viaspringboard.com

A new Android in the VAB family

 

Springboard (VAB-600) isn’t the only ARM board in the VAB lineup that supports Android. Its “brother”, the VAB-820, just got it’s own, brand new Android Evaluation Package.

VAB 600 connects the multimedia capabilities and flexible I/O connectivity .It has a various range of temperature and consumes low power and gives the solution which is versatile and reliable. It will be in the range of industrial and the home automation, HMI, IoT and others. The springboard of VAB contains the android software development package which features the android version 4.0.3. It also consists of kernel and the boot loader code. VIA smart ETK is also included in this and it is made up of number of APIs such as that of watch dog timer in order to protect against the system crashes, GPIO access and COM port access. The sample application is also available to demonstrate the above said function. A total noob will find it difficult to understand and should avail professional support.

VAB-820

What the VAB boards have in common is the aim to be small, efficient, and powerful when they are built into a project. Hence the shared Pico-ITX form factor and integrated ARM architecture. What they have different, though, is the ARM SoC itself. While Springboard features a VIA ARM Cortex-A9 processor, the VAB-820 has a quad-core Freescale i.MX 6Quad ARM Cortex-A9 SoC.

The VAB-820 is one of the few Freescale boards on the market that can run Android. Such a combination of hardware and software is very interesting, bringing together a good, familiar interface, easier software development (apps), and some serious reliability (including a wide operating temperature range from -20°C ~ 70°C). You can find the detailed specs of the board on the VAB-820 product page.

I’m not surprised that VAB-820 is aimed at in-car systems and industrial applications (among other things). VIA has also contributed CAN bus support within Android, which can be especially useful for cars.

Springboard and the VAB-820 are aimed at a different crowd, but I’m excited about the interaction between them and the rest of the VAB family. I also hope I can get my hands on one of the boards to run an Android benchmark on that too. 🙂

This entry was posted in VIA Embedded and tagged Anrdoid, VAB-820, VAB on April 23, 2014 by Gergely Imreh.← Previous Post

 

A survey of ARM operating systems

A piece of hardware without the software to run on it does not do much good. I can have the best piece of computing equipment if there’s no operating system to boot it.

The periodic updates to the architecture will be released by the ARM Holdings.ARM operating system is mostly used instruction set and it is produced in the enormous quantity. All the necessary features are there to develop IoT related products. ARM operating system is used in 1990s and it is a replacement made by windows based PCs.

With all their advantages, each ARM CPU still requires some effort on the side of operating system maintainers before the hardware and software can work well together. Fortunately there’s a very active community,  lots of accumulated developer knowledge, and many choices.

I collected a non-exhaustive list of operating systems for ARM processors, with a preference towards those that are interesting for VIA Springboard.

Linux

Linux supports an amazing variety of computing hardware, and now often that is the first system available for new development boards. With ARM each new processor needs a new driver too, thus usually there’s only one or two operating system is available at first. Fortunately support for one distribution often find its way into others.

The Springboard development pack is based on Debian, which is a distribution with a long track record of stability. I’m writing this article running that Debian development system. It aims to provide a sense of safety using well tested packages. Other distributions sometimes base their core on Debian too.

On my personal computer I’m running Arch Linux, a distribution that is in some sense the direct opposite of Debian. It is on the bleeding edge: many software package is available on the day of their release, and the system’s development is moving quickly. It has a great community, and the Arch Linux Wiki is one of the best sources for all thing Linux. The Arch Linux ARM version supports many ARM boards, from Raspberry Pi to Beaglebone. I would love to see Springboard among those too – it would be one of the most powerful boards in the list.

Raspbian is the Raspberry Pi + Debian system. The original APC board was running it too. This system has a narrower focus than the previous ones (supporting Raspberry Pi), but turned out to be a good base system for other boards too.

FirefoxOS is an up-and coming candidate. The new APC boards are running it too, and I’m looking forward learning more about it.

Ubuntu is probably the most widely known Linux system. It’s not surprising that there’s an ongoing Ubuntu ARM development as well. Their focus seems to be more on the server side than on the desktop/user side.

Android has to be on this list. It has done an amazing job standardizing operating systems for the embedded world, and I feel that there’s a lot more to come. Besides Debian, the other development system for the Springboard is Android 4.0.3, that I’m having a lot of fun exploring as well.

Among the more purpose-built distributions  there is Open Embedded Linux Entertainment Center (OpenELEC), which does what it says: turns a computer into a media center. With the ubiquity of boards like Springboard and our rampant media consumption, there’s definitely a lot of opportunity in this.

This is absolutely not the complete list of Linux distributions supporting ARM. Hopefully it is still adequate to start exploring the ecosystem.

BSD

Besides Linux, the different BSD flavours are among the most widely used open source operating systems. My first *nix system was FreeBSD back in high school, so I’m really happy to see the FreeBSD ARM project. OpenBSD is focusing on openness and security, qualities that are always welcome in the computing world. NetBSD/evbarm is targeting ARM based evaluation boards.

Other

For certain use cases it is worth looking beyond the above open source and mostly general-use systems.

Windows RT has the disadvantage compared to the previous systems that it’s only available preloaded and only on specific devices. It can however tap into a whole different ecosystem both in software, and apparently in supported peripherals.

QNX Neutrino and FreeRTOS are real-time operating systems with ARM support (and also specifically with Cortex-A9 support for the likes of Springboard). For industrial computers, medical computer,  scientific/laboratory work, possibly for certain media applications these can be interesting choices.

Plan 9 from Bell Labs has probably the quirkiest name and intriguing circumstances. It is primarily a research system, and gave us a lot of interesting technology. It has a Raspberry Pi port, so I guess it should be possible to cover other boards too.

Epilogue

There are really a large number of possible systems, while there are still a plenty of hurdles. A lot more work needs to be put into supporting existing and future systems to unlock all that potential. I feel that the deciding factor between different boards will be the amount of support they get, not necessarily the raw available power or awesomeness of their hardware.

Springboard is still very young, and while as of now it runs Debian and Android, I can see a lot of exciting opportunities for different use cases and different systems.

And with this, we are back at the community. What OS would you like to run on your Springboard or other ARM device? Would love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Ps: a very happy Easter to you all!

This entry was posted in Springboard Blog and tagged operating system, Linux, Android on April 21, 2014 by Gergely Imreh.← Previous PostNext Post →

 

Maker Club: The Thermal Printer Photobooth

The VIA Maker Club has already been featured on this blog, and I had the chance to meet some of the members when they came to visit the Taipei Hackerspace back in December of last year to demo their Smart Garden project. Now that I have joined VIA, I was eager to establish some credibility for myself in this very much technical team. I spent a half-day to come up with a project I could show at the regular Maker Club: meet MonoBooth, the thermal printer photobooth!

MonoBooth

For my quick project I wanted to do something interactive, personal, and which included hardware as well as software. I have worked with the thermal printer on a previous project, and looked like it would be fun to use it for this quick setup. So MonoBooth (monochrome + photobooth) was born.

About 331 instagram thermal printers are available for the suppliers of photo booth. The main supply of the thermal printer is provided by the country of China. In the websites a knockout post for the thermal printer with high quality is available online for the purchase. When you are purchasing the thermal printer ensure the products safety.

The ingredients: webcam, thermal printer, and a Springboard

The hardware I have used for the project:

• VIA Springboard with Linux
  • A webcam that works under Linux (e.g UVC-supported ones, like this Logitech I found lying around)
  • ICT GP-58 IVthermal printer (probably other ESC/POS protocol speaking printer will do
  • Keyboard, Mouse, USB Hub, Mini-HDMI-to-VGA converter, screen…

Python is very useful for quick projects, and it has a very large community and software support, so I used it for this setup.

The webcam interaction is done with PyGame, it requires only a handful of lines of code to whip together the “photo” part of the booth: grabbing pictures from the webcam, displaying them, and once a key is pressed on the keyboard, take a shot and send it to post-processing and printing.

The printer was a tougher nut to crack. I’m using python-escpos, that implements the ESC/POS protocol, originating from Epson. The library can connect to printers in many different way (over the network, Serial/RS232 connection, bare USB). The current Springboard kernel doesn’t have all the modules compiled to save some space, so I couldn’t use the Serial (CDC_ACM), but the bare USB did work. I could get the required numbers from `lsusb -v`. The relevant output is saved on Github for future reference.

The important parts are:

• Vendor and Product ID, in this case 0x0483 and 0x5740)
  • Interface number, the printer has two, the printing’s on “bInterfaceNumber 1”
  • The endpoints (bEndpointAddress) for data IN and OUT are 0x81 and 0x03

Using these numbers the escpos library can communicate:

printer.Usb(0x0483, 0x5740, 1, 0x81, 0x03)

Text printing was working okay, but ran into a problem: pictures didn’t come out right most of the time. I had to do quite a bit of testing to figure out what might be causing this problem, and how to work around that for the demo.

Development troubleshooting

After testing different pictures sizes, formats, and colours, I found that up to about 120 pixel square images worked 90% of the time, so I settled for those (down from the maximum of approximately 512×256). Fortunately there’s a protocol setting to print pictures in quadruple size (double width and height), so my 120 x 120 pixel images can be printed as 240 x 240, which looks somewhat better. It is the usual procedure when hacking: problems inevitably come up, and people still find a compromise workaround if they try hard enough. 🙂

As the captured images needed to be modified to fit the printer well: first crop the webcam’s 640×480 image to 480×480, resize to 120×120, then turn into monochrome with the Python Imaging Library (PIL). The escpos library has its own conversion, but PIL looks better according to my tests.

When all the parts were sort-of working separately, the pieces were put together.

A picture of a picture

And ready to print…

A picture of a picture of a picture

It’s a good enough picture to recognize myself, so success is declared. The demo run at the Maker Club, and sparked a good conversation.

Party time

The source code of the project is on Github. I have tried to comment enough to make it usable. Since I modified the escpos library a bit to scale up the image as mentioned above and adding some printing delays for possibly better printer reliability, I added those to the repository as well.

Aftermath

This was a fun half-day project. I still want to figure out how to communicate with the printer better so I can use the total available resolution for the future version of this photobooth. Fortunately, we have a lot of firmware and hardware experts here who also want to play with the printer. I’m sure we’ll figure out where’s the problem (Linux? USB? Printer firmware? Software library?) and update the project.

Do you have any comments how to make the photobooth more fun? Or do you have projects you made with Springboard or another single-board-computer? Would love to hear about it! 🙂

 

Benching the mark, step one

HWBot is a very active overclocking community, based just nearby to the Springboard HQ in Taipei. For years they were promoting desktop performance testing. At their intro event at the Taipei Hackerspace a few months ago they made a very convincing case for the overclocking community driving stability and quality improvements in the desktop computing, forcing companies to come out with better motherboards, more stable and rugged CPUs and so on.

Now they want to apply the same pressure on smartphone manufacturers. Their Android benchmarking app, HWBot Prime, now has a beta version on the Play Store. It’s a good start comparing the performance and stability of the different smartphones, and to start competing in the community for benchmark higher scores to brag about. 😉

Since Springboard can also run Android, I thought it would be interesting to run their benchmark and see where are we now.

Springboard is more specialized to deliver the complex datasets in the appropriate time to help the clients .There are different needs and objectives met benchmarking data. It can be used both in the pdf file format and also as normal data feeds. It functions in a unique manner appropriate to the purpose just like Arthrolon, which is a well established product for joint pains that is unique in its ingredients being natural.

Installation

Flashing the Android image was pretty straightforward (especially after doing Linux already).

Flashing Android on the Springboard

The Springboard Android image doesn’t come with many apps, nor does it have a Web Browser or the Play Store app yet. I had to install HWBot Prime by putting the APK file on an SD Card, and manually opening it in the file manager. A bit of trial and error, but got there.

Android installed

Doesn’t need that many apps to get started with my particular plan, and it probably even helps that I don’t have to kill background apps to get a good performance measurement.

Benchmarking

Running HWBot Prime for the first time, the software mentioned that it doesn’t recognize the system, which is not a surprise. The benchmark did run successfully, though.

Benchmark run

The result is 354 primes/s with Springboard’s Android 4.0.3. Looking at the Hardware information, the app didn’t recognize pretty much any of the hardware, just the SoC name. The CPU Core#1 is also shown as “down”. Judging from my experience running HWBot on my phone, that probably means meaning “idling”, and when the app correctly recognizes the CPU, it shows the current frequency too. Thus the reading might mean that this performance measure is a “minimum” benchmark.

First time benchmarking results

So now we have a number, that might or might not mean anything. The interesting thing will be to see how we can improve on this number, with hardware settings, software updates, tuning…

“What gets measured, gets managed.” – Peter Drucker

The first thing I can do with it, though is comparing the results to my phone (an HTC Butterfly). That got 1838 primes/s on full power mode (Quad Core, 4x1512MHz), or 1529 primes/s on power saving (4x1134MHz). Springboard has a single core 800MHz CPU

A quick, non-scientific comparison, so I can relate the numbers:

Springboard:  0.4425 (prime/s) / core / MHz
Butterfly full power: 0.3039 (prime/s) / core / MHz
Butterfly power save: 0.3370 (prime/s) / core / MHz

This doesn’t look too bad, even if the overall power is lower, you get more power out by MHz from the Springboard.

Overclocking

The next step is talking to the HWBot guys, get Springboard into their database, and hear their ideas about improving performance.

Since tuning parameters of the hardware should be easier in Linux, will definitely look into running a similar check on that image as well, and start tweaking things. I’m sure the Springboard hardware team will be delighted. 🙂

Update 2014/04/18:
Springboard now shows up correctly in the HWBot leaderboard with its WM8950 CPU. Let the fine-tuning begin!

 

Hi, I’m new here

 

This entry was posted on April 12, 2014 by Gergely Imreh.

Hi, I’m Greg, and this is my first week here at VIA. While I was waiting for my regular office computer to arrive, spent some time thinking about Springboard, since I will be focusing on that a lot. Instead of just sitting around, decided to set up my own Springboard to get started in the meantime.

The VIA technology is a leading innovator in the computing platforms which supplies embedded developers and DIY enthusiasts ,the fastest and the stable path to the upcoming generation. The product with the connected devices of the ARM is based for massive production. It is an innovative concept just as the Ostelife, which has natural ingredients for weight loss.

Setting up

Picked up one of the boards, and started to scavenge for the rest of the parts needed for a full computer:

• Power supply
• Mini-HDMI to HDMI cable
• HDMI monitor
• Extension board for USB
• USB hub
• USB keyboard and mouse
• Ethernet cable
• MicroSD Card

Fortunately some of them I’ve already had with me (what geek doesn’t have a MicroSD card forgotten in some coat pockets?), other pieces I got on loan from around the office.

Decided to use the Linux version of the operating system this time (will give Android a spin later), and downloaded the image from the resources page. Format the SD Card to FAT32, copy things over, and ready to flash the system anew.

After flashing successfully (a minute or so), just shut down and reboot.

To add a little personal touch, I have modified the boot logo: it’s spring and just got back from Kyoto cherry blossom watching, so let’s see that when my computer starts (spring – Springboard, got it?)

The boot logo is just a BMP file with the name u-boot-logo.data among the update files. Not sure how large file it can be, I kept around the original 240pixel width, though that looks tiny on the large screen.

Now Debian Linux is booting and ready to do some actual computing soon.

Getting the networking up was a bit trickier. I didn’t have wifi for Springboard, nor ethernet yet. Fortunately my laptop had wifi connection and a free ethernet port: let’s set up my laptop (temporarily) to be the router for the Springboard!

All I needed was basically to follow the description of Internet Sharing on the Arch Linux wiki (with some more optional tips from the Revsys blog about Linux NAT). This was the first time I did that, but it was easier than expected. Most of the problems I had were due to typos. Arch Linux (that I’m using for my laptop for years now) has an amazing knowledge base for all things Linux….

Networking now done, run a quick update to bring Debian up to date since the original OS image was published.

A quick install of XFCE for lightweight graphical environment took another 5-10 minutes or so. In the meantime I started a bit of system administration (e.g. setting up a non-root user for myself).

Once in the graphical environment, had to install a web browser. Looks like using ARM processor does limit the package choices a bit. At first glance I couldn’t install regular choice, Chromium. Instead went with Midori, which was also on the list of XFCE recommended applications.

And now ready to toast to my new computer. Cheers!

Ps: Toasting with a Vitamin C drink, looks like there’s flu going around over here in Taipei, everyone keep safe!

PPs: Thanks Max and Mike for lending me some of the parts to put this system together (though Mike does not know that yet:)

This entry was posted in Springboard Blog and tagged user, office, desktop on April 12, 2014 by Gergely Imreh.

 

VIA Partners with Mozilla

VIA Partners with Mozilla on the development of Firefox OS

If you’re interested in developing new connected devices using Firefox OS, you might want to check out our APC.

Announcement was given by VIA to have an official partnership with the Mozilla to give its full support and to develop the Firefox OS to the new device. The Firefox OS runs on the Rock and the APC paper is made to release the source codes which will be available on GitHub to the developers. Developers are rewarded with the free APs to encourage their support. This gives a natural feeling of accomplishment to the stakeholders just like the product Artroser, which has made a mark among the users to relieve them from joint pain.

The power of the web is given to the people through the Firefox OS. Partnership gives the opportunity to help the users around the world. There will be a continuous working of Firefox to develop new features and to enhance the Firefox OS. There is also a benefit in providing knowledge which can be shared and gives the technical support to the market place and Firefox OS.

It was told that they are very excited to the announcement of the partnership with the Mozilla and their support in the development of Firefox OS. The mission of the Mozilla is to promote the openness and the innovation on the web. The perfect combination was created to provide the best to the desktop of web everywhere. There will not be any excitement in the future. Mozilla had taken effort to produce the Firefox OS to the mobile devices and VIA announced its partnership with the web browser. The constant support is given by VIA to develop the Firefox OS and the incentives are given to the coders.

As we announced yesterday, Firefox OS running on APC Paper and Rock has been released with complete, buildable source codes available to developers on GitHub. In order to continue to encourage community support, we will be awarding free APCs to developers that fix a known issue. For more information, please read the press release here.

This article on CNet has an excellent overview of overall Mozilla’s plans for Firefox OS. We’re very excited to be partnering with them on the development of new device form factors based on the platform.

This entry was posted in Press Releases on January 7, 2014 by viaspringboard.

 

VIA Springboard Blog

• Running Go on VIA ARM devices

Go is a modern and quite popular systems programming language developed at Google. I’ve recently came across a wiki page describing its ARM support, I thought it would be interesting to check how VIA devices can make use of Go.  . I was surprised by its composition and its performance real time. It will get convenient and useable among the users over a period of time. When the product has the right development at every stage it proves to be a highly effective solution just like Erogan, which has the necessary attributes to solve inadequacy among males in having an intimate relationship. I’ve checked out the VAB-820, VAB-600, and the APC 8750 boards, all a bit different from each other.
VAB-820 with a Gopher
I found that the general documentation does not cover all the things that can (and generally do) go wrong, though a few online searches usually pointed me in the right direction. Installing Go needs two separate steps: bootstrapping first, then compiling from source.
Continue reading →
This entry was posted in Springboard Blog and tagged APC 8750, golang, VAB-600, tutorial, VAB-820 on November 18, 2015 by Gergely Imreh.
• Mini-PCIe microcontroller and make your board too
All VIA’s current ARM boards (VAB-600, 820, 1000) have an online mini-PCIe connector, and I’ve been planning to do something interesting with that for a long time (see this intro post from more than a year ago). Thus I’m very happy to introduce the PCIeDuino – mini-PCIe form-factor Arduino-compatible microcontroller, which can add a whole new set of I/O capabilities to these ARM “carrier boards”.
PCIeDuino under the magnifying glass
I have just recently finished this board, and been able to test it briefly with Springboard and also with the VAB-820. The picture just below shows the shining blue LED, that is tied to D13 – the 13th digital pin, as most Arduinos do.
Continue reading →
This entry was posted in Springboard Blog and tagged VAB-600, mini-PCIe, open source hardware, KiCad, VAB-820 on September 18, 2015 by Gergely Imreh.
• Grove comes to embedded
Hardware interoperability is hard.
While software is usually easy to adjust to your different needs, hardware pieces tend to be quite finished by the time they are being used. If they require changes, it’s usually not a trivial thing to make it happen. You want to use a different IC, you need more sensors, or want to change your output device? All of these might be custom work instead of plug-and-play solutions.
There are some examples of projects to make such hardware interoperable between devices, so they can benefit a larger user base. The most successful is probably the shields for Arduino. They have now spread beyond Arduino boards as you can start seeing shield connectors in a lot more places. However they are still not the ultimate solution. Some of their drawbacks include their large size for many common accessories as well as difficulty in using more than a handful at a time as stacking can become troublesome very quickly. Fortunately there’s a new system that complements these existing solutions very well and improves usability tremendously!
Enter Grove
The Grove system was designed by Seeed Studio and seems to be taking maker computing platforms by a storm. It is designed to have a standardized physical connector, predictable pinouts, and common board sizes.
Continue reading →
This entry was posted in Springboard Blog and tagged Grove, open source hardware, prototyping, VAB-820 on September 3, 2015by Gergely Imreh.
• Going Real-Time with Xenomai on VAB-820
It has been quite a few years since I’ve last used Xenomai, the real-time application framework for Linux, during the work on my thesis back at the university physics lab. When I’ve found that the VIA VAB-820 board is listed on Xenomai’s compatible hardware page, it brought back a lot of interesting memories and I got excited trying it out again. Now that the new (testing) kernel for the VAB-820 is released recently, I thought it’s a good chance to revisit real-time operating systems.
Setting up
Buildroot is a very handy tool to build a kernel and simple file system for embedded devices, and just recently accepted our submitted patch adding support for VAB-820. Buildroot already has support for Xenomai, so everything’s set up to create a system complete with the required patches & tools.
Running xeno-test on the VAB-820
One outstanding issue was a bit of adaptation. Xenomai (at least the stable 2.6.4 version I targeted) needs a suitable Adeos I-pipe patch applied to the Linux kernel, which enables secondary real-time kernel on the same hardware (see the Xenomai FAQ). The closest kernel version that had an available patch was 3.10.18, and I’ve backported that to the 3.10.17 kernel used in our latest release (can download the patch from Github).
Continue reading →
This entry was posted in Springboard Blog and tagged real-time, Xenomai, buildroot, VAB-820, benchmark on May 13, 2015 by Gergely Imreh.
• Ready-to-go file system for the VAB-820
It’s been a while since we have announced on this blog another member of the VAB family, the VAB-820. At that time the highlight was Android support for this quad-core Freescale SoC based system, but our board support package (BSP) also had a Linux version. Over the Christmas holidays I found a bit of time to make a simplified Linux OS image for the VAB-820, and want to share with you, so you can make the most of your boards too.
Running Debian Wheezy on the VAB-820
That original, official Linux BSP version was is based in turn on the Freescale BSP, and had a lengthy user manual how to arrive to a working system. It is perfectly fine for our embedded customers. For the wider community this clearly does not cut it, the large number of quality ARM boards raised the bar for everyone, and we do want to work harder and smarter too.
Continue reading →
This entry was posted in VIA Embedded and tagged tutorial, Debian, buildroot, kernel, VAB-820, Linux on December 31, 2014 by Gergely Imreh.
• Cryptography for Springboard: Hashlet
Previously I’ve described here the ProtoSpring board to support quicker prototyping with Springboard. Since then it was put to good use for just that: I’ve tested how the I2C bus works, and created a new device.
The inspiration for that new device comes from Tindie, the indie hardware marketplace (where ProtoSpring is listed as well). Browsing existing hardware I’ve found Hashlet, a secure authentication cryptographic device made for BeagleBone Black and Raspberry Pi by Cryptotronix. It looked interesting, it’s open source hardware, and I hope that Springboard users can take advantage interesting too, so decided to make a “remix” of the original board. It’s also good process to learning about hardware too! 🙂
A working Hashlet for Springboard, serial #1
Hashlet is based on the Atmel ATSHA204A chip, which is a “secure authentication and validation device”, with use cases such as:
• Network and Computer Access Control
• Key Exchange for Encrypted Downloads
• Authenticated/Encrypted Communications for Control Networks
Continue reading →
This entry was posted in Springboard Blog and tagged i2c, cryptotronix, atmel, open source hardware, cryptography, prototyping, open source on December 20, 2014 by Gergely Imreh.
• ProtoSpring, part 3: manufacturing and demo
After coming up with the idea in part 1 for ProtoSpring, the prototyping board for Springboard, and creating the PCB in part 2, this final segment shows the end-result and a demo application – using GPIO to control a 7-segment display from an Android app!
Finished Prototyping Board
After finishing the v1 of the PCB, I’ve exported the Gerber files from KiCad and sent them to Seeed Studio. Looking at their specifications, some of the filenames they require were different from the ones KiCad creates by default (the board outline and the drill files need different extensions). It’s a bit weird, but it’s easy enough to adjust before submission.
The board fits on a 5 cm x 10 cm base, has 2 layers, standard 1.6mm thickness, and didn’t bother changing the PCB colour to save some money on the manufacturing (though I bet the others looks very good too). The printing took less than a week together with shipping from Shenzhen to Taipei, and got 5 boards for about US$20:
ProtoSpring board straight from manufacturing
The board feels really nice and solid, and I’m almost surprised that it worked out so well on the first try (this is my first ever PCB!) After reviewing it, I’ve added a few changes for future print runs: Continue reading →
This entry was posted in Springboard Blog and tagged ProtoSpring, prototyping, electronics, Android on November 7, 2014 by Gergely Imreh.
• ProtoSpring, part 2: schematic revision and PCB
In the first part of this series I’ve outlined the idea of making a prototyping extension board for the Springboard, and finished with a rough schematic. Since then I’ve revised the schematic based on experience, and laid out the prototyping board PCB. By the end of this write-up we’ll have a complete design, ready to send to manufacturing.
Before I dive in, probably the single most important lesson learned is to keep in mind all different stages of a board design. There’s a lot of back and forth between schematic, components, footprint, layout, manufacturing specs. The tools help making the right decisions, and often when something feels difficult it is because I’m doing it wrong…
Finding crucial parts
After making the basic schematic I realized that there’s one type of component on the board that can make or break the entire project: the board-to-board connectors. To interface with the Springboard needed to find 2mm pitch, dual row, through hole, perpendicular mounting female receptacles. I couldn’t find anything like that in the local electronic stores. After an hour of search online they did turn up, fortunately both Digikey and Mouser had the required 3×2, 4×2, and 7×2 connectors by 3M.
Finally found the correct 2mm, double row, perpendicular, through-hole connectors I needed
I got a bit lucky too, because these ones can be ordered piecemeal, while other pin count versions (e.g. the 10×2) require minimum order of 300 pieces. This is one of the first example of the importance of choosing components. Of course, if these were 0.1″ (2.54mm) connectors then there wasn’t any problem finding them in the first place, but then they would probably not fit on the Springboard itself… Continue reading →
This entry was posted in Springboard Blog and tagged ProtoSpring, PCB, schematic, KiCad, design, electronics on October 28, 2014by Gergely Imreh.
• ProtoSpring, part 1: Idea and Schematic
I was looking for a project to showcase how easy it is to extend the functionality of the Springboard platform, drawing inspiration from the expansion board that is bundled in the kit.
Springboard and expansion board (top), from klinger.net
The expansion board connects to the main board with a couple of pin headers (power, GPIO, sound) and cables (USB) to break out some of the functionality to easy to access connectors, such as the regular speaker and mic plugs, two USB, on-off button. It should be easy to replace that board with another to provide different functionality, so I’ve come up with an example. Continue reading →
This entry was posted in Springboard Blog and tagged ProtoSpring, schematic, KiCad, design, electronics on October 14, 2014 by Gergely Imreh.
• At a Freescale developer event in Taiwan
Here at VIA we like to learn from others, and our ecosystem is full of very successful examples we can learn from. Just like we were very happy to see RaspberryPi in Taiwan recently, this week we’ve joined the “Designing with Freescale” developer event in Hsinchu.