
It's Now Possible to Boot Android on I.MX6 Platforms Without Proprietary Blobs - mmastrac
http://news.softpedia.com/news/it-s-now-possible-to-boot-android-on-i-mx6-platforms-without-proprietary-blobs-516364.shtml
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grizzles
What are the other of the "very few" embedded SOCs that need no proprietary
blobs to run? Mediatek?

Also, how great a name is Robert Foss for someone who writes open source code
for a living...

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robert_foss
Many SOCs are able to run with no blobs, but very few require no blobs while
still offering graphics support. Some SOCs with Adreno or Vivante GPUs do
however offer open source GPU support.

Re being named Foss while working in Foss: It's a pure coincidence, but has a
medieval feel to it. Like Baker, Coppersmith or Eisenhower.

~~~
chuckdries
Eisenhower?

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huxley
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eisenhower_(surname)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eisenhower_\(surname\))

It means Iron Hewer

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hewer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hewer)

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robert_foss
Author here, feel free to ask me things.

~~~
leggomylibro
What do you think is the best hand-solderable application processor these
days? I don't see any non-BGA I.MX6 chips, but I didn't look very hard. Is the
hobbyist stuck with an ARM926?

Also, in that vein, is there a similar solution for I.MX23's?

~~~
planteen
You can get a i.MX6 SoM (system-on-module) to take care of nasty things like
external memory.

[https://www.solid-run.com/freescale-imx6-family/imx6-som/](https://www.solid-
run.com/freescale-imx6-family/imx6-som/)

~~~
psykotic
I was about to suggest SoMs as well.

The biggest challenge with BGAs from a hobbyist perspective isn't the
soldering. There are lots of hobbyists successfully reflowing BGAs with
toaster ovens. The bigger problem is manufacturing the PCBs to break out the
BGA balls. TI has some BGAs with a proprietary ball pattern that are designed
to be broken out with just 4 layers, but that's the exception, and you
generally need very narrow traces and trace clearance to route between balls
and vias. I just looked at OSH Park's current capabilities and they only do up
to 4 layers and their DRC specifies 6 mm minimum trace width and 6 mm minimum
spacing. I've heard of people using OSH Park and similar lower-end prototyping
services to manufacture one-off PCBs for fine-pitch BGAs, but you'll be
failing DRC by a massive margin, so expect terrible yield on the PCBs,
assuming any of them work at all.

Unfortunately I think DRC will be similarly challenging for most SoM
connectors since their pin spacing has a similar pitch to BGAs, so you'll
probably need an off-the-shelf break-out board to work around that. Honestly,
at some point you should consider whether a vanilla dev board with low-speed
GPIO headers could meet your requirements.

~~~
leggomylibro
Those OSHPark rules are 6mil, not mm - that's a little over 0.15mm. But it's
still not really suitable for BGP modules. You can probably do 60-ball RAM
modules, but a medium-sized processor seems like it would be off the table.

I think that dirtyPCBs does 6-layer boards, but they're comparatively pricey
for small runs or prototypes.

~~~
psykotic
Thanks for the correction; I thought 6 mm sounded way too high. Gotta love
American measurement units!

There are Internet accessible Chinese PCB manufacturers that will do short
runs for designs of almost any complexity, but they aren't really targeting
hobbyists, though that seems to be changing.

~~~
leggomylibro
Yeah, mils are a really strange measurement unit. I'm not sure who thought
that 1/1000" would be a good standard.

~~~
semi-extrinsic
I think it harks back to older manufacturing processes, via plastics (where
mils are used) back to metalworking. Machinists will usually talk about small
distances in "thou", as in thousandths of an inch.

Always cracks me up when AvE mentally converts 2.5/64" or some crazy shit into
thou while thinking out loud, and then goes "metric fanboys be like whaaat?"

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throwaway-1209
I'd love to see Ubuntu or Yocto support for this, with accelerated Wayland. Is
that a possibility?

~~~
robert_foss
The same work that goes into this Android support also paves the way for
Wayland on this hardware platform.

But, I haven't run it myself yet.

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lawl
An interesting target for postmarketOS:
[https://ollieparanoid.github.io/post/postmarketOS/](https://ollieparanoid.github.io/post/postmarketOS/)

