At any time preferred to run Linux in an extremely modest footprint? Then [Reimu NotMoe] from [SudoMaker] has anything for you! She’s located an unbelievably little Linux-in a position chip in BGA, and intended a self-contained little SoM (Procedure on Module) breakout with electric power administration and castellated pads. This breakout contains everything you have to have to have Linux in a 16x16x2mm footprint. For the reference, a 16mm sq. is the sizing of the CPU on a Raspberry Pi.
This board is not just little, it’s also well-thought-out, aiding you place the BGA-packaged Ingenic X1501 any where with nominal energy. With castellated pads, it is easy to hand-solder this SoM for progress and reflow for output. An onboard switching regulator performs from 6V down to as low as 3V, generating this a feasible battery-run Linux selection. It can even give you up to 3.3V/1A for all your exterior equipment.
The coolest section still – the X1501 is incredibly helpful and NDA-cost-free. The datasheets are up for grabs, there are no “CONFIDENTIAL” watermarks – you get a right 730-webpage PDF. Many thanks to this openness, the X1501 can run mainline Linux with minimum variations, with most of the peripherals previously supported. In addition, there’s Efuse-primarily based Secure Boot if your program desires to be secured from cloning.
Far more following the break…
We have witnessed Ingenic-built chips convey Linux to a slew of low-priced items, from game consoles to compact hackable security cameras. If you’re fatigued of your MCU giving you headaches, perhaps you’d like to advantage from all the interfaces, libraries, languages, and frameworks that Linux delivers. This SoM is a wonderful stepping stone for simplicity of advancement.
You get a 1GHz MIPS32r2 main, with a spare 300MHz core for all your genuine-time responsibilities 2MB of inside flash fits Uboot and a Linux kernel with a great deal of space to spare. You can hook up a MicroSD card for troves more storage. You also get all the interfaces like USB, SPI, I2C, and SDIO, as properly as analog and electronic audio help. There is a little bit of a DMA hiccup, but almost nothing that cannot be solved with a bit of time and help from a local community.
Talking of a local community – [Reimu] suggests she’s pitched this board for CrowdSupply, so be on the lookout. If anyone’s interested in serving to polish the kernel quirks, a number of developer-aimed units are on the desk for positive! Immediately after the crowdfunding completes, all the layout information will be open up-sourced – in any other case, this sort of a board would be trivial for other folks to clone. If you’d like some awesome project thoughts for this sort of a module – how about a little Linux-powered cell telephone? This a single has an Ingenic X1000 inside of.
Would you like to know how these kinds of boards are produced? We’ve seen an impressive generate-up about taming smaller ARM chips with custom made PCBs and Linux!
Obtained USB host mode doing the job on the #X1501 Pico. Patches coming in Linux kernel v5.19. pic.twitter.com/QILjcZ4PfV
— ReimuNotMoe (@ReimuNotMoe) May 30, 2022
