

32- and 64-bit ARM Open Hardware Boards - timthorn
https://www.96boards.org/

======
sspiff
This wasn't completely clear to me from the get-go, but this organization and
it's boards are an effort put forward by the Linaro organization. That, to me,
makes the product much more relevant and reliable. I wouldn't buy a board from
a random startup with no track records of providing support and updates for
their devices.

Linaro is an engineering non-profit, support by many of the major players, to
improve support for the ARM ecosystem. This includes improvements to GCC,
LLVM, the Linux kernel, various libc's, AOSP, ... They also provide Ubuntu,
Debian and Android RFS images for supported reference boards.

I understand that they went with a Mali GPU, since it is the reference GPU
design from ARM. However, it is unfortunate that there is no open source
driver for this platform. Maybe this will change in the future.

~~~
noodly
> However, it is unfortunate that there is no open source driver for this
> platform.

What about this one:

[http://malideveloper.arm.com/develop-for-
mali/drivers/open-s...](http://malideveloper.arm.com/develop-for-
mali/drivers/open-source-mali-gpus-linux-kernel-device-drivers/) ?

~~~
lhl
Sadly, the kernel driver is of limited use since the user-space driver is what
does everything.

Some more info:
[http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTY3OTM](http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTY3OTM)

~~~
sspiff
Exactly - the open source kernel driver is just a gateway for the user space
driver to access the hardware. The real magic is in the closed source, user
space driver.

I believe Linus has stopped accepting these kinds of Trojan horse drivers into
the mainline kernel, unless an open source user space component that does at
least handle 2D graphics through it is also available.

------
rmoriz
I'm not convinced. Despite the cpu the specs looks like some 2011ish TI
PandaBoard. Slow usb2 i/o and no SATA ports won't be able to compete against
low-end development boards (SolidRun HummingBoard or Radxa Rock Pro). While
64bit 8core ARM is something interesting, the low i/o speeds and ports rather
limit any "computational" usage.

Finally, the main reason not to build products out of the variety of ARM
development boards is IMHO the missing CE/FCC certification for retail
products. Afaik every board including the Raspberry PIs are only for demo/lab
purposes. So if you build some embedded server product you'll do have the
bureaucracy and costs. At least they should offer 2-3 FCC/CE ready
combinations of boards+cases ready to be deployed in the wild.

In my eyes those boards are just an replacement for the Texas Instruments
PandaBoards which are discontinued because TI gave up their OMAP business a
while ago and the typical low-cost board makers are using cheap dual/quad-core
32bit A8 and A9 IP.

~~~
Kliment
The Rpi and beaglebone and the like are most definitely CE/FCC certified.

~~~
wyldfire
It's probably hard to get a CE mark or FCC certification for a PCB-style
product, right? Those organizations probably want to know about emissions but
it doesn't make sense to measure a PCB for radiated emissions since it has so
few protections against it.

Arguably, that's your job -- when you buy the PCB you are planning to
integrate it with an enclosure that will solve those problems and now that
you've designed this new product you should get the certifications.

~~~
pjc50
You're basically right with the second paragraph; a Pi in a box is a different
"product" from a Pi under CE rules, and the person putting the Pi in the box
and selling it is a "manufacturer" with all the CE and WEEE liabilities
thereof.

The Pi is certified for radiated emissions - as "EN 55022 Class A product".
[http://docs-europe.electrocomponents.com/webdocs/109e/090076...](http://docs-
europe.electrocomponents.com/webdocs/109e/0900766b8109e8f8.pdf) See discussion
of class A vs class B: [http://www.ecma-
international.org/publications/files/ECMA-TR...](http://www.ecma-
international.org/publications/files/ECMA-TR/TR-074.pdf) Effectively, this
puts some of the interference mitigation responsibility onto the customer.

It's entirely missing the ESD certifications which might normally be applied
to cased products. If it had wifi that would trigger a whole other class of
certification requirements.

The whole thing is tedious and hateful. I wish there was some way to get rid
of it without people immediately flooding the market with cheap high emission
SMPS.

~~~
Kliment
The thing is, people are flooding the market with cheap noisy crap anyway,
distributed as any of hundreds of non-brands and shipped directly to the
customer from outside the regulatory area. Technically it falls upon customs
to stop these from entering, but customs is not qualified to do compatibility
testing. Personally I think the correct response would be a customer
protection law that requires that manufacturers and vendors take back/replace
problematic products, rather than forcing pre-certification and membership in
predatory organizations on everyone. The current regulatory environment
(particularly WEEE) is toxic to any kind of small-scale manufacture, not
because of the specific requirements imposed, but because of the gigantic
costs of complying with said requirements in a regulation-approved way.

------
rffn
How open is this hardware? Are there open specs for Mali? Are there open specs
for CSI and DSI? All this is on the board. Available specs are needed to write
open source software or at least make it much simpler. I have difficulties to
consider a board with missing specification for important parts or connectors
to be "open".

~~~
4ad
Well, then you must have difficulties considering almost any embedded board,
because they all have a combination of chips with closed specs, or chips that
require blobs to do important things, e.g. boot.

Is there a truly open board except the Lemote stuff?

~~~
pingswept
The Beaglebone Black is the most open board, so far as I can tell.

Here are the PCB sources for the latest revision:
[http://elinux.org/Beagleboard:BeagleBoneBlack#Hardware_Files](http://elinux.org/Beagleboard:BeagleBoneBlack#Hardware_Files)

The datasheet for the AM3558 processor is here, no NDA required:
[http://www.ti.com/product/AM3358/technicaldocuments](http://www.ti.com/product/AM3358/technicaldocuments)

The bootloader is U-boot, which is open source, based here:
[http://www.denx.de/wiki/U-Boot](http://www.denx.de/wiki/U-Boot)

The GPU in the AM3558 is a PowerVR SGX530, which is not open source in any
sense-- I believe that the Linux driver uses a binary blob (but I'm not 100%
sure of that).

For comparison, the Raspberry Pi has open schematics
([http://www.raspberrypi.org/wp-
content/uploads/2012/04/Raspbe...](http://www.raspberrypi.org/wp-
content/uploads/2012/04/Raspberry-Pi-Schematics-R1.0.pdf)) but not open PCB
layout source files. There's a partial datasheet for the processor here:
[http://www.raspberrypi.org/wp-
content/uploads/2012/02/BCM283...](http://www.raspberrypi.org/wp-
content/uploads/2012/02/BCM2835-ARM-Peripherals.pdf), but you can't buy the
processor from Broadcom unless you're willing to buy 100,000 or so.

~~~
makomk
Last time I looked, the proprietary bootloader for the Pi also had a license
forbidding you from running it on boards not supplied by the Raspberry Pi
Foundation.

~~~
AlyssaRowan
That is true, for Broadcom's proprietary BOOTCODE.BIN, the (ThreadX-based)
START.ELF VPU-side microkernel and their user-space graphics driver components
which talk to it via the Linux kernel shims. (Although, note: you won't get a
BCM2836 anywhere else anyway.) Broadcom do, however, have someone writing an
open firmware I understand - definitely an unfamiliar world for them, so let's
give them time and see what happens.

I am also aware of a complete reverse-engineering effort (for the purposes of
interoperability), and that is all I'm going to say about that right now. :)

------
userbinator
I think the OLinuXino series is the closest to fully-open ARM boards:
[https://www.olimex.com/Products/OLinuXino/A20/A20-OLinuXino-...](https://www.olimex.com/Products/OLinuXino/A20/A20-OLinuXino-
LIME/open-source-hardware)

Unfortunately the GPU is a Mali, so software-wise it's not completely open,
but the hardware is fully open-source and the SoC datasheets are available.

~~~
fizixer
Two questions:

\- ARM licenses its designs so that would make their SoC design not open-
source (both CPU and GPU)? (a sub question: they didn't specify in the main
page who made the Mali. ARM doesn't make chips itself).

\- By "software-wise" you mean the GPU driver? the way nVidia and AMD drivers
are not open-source. But since people are trying to reverse-engineer those
GPUs to make open-source drivers (nouveau and xf86-video-ati respectively), do
you think this could be done for Mali too?

------
jalopy
Complete noob (to hardware/ARM stuff) question: Why would I buy this over the
much cheaper Raspberry Pi 2? Does it just have a (much?) faster processor?

~~~
sspiff
It's a good question. It has more CPU power, and likely more GPU power as
well, but not an order of magnitude more. They main selling point (from my
point of view) is for people who want to get their hands on a dev board that
has 64-bit ARM.

This board also has software support from Linaro, which is very good, but the
Raspberry Pi community should offset this advantage.

~~~
sounds
In addition to sspiff's good info, take a look at the I/O options:

[https://www.96boards.org/wp-
content/uploads/2015/02/HiKey_Us...](https://www.96boards.org/wp-
content/uploads/2015/02/HiKey_User_Guide_Rev0.2.pdf)

This will likely limit how useful the board can be, because the I/O choices
will prevent a good ecosystem from growing up around it.

~~~
sspiff
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this true for all popular ARM boards today?
Decent CPU, low power consumption, and terrible I/O performance?

I remember the PandaBoard as exceptionally bad, most are better but still
pretty slow.

~~~
sounds
Take a look at the BeagleBone Black. It has pretty decent I/O. The big gaping
missing piece, of course, is better video output, but that's sort of in the
same bucket as open source GPUs: missing in action.

~~~
sspiff
I actually have one on my desk, waiting to be used. Hoping to play around with
OpenBSD on it.

