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Can you talk about what you used the serial ports for? Was the board you used the mxc on cheaper than this one?
by dfc 13y ago
Can you talk about what you used the serial ports for? Was the board you used the mxc on cheaper than this one?
- joezydeco 13y agoI'm working on a project where a customer wants to update an old 16-bit control panel and make it run with a touchscreen, ethernet, and H.264 A/V playback. The control panel talked over RS-485 to a motor control board that sat somewhere else in the machine. So I took the original code, recompiled it to arm-eabi, and stuck it into an NDK library on Android 4.04. So now I have an Android UI in the foreground talking over JNI to the orignal (unmodified) control panel code in the background. All I needed to do was switch the serial driver code a bit to handle the iMX's UART setup and pthread up the old UI event loop to let it run free underneath Android. The board I'm using is a custom-designed PCB with an iMX6 Solo (single A9 core), but we used the SABRE-SD reference design from Freescale as our starting point. For proof of concept I used a Boundary SabreLite (now called BD-SL-i.MX6) for $199. That comes with two RS232 ports with DB-9 breakout connectors. I don't think you'll find a cheaper design than this Utilite, although they really don't have full pricing online yet. I'm guessing the $99 is for the Solo or even SoloLite and the multiple core units will be significantly more than this. They also don't say how much RAM is on the $99 unit. "Up to 4GB" says nothing about the specs on the cheapest one. I've found I need at least 256MB to run the FSL AOSP build in a minimal form. You seem concerned about GPS as well, this Android build from Freescale contains a driver for the Atheros Orion GPS chipset over UART. So I think they have a lot you can work with out of the box.