- As of December 2022 Semiconductor shortage has led to various companies searching for alternate options that are in stock or have longer term availability. One such example is the availability of Raspberry Pi, Toradex older versions, etc.
- MyIrtech has an extensive portfolio of such equivalents. https://www.myirtech.com/
- There was a need to support a client who needed a browser preferably chrome and apache and php.
- One requirement was to support serial port via PHP modules, needing the not actively maintained DIO module
- Why anybody would use serial port via apache definitely weird, but maybe the customer only had that as the default skill
- An NXP imx8 SBC MYS-8MMX was found to be suitable wrt the application needs.
- Its an imx8 quad 1.8G cores and also a single 400 MHz microcontroller.
- 2GB DDR4 and 8GB emmc, with USB Host, NVME, gig E, WIFI/BT, MIPI CSI, LVDS/HDMI output, etc
- All for a cost of 100 USD. And with a 7 inch display would work out to say 20k INR
- It has support for Yocto and Ubuntu.
Yocto
- The default environment provided was the one with the Yocto build system.
- As this was the first time Yocto was used, there was no awareness of the time taken for the build.
- On a Core i5 machine 4GB, the first build of the entire tarball took some 30 hours 😊
- One has to add recipes to compile in various programs. And everything is compiled from scratch. So addition of Chrome, apache etc took another 10 hours. This was by far the most I have spent time on compilation.
- It has good support for all the devices and also QT is supported out of the box. So in case custom app development is needed QT support etc can be readily used.
- Below is a pic of the QT interface running on the machine.
Ubuntu
- As development on Yocto is time consuming, it was then migrated to Ubuntu 18 provided by myirtech themselves.
- The DIO modules etc quickly added thanks to the package management utilities.
- Only the device drivers need to be customised.
- This board uses the Lontium LT8912 LVDS/HDMI bridge. The requirement was to support 800x480 resolution but the driver would only go down to 1024x800.
- The device configuration was also changed to add both the display and the serial ports.
- As the resolution requirement was not satisfied further development was not attempted.
- Dual displays 5 and 7 inch working parallely on this board
SBC
- This SBC has a good software ecosystem along with ML frameworks/CV etc all built into.
- To be attempted at a later date.
