Does anyone have a feature-for-feature comparison of pico-SAM9G45 vs mini2440 ?

[bdutta]

Hi,

From a quick review and mental recollection of feature of pico-SAM9G45
("pico" for short) vs mini2440, here's what I believe are the
differences in terms of features:

1. No on-board Flash memory on pico. This means that we always used
microSD as the root filesystem and to store the bootloader.

2. No I2S headers, and no audio in/out points on pico. Mini2440 has
audio in/out and I2S.

3. No onboard CMOS camera support on pico. Mini2440 has CMOS camera
support on-board.

4. Pico has 256MB DDR2 RAM, compared to 64MB SDRAM on mini2440. IMHO,
this can have significant performance impact (positive).

5. Pico has 4(?) USB ports, so obviously has a onboard hub, which
mini2440 doesn't. I am guessing all 4 can be used, and with a 5A power
adaptor, 500mA can be supplied on each, making pico more capable in
terms of dealing with multiple USB peripherals.

6. any other... ?

Other than that, both -

a) support LCD+Touchscreen, though pico seems to have only one
supported today, while mini2440 has several 3.5" (NEC, Sony and 2
others AFAIR), 4.3", 7", 10" etc.

b) have ARM9 CPU's clocked at 400MHz (and neither of those support HW
floating-point or DSP, and AFAIK don't support NEON either).

One thing which I found a bit worrying is the HW seems to be still
evolving. Is this correct ? I saw some posts from Nov'2011 about
report of some issues with mini-PCI implementation on the board, due
to which 3G USB modems do not work out of the box, and one needs to
cut traces.

Also, who are the original designers and what are the long term
availability plans of this board, isn't clear (same is however true
for mini2440). I am hoping that this is not an issue because boards
seems to be recommended for OEM use.

I am keen on knowing what success people have had with following USB
peripherals -
- 3G modem (GSM / CDMA technologies)
- WiFi dongle
- USB hub
- USB audio dongle
and usage of onboard GPIO, with user-level code.

[Daniel Palmer]

1. No on-board Flash memory on pico. This means that we always used
microSD as the root filesystem and to store the bootloader.

There are 2 SD slots (a bootable microSD slot, and a non-bootable full size SD slot). The performance is pretty good.. and fast large SD cards are cheap now.

 

2. No I2S headers, and no audio in/out points on pico. Mini2440 has
audio in/out and I2S.

I think the SAM9G45 SoC on the board does have the ability to interface an AC97 codec, but that isn't brought out on the board anywhere. I2C,SPI,GPIO are though.

 

3. No onboard CMOS camera support on pico. Mini2440 has CMOS camera
support on-board.

USB camera :) 

4. Pico has 256MB DDR2 RAM, compared to 64MB SDRAM on mini2440. IMHO,
this can have significant performance impact (positive).

I think this is a pretty important point.. 64MB is the bare minimum you can get away with if you want to run a standard linux distro, you will still need to strip everything back to get it to run without complaining about memory all the time.. I have SH4 machines running Debian with this exact issue.. The 256MB of ram on the Pico means it has zero issues running standard software. OpenJDK etc are no problem for the Pico

 

5. Pico has 4(?) USB ports, so obviously has a onboard hub, which
mini2440 doesn't. I am guessing all 4 can be used, and with a 5A power
adaptor, 500mA can be supplied on each, making pico more capable in
terms of dealing with multiple USB peripherals.

The 4 usb ports are connected via a USB hub on the board to a USB port on the SoC. Not sure what the ratings of the 5v supply are. The schematics are on http://arm.mini-box.com/ I think.

 

6. any other... ?

Other than that, both -

a) support LCD+Touchscreen, though pico seems to have only one
supported today, while mini2440 has several 3.5" (NEC, Sony and 2
others AFAIR), 4.3", 7", 10" etc.

I think there is a larger LCD on the way with a capacitive touch screen. 

 

b) have ARM9 CPU's clocked at 400MHz (and neither of those support HW
floating-point or DSP, and AFAIK don't support NEON either).

The SAM9G45 is an ARMv5 design.. It doesn't have VFP or NEON.. but unless your code is specifically written for NEON it doesn't make any difference. If you want a board with a newer ARMv7a core you'll need to look at one of the OMAP based boards like the Beagle or Panda.. They are more than twice the price of the Pico though. 

 

One thing which I found a bit worrying is the HW seems to be still
evolving. Is this correct ? I saw some posts from Nov'2011 about
report of some issues with mini-PCI implementation on the board, due
to which 3G USB modems do not work out of the box, and one needs to
cut traces.

There are some bugs with the minipci slot. The fixes are simple (I have done them but still cant get my 3G modems to be detected) and according to the wiki they are going to get fixed in a new board revision.

Someone else will need to answer the other stuff :).

Cheers,

Daniel

[bdutta]

> onhttp://arm.mini-box.com/<http://arm.mini-box.com/i> I think.

>
>
>
> > 6. any other... ?
>
> > Other than that, both -
>
> > a) support LCD+Touchscreen, though pico seems to have only one
> > supported today, while mini2440 has several 3.5" (NEC, Sony and 2
> > others AFAIR), 4.3", 7", 10" etc.
>
> I think there is a larger LCD on the way with a capacitive touch screen.
>
>
>
> > b) have ARM9 CPU's clocked at 400MHz (and neither of those support HW
> > floating-point or DSP, and AFAIK don't support NEON either).
>
> The SAM9G45 is an ARMv5 design.. It doesn't have VFP or NEON.. but unless
> your code is specifically written for NEON it doesn't make any difference.
> If you want a board with a newer ARMv7a core you'll need to look at one of
> the OMAP based boards like the Beagle or Panda.. They are more than twice
> the price of the Pico though.
>
> > One thing which I found a bit worrying is the HW seems to be still
> > evolving. Is this correct ? I saw some posts from Nov'2011 about
> > report of some issues with mini-PCI implementation on the board, due
> > to which 3G USB modems do not work out of the box, and one needs to
> > cut traces.
>
> There are some bugs with the minipci slot. The fixes are simple (I have
> done them but still cant get my 3G modems to be detected) and according to
> the wiki they are going to get fixed in a new board revision.
>
> Someone else will need to answer the other stuff :).
>

Thanks Daniel, for your answers.

Have been reading about SAM9G45, that and your answers - this looks
like a great alternative to mini2440. Your point about USB Camera is
well taken, although I am not sure of board-cameras that provide USB
interface. Need to look around.

Now only if someone can confirm a sure-shot way to get 3G modems, and
USB-audio working on this board, I think I am good to go (i.e. go and
order a set of samples).

If anyone has any ETA on the next rev of boards.

I've got Beagleboard, IGEPv2's so have tasted their power. You are
absolutely right that they are twice as expensive and that is
precisely the reason why I am looking for alternatives. I guess, lot
of people are :-)

[Nicu Pavel]

Hi,

> One thing which I found a bit worrying is the HW seems to be still
> evolving. Is this correct ? I saw some posts from Nov'2011 about
> report of some issues with mini-PCI implementation on the board, due
> to which 3G USB modems do not work out of the box, and one needs to
> cut traces.

Yes that will be probably the only change in the next revision. The
miniPCIE reserved pins were routed to voltage for some custom
applications, but we're going to make them standard for the OEM board.

> Also, who are the original designers and what are the long term
> availability plans of this board, isn't clear (same is however true
> for mini2440). I am hoping that this is not an issue because boards
> seems to be recommended for OEM use.

mini-box.com is the original designer, and yes there is long term
support for the board since we are going to release a
full case+capacitive touchscreen and make a separate product with this board.

> I am keen on knowing what success people have had with following USB
> peripherals -
> - 3G modem (GSM / CDMA technologies)
> - WiFi dongle
> - USB hub
> - USB audio dongle
> and usage of onboard GPIO, with user-level code.

We're using all of the above except 3G Modem in several custom projects.

Nicu

[Simon Matthews]

I have a Huawei E1762 3G USB modem running on the pico PCB. I am using the pico PCB as a server.

Simon

[Banibrata Dutta]

On Mon, Feb 20, 2012 at 8:49 PM, Simon Matthews <s.mat...@karrak.id.au> wrote:

I have a Huawei E1762 3G USB modem running on the pico PCB. I am using the pico PCB as a server.

Simon

Hi Simon,

Great to hear.
Any chance you could do an article to share how you got the 3G USB modem working on pico ?

thanks,
BD

[Simon Matthews]

Firstly built a kernel with inbuilt support and drivers for USB serial devices and 'iptables'. I used the recipe outlined in the pico-sam9G45 wiki for the Angstrom distribution.

I have a copy of the kernel build config file to do this and the compiled kernel . Ideally i would like to put these on a server somewhere so anyone can access it, any suggestions?

After copying the kernel to the boot partition and rebooting download the 'iptables' package, 'ppp' package and the 'minicom' package.

If your 3G modem is the Huawei E1762 and it is the only device with USB serial ports plugged into the Pico PCB the ports should show up as /dev/ttyUSB0,/dev/ttyUSB1, and /dev/ttyUSB2. Configure ppp to access port /dev/ttyUSB0 and start the ppp deamon with pon.

This should now give you access to the internet.

The third port /dev/ttyUSB2 is useful as the modem not only continuously dumps status information to this port, but allows you to send AT commands to the modem while the ppp link is using /dev/ttyUSB0.

I have used iptables to do the NAT necessary to be able to route data from other devices connected to the picoPCB to/from the internet via the 3G modem.

I have found that the 3G link drops out  several times  a day so have written some scripts to ping google.com every five minutes and if i don't get a reply i reboot the picoPCB.

If anyone needs more information i should have time to write a more detailed How To. Should this information and other information about getting other peripherals working on the picoPCB go onto the Pico wiki?

Simon

[itserik]

Hi,

We use the option GTM671W 3g modem and this works (using hso kernel
module) fine for us. To keep the connection alive we ping every our
and do a killall pppd when it fails. In the modem connect script we
send AT commands to force a hard reset of the modem. After that we
have to enter the pin and wait a while for a new network registration.

Erik

[Banibrata Dutta]

Hello Simon,

Thanks for the instructions. Maybe if you can put the kernel build config in the wiki, or pastebin with a pointer back in the wiki, it'd be great. Of course, others might provide more appropriate suggestion.

On Sat, Feb 25, 2012 at 10:01 PM, Simon Matthews <s.mat...@karrak.id.au> wrote:

Firstly built a kernel with inbuilt support and drivers for USB serial devices and 'iptables'. I used the recipe outlined in the pico-sam9G45 wiki for the Angstrom distribution.

I have a copy of the kernel build config file to do this and the compiled kernel . Ideally i would like to put these on a server somewhere so anyone can access it, any suggestions?

After copying the kernel to the boot partition and rebooting download the 'iptables' package, 'ppp' package and the 'minicom' package.

If your 3G modem is the Huawei E1762 and it is the only device with USB serial ports plugged into the Pico PCB the ports should show up as /dev/ttyUSB0,/dev/ttyUSB1, and /dev/ttyUSB2. Configure ppp to access port /dev/ttyUSB0 and start the ppp deamon with pon.

This should now give you access to the internet.

The third port /dev/ttyUSB2 is useful as the modem not only continuously dumps status information to this port, but allows you to send AT commands to the modem while the ppp link is using /dev/ttyUSB0.

I have used iptables to do the NAT necessary to be able to route data from other devices connected to the picoPCB to/from the internet via the 3G modem.

I have found that the 3G link drops out  several times  a day so have written some scripts to ping google.com every five minutes and if i don't get a reply i reboot the picoPCB.

Isn't there any alternative to rebooting in this situation ? I've similar issue with my 3G USB modems too, even on Ubuntu desktops, where a simple connection restart doesn't work, and I actually need to plug-out / plug-in the USB dongle. I've been thinking that there much be a software equivalent of the plug-out / plug-in, which could also be useful in case of pico.

If anyone needs more information i should have time to write a more detailed How To. Should this information and other information about getting other peripherals working on the picoPCB go onto the Pico wiki?

If my vote counts, +1 / yes please. Thanks again.

[Banibrata Dutta]

On Sat, Feb 25, 2012 at 11:25 PM, itserik <its...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi,

We use the option GTM671W 3g modem and this works (using hso kernel
module) fine for us. To keep the connection alive we ping every our
and do a killall pppd when it fails. In the modem connect script we
send AT commands to force a hard reset of the modem. After that we
have to enter the pin and wait a while for a new network registration.

Ah, our mails crossed... and this seems to be the perfect answer to the problem. Just wondering, about the pin bit. Which pin is this ?
 

[itserik]

Sorry about that. pin means the PIN code on the sim card. But this can
be disabled of course.

On Feb 25, 6:59 pm, Banibrata Dutta <banibrata.du...@gmail.com> wrote:

[Stephen Chiou]

Hi, I know it's been awhile since someone posted in this thread, but i was wondering if you guys made any progress yet with that full case + capacitive touchscreen for the board yet?