2GB LPDDR3 Storage – 4GB eMMC flash, 1x SATA interface, 1x micro SD card slot Display I/F / Video Output 2x LVDS (6 or 8 bit) 1x 24-bit VGA output 1x HDMI port up to 1920×1080 (FHD) 1x I2C AR1021 touch controller Audio – SGTL5000 audio codec with class D amplifier; 1x audio header for speaker and microphone Connectivity – Gigabit Ethernet (Qualcomm AR8035), industrial grade wireless module (Jorjin WG7833) with dual band WiFi 802.11 a/b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.2 USB – 4x […]

August 17, 2017November 25, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 4 Comments

NXP i.MX RT Series Crossover Embedded Processor is Based on an ARM Cortex-M7 Core @ 600 MHz

Microcontrollers (MCUs) provide real-time processing, low power, low cost, and plenty of I/Os, but with security and user interface requirements of recent embedded devices, the processing power may be a limitation, and embedded systems designers may have to use an application processor instead gaining performance, but losing some of the benefits of MCUs. The bridge the gap between performance and usability, NXP has launched i.MX RT series of Crossover Embedded Processor which uses the powerful ARM Cortex-M7 MCU core clocked at up to 600 MHz, a frequency partially made possible by eliminating on-chip flash memory. The first member of the family is NXP i.MX RT1050 with the following key features and specifications: MCU Core – ARM Cortex-M7 @ up to 600 MHz; 3015 CoreMark / 1284 DMIPS Memory – Up to 512KB SRAM/TCM (Tighly Coupled Memory) with response time as low as 20 ns Storage – 96KB RAM; interfaces: NAND, […]

August 15, 2017August 15, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

Aspencore 2017 Embedded Markets Study – Programming Languages, Operating Systems, MCU Vendors, and More

Aspencore media group asked readers of their EE Times and Embedded.com websites to fill out an online survey about their embedded system projects. They got 1,234 respondents mostly from North America (56.3%), followed by Europe (25.2%), and Asia (10.6%). This resulted in a 102-page market study which you can download here. I’ve extracted a few slides to have a look at some of the trends. C language is still the most used language in embedded systems, but other languages like C++, Python and even assembly language are gaining traction. Operating system is more spread with Linux being the most used via Embedded Linux distributions, Debian, and Ubuntu. FreeRTOS comes in second place, while Android registers fourth with 13%. Git has finally supplanted Subversion in 2017, with all other version control software losing ground. Switching to some hardware slides, 44% used a development board to start their embedded design with ST […]

August 10, 2017August 10, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 20 Comments

VoltaStream ZERO NXP i.MX6ULL Linux Audio Board Follows Raspberry Pi Zero Form Factor

Back in 2013. Philip came with the idea of designing a development board for audio application, and after various experiments with off-the shelf Raspberry Pi boards and audio DACs, he founded PolyVection company, and started designing the board. Forwarding to today, he has completed his work and introduced VoltaStream ZERO to the world, a board based on NXP i.MX6ULL processor with 512MB or 1GB RAM, and a choice of Texas Instruments DAC. It also follows Raspberry Pi Zero form factor, like the upcoming Banana Pi BPI-M2 Zero board. VoltaStream ZERO specifications: SoC – NXP i.MX6ULL ARM Cortex-A7 processor @ 996 MHz System Memory – 512 MB or 1 GB DDR3 Storage – micro SD card slot Audio 1x I2S for integrated DAC, 1x I2S for GPIO access, 1x S/PDIF header / TOSLINK jack Analog DAC – Texas Instruments PCM5121 (106 dB) or PCM5142 (112 dB) USB – 1x micro USB […]

July 24, 2017November 21, 2018 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 5 Comments

Variscite DART-6UL SoM, an Alternative to Intel Edison Module

Intel recently announced it will discontinue manufacturing and selling all SKUs of the Intel® Edison compute modules and developer kits. The initial version of Edison was released in the beginning of 2014, with a second version being released by the end of 2014. It was intended for the IoT market, with dimensions of 35.5x25x3.9mm. The Edison features an Intel Atom processor, consisting of two Atom Silvermont cores running at 500MHz. It includes a fixed configuration of 1GB integrated RAM, and 4GB eMMC flash on-board. Dual-band (2.4GHz and 5GHz) Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0 and USB controllers complete the package. According to Intel’s announcement, the last shipment of Edison family boards is planned for December 2017. This announcement will have a critical impact on companies that already integrated the Edison board in their products, as well as the many companies that engaged in the development process of integrating the Edison board into their products. While some of these companies are rushing to place […]

July 3, 2017June 18, 2018 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 6 Comments

Linux 4.12 Release – Main Changes, ARM & MIPS Architectures

Linus Torvalds has just released Linux 4.12: Things were quite calm this week, so I really didn’t have any real reason to delay the 4.12 release. As mentioned over the various rc announcements, 4.12 is one of the bigger releases historically, and I think only 4.9 ends up having had more commits. And 4.9 was big at least partly because Greg announced it was an LTS kernel. But 4.12 is just plain big. There’s also nothing particularly odd going on in the tree – it’s all just normal development, just more of it that usual. The shortlog below is obviously just the minor changes since rc7 – the whole 4.12 shortlog is much too large to post. In the diff department, 4.12 is also very big, although the reason there isn’t just that there’s a lot of development, we have the added bulk of a lot of new header files […]

June 13, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments

Android Can Now Boot with a Full Open Source Graphics Stack on NXP i.MX6 Boards

While the Android operating systems is itself open source, it still relies on proprietary binary files to leverage GPU acceleration, VPU hardware decoding, wireless connectivity, and so on. It’s been possible to run Android with an open source software graphics stack, but it’s normally terribly slow and barely usable. But Collabora has announced it could now boot Android with a full-graphics stack on iMX6 platforms using no proprietary blobs at all. To do so, they leveraged the work done on Etnaviv open source drivers for Vivante GPUs, and adding the different formats used for graphical buffers in Android and Mesa library using modifiers representing different properties of buffers. They further explain: Support was added in two places; Mesa and gbm_gralloc. Mesa has had support added to many of the buffer allocation functions and to GBM (which is the API provided by Mesa, that gbm_gralloc uses). gbm_gralloc in turn had support […]