TS-TPC-8390-4710: Difference between revisions

From embeddedTS Manuals
m (FTP links auto-updated (ftp://ftp.embeddedarm.com/ →‎ https://files.embeddedarm.com/))
m (FTP links auto-updated (http://www.marvell.com/application-processors/armada-100/ →‎ https://www.marvell.com/application-processors/armada-100/))
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|data3        = [https://www.embeddedarm.com/products/TS-TPC-8390-4710?tab=specs Specifications]
|data3        = [https://www.embeddedarm.com/products/TS-TPC-8390-4710?tab=specs Specifications]
|header4      = TS-8390
|header4      = TS-8390
|data5        = [http://www.embeddedarm.com/documentation/ts-8390-schematic.pdf Schematic]
|data5        = [https://cdn.embeddedarm.com/resource-attachments/ts-8390-schematic.pdf Schematic]
|data6        = [http://www.embeddedarm.com/documentation/ts-8390-mechanical.pdf PCB Mechanical Drawing]
|data6        = [https://cdn.embeddedarm.com/resource-attachments/ts-8390-mechanical.pdf PCB Mechanical Drawing]
|data7        = [http://www.embeddedarm.com/documentation/ts-tpc-7390-mechanical.pdf Bezel Mechanical Drawing]
|data7        = [https://cdn.embeddedarm.com/resource-attachments/ts-tpc-7390-mechanical.pdf Bezel Mechanical Drawing]
|data8        = [http://www.embeddedarm.com/documentation/TS-TPC-7IN-B.zip 7-Inch Bezel Mechanical Design Files]
|data8        = [https://cdn.embeddedarm.com/resource-attachments/TS-TPC-7IN-B.zip 7-Inch Bezel Mechanical Design Files]
|header9      = TS-4712
|header9      = TS-4712
|data10        = [http://www.embeddedarm.com/documentation/ts-4712-schematic.pdf Schematic]
|data10        = [https://cdn.embeddedarm.com/resource-attachments/ts-4712-schematic.pdf Schematic]
|data11      = [http://www.embeddedarm.com/documentation/ts-4712-mechanical.pdf Mechanical Drawing]
|data11      = [https://cdn.embeddedarm.com/resource-attachments/ts-4712-mechanical.pdf Mechanical Drawing]
|data12      = [https://files.embeddedarm.com/ts-socket-macrocontrollers/ts-4712-linux/ FTP Path]
|data12      = [https://files.embeddedarm.com/ts-socket-macrocontrollers/ts-4712-linux/ FTP Path]
|header13    = Processor
|header13    = Processor
|data14      = Marvell PXA166 or PXA168
|data14      = Marvell PXA166 or PXA168
|data15      = 800MHz or 1066MHz ARMv5TE Mohawk (ARM9 compatible)
|data15      = 800MHz or 1066MHz ARMv5TE Mohawk (ARM9 compatible)
|data16      = [http://www.marvell.com/application-processors/armada-100/ CPU Series Website]
|data16      = [https://www.marvell.com/application-processors/armada-100/ CPU Series Website]
|data17      = [http://www.marvell.com/application-processors/armada-100/assets/armada_16x_software_manual.pdf PXA16X Software Guide]
|data17      = [https://www.marvell.com/application-processors/armada-100/assets/armada_16x_software_manual.pdf PXA16X Software Guide]
}}
}}


Line 149: Line 149:
| [[#SPI|SPI_MISO]]
| [[#SPI|SPI_MISO]]
|-
|-
| MFP_38 <ref name=cpupins> Refer to the [http://www.marvell.com/application-processors/armada-100/assets/armada_16x_software_manual.pdf CPU manual] Page A-1 for more information on the CPU registers</ref>
| MFP_38 <ref name=cpupins> Refer to the [https://www.marvell.com/application-processors/armada-100/assets/armada_16x_software_manual.pdf CPU manual] Page A-1 for more information on the CPU registers</ref>
| [[#DIO Header|DIO Header pin 11]]
| [[#DIO Header|DIO Header pin 11]]
| [[#SPI|SPI_CS2#]]
| [[#SPI|SPI_CS2#]]

Revision as of 20:45, 14 January 2021

TS-TPC-8390-4710
ts-tpc-8390-4710.gif
Product Page
Product Images
Specifications
TS-8390
Schematic
PCB Mechanical Drawing
Bezel Mechanical Drawing
7-Inch Bezel Mechanical Design Files
TS-4712
Schematic
Mechanical Drawing
FTP Path
Processor
Marvell PXA166 or PXA168
800MHz or 1066MHz ARMv5TE Mohawk (ARM9 compatible)
CPU Series Website
PXA16X Software Guide

Overview

The TS-TPC-8390 is a complete touch panel computer solution comprised of a 7" TFT LCD, TS-8390 baseboard and processor board. It is an ideal solution for applications requiring a touch screen human machine interface (HMI), such as industrial automation, home automation, self-service machines, and point-of-sale terminals. This product offers an excellent value with a full range of features and industry standard connectors and a fanless, low power, high performance modular design. TS-TPC-8390 also provides an upgrade path for Technologic Systems' customers currently using TS-TPC-7390 and TS-TPC-7395 products.

The TS-4710 is a TS-Socket Macrocontroller System on Module based on the TS-4700 with a revised FPGA to CPU interface, a faster CPU, more memory, dual SD cards for DoubleStore support, and a significantly faster boot time.

Getting Started

A Linux PC is recommended for development, and will be assumed for this documentation. For users in Windows or OSX we recommend virtualizing a Linux PC. Most of our platforms run Debian and if there is no personal distribution preference this is what we recommend for ease of use.

Virtualization

Suggested Linux Distributions

It may be possible to develop using a Windows or OSX system, but this is not supported. Development will include accessing drives formatted for Linux and often Linux based tools.

Booting up the board

WARNING: Be sure to take appropriate Electrostatic Discharge (ESD) precautions. Disconnect the power source before moving, cabling, or performing any set up procedures. Inappropriate handling may cause damage to the board.

The TS-8390 accepts 5-28VDC input on the terminal block connector.

Power connector


Once you have applied power to your baseboard you should look for console output. Creating this connection is described more in the next chapter, but the first output is from the bootrom:

  >> TS-BOOTROM - built Dec 21 2011 10:05:44
  >> Copyright (c) 2011, Technologic Systems
  >> Booting from microSD card ...
  .
  .
  .

The 3 dots after indicate steps of the booting procedure. The first dot means the MBR was copied into memory and executed. The next two dots indicate that the MBR executed and the kernel and initrd were found and copied to memory.

Get a Console

Option 1: Telnet

If your system is configured with zeroconf support (Avahi, Bonjour, etc) you can simply connect to the TS-4710 with:

telnet ts4710-<last 6 characters of the MAC address>.local
# You will need to use your TS-4710 MAC address, but 
# for example if you mac is 00:d0:69:01:02:03
telnet ts4710-010203.local

When the board first powers up it has two network interfaces. The first interface eth0 is configured to use IPv4LL, and eth0:0 is configured to use DHCP. The board broadcasts using multicast DNS advertising the _telnet._tcp service. You can use this to query all of the available TS-4710s on the network.

From Linux you can use the avahi commands to query for all telnet devices with:

avahi-browse _telnet._tcp

Which would return:

+   eth0 IPv4 TS-4710 console [4f47a5]                      Telnet Remote Terminal local
+   eth0 IPv4 TS-4710 console [4f471a]                      Telnet Remote Terminal local

This will show you the mac address you can use to resolve the board. In this case you can connect to either ts4710-4f47a5 or ts4710-4f47a5.


From Windows you can use Bonjour Print Services to get the dns-sd command. OSX also comes preinstalled with the same command. Once this is installed you can run:

dns-sd -B _telnet._tcp

Which will return:

Browsing for _telnet._tcp
Timestamp     A/R Flags if Domain                    Service Type              Instance Name
10:27:57.078  Add     3  2 local.                    _telnet._tcp.             TS-4710 console [4f47a5]
10:27:57.423  Add     3  2 local.                    _telnet._tcp.             TS-4710 console [4f47a5]

This will show you the mac address you can use to resolve the board. In this case you can connect to either ts4710-4f47a5.local or ts4710-4f47a5.local.

Option 2: Serial Console

The console UART (ttyS0) is a RS232 UART at 115200 baud, 8n1 (8 data bits 1 stop bit), and no flow control. This UART is brought out to the COM1 header when the "Console Enable" jumper is on.


Console from Linux

There are many serial terminal applications for Linux, three common used applications are 'picocom', 'screen', and 'minicom'. These examples demonstrate all three applications and assume that the serial device is "/dev/ttyUSB0" which is common for USB adapters. Be sure to replace the serial device string with that of the device on your workstation.

'picocom' is a very small and simple client.

picocom -b 115200 /dev/ttyUSB0

For Rev C hardware or newer.

picocom -b 115200 /dev/ttyACM0


'screen' is a terminal multiplexer which happens to have serial support.

screen /dev/ttyUSB0 115200

For Rev C hardware or newer.

screen /dev/ttyACM0 115200


Or a very commonly used client is 'minicom' which is quite powerful but requires some setup:

minicom -s
  • Navigate to 'serial port setup'
  • Type "a" and change location of serial device to '/dev/ttyUSB0' then hit "enter"
  • If needed, modify the settings to match this and hit "esc" when done:
     E - Bps/Par/Bits          : 115200 8N1
     F - Hardware Flow Control : No
     G - Software Flow Control : No
  • Navigate to 'Save setup as dfl', hit "enter", and then "esc"


Console from Windows

Putty is a small simple client available for download here. Open up Device Manager to determine your console port. See the putty configuration image for more details.

On boards using the Silabs CP210x driver:

Device Manager Putty Configuration

On boards using the Renesas USB CDC-ACM driver:

Device Manager 2 Putty Configuration 2

Initramfs

When the board first boots up you should have a console such as:

>> TS-BOOTROM - built Mar 14 2013 15:01:50
>> Copyright (c) 2012, Technologic Systems
.
.
Uncompressing Linux... done, booting the kernel.
Booted in 0.90s
Initramfs Web Interface: http://ts47XX-112233.local

This is a minimalistic initial ram filesystem that includes our specific utilities for the board, and is then used to bootstrap the Linux root. The initramfs is built into the kernel image so it cannot be modified without rebuilding the kernel, but it does read several bits from nonvolatile memory for common configuration options we call soft jumpers. Note: Soft jumper settings are not stored on the SD media, so re-flashing your SD card will not reset the soft jumpers. This action can only be taken from within the OS.

WARNING: Setting soft jumper 1 will boot the system straight to Debian, leaving the serial port as the only default access method. Ensure that alternate access methods (telnet, SSH, etc.) are set up and working in Debian if the serial port is not a viable access method before this jumper is set. If a lockout situation does occur, please contact us at support@embeddedTS.com
Soft Jumpers
Jumper Function
1 Boot automatically to Debian [1]
2 Reserved
3 Reserved
4 Reserved
5 Reserved
6 Reserved
7 Skip most of the init. [2]
8 Skip full DRAM test on startup [3]
  1. Initramfs boot is default. Be sure to configure Debian before setting this jumper if serial port access is not possible, see "Warning" above.
  2. This option skips a significant amount of setup and will boot to a single SD card as fast as possible with no initialization. This mode will still execute /mnt/root/ts/init if it exists, or boot to Debian if jp1 is set. Note that this will not initialize any networking in the initramfs, leaving the serial port as the only access method. If booting to Debian, see "Warning" above.
  3. The DRAM test can be used to verify the RAM, but adds approximately 20 seconds to the boot time. This should normally only be enabled when diagnosing problems.

There are 2 ways to manipulate soft jumpers on the board. The web interface at

"http://ts<model>-<last 6 chars of the MAC>.local" 

has a list of checkboxes that will immediately change the values. You can also use tshwctl:

# Boot automatically to Debian:
tshwctl --setjp=1

# Or revert to the initramfs:
tshwctl --removejp=1

The Debian boot can also be inhibited by creating a file in /ts/fastboot in the Debian root. While this file exists the board will stop booting at the initramfs. If you do not have a serial console, make sure you first configure Debian's network settings first before booting directly to Debian. Once JP1 is enabled, the initramfs does not run ifplugd/udhcpc to configure the network.

Most development should be done in Debian, however many applications are capable of running from the initramfs. Utilities from Debian can be accessed under /mnt/root as read only, but for Debian services, or using apt-get a full boot into Debian should be performed. The initramfs itself cannot be easily modified, and it is not recommended to do so. The initramfs however has several hooks for applications to manipulate it's behavior.

/mnt/root/ts/init

For headless applications you can create a bash script with any initialization you require in /ts/init. This does not use the same $PATH as Debian, so you should enter the full path to any applications you intend to run from this environment. The init file does not exist by default and must be created.:

#!/bin/sh

/path/to/your/application &

Remember to set it executable!
chmod a+x /ts/init

/mnt/root/ts/initramfs-xinit

Graphical applications run in the initramfs should use /ts/initramfs-xinit. Users booting to Debian should use /usr/bin/default-x-session. The xinit file is used to start up a window manager and any applications. The default initramfs-xinit starts a webbrowser viewing localhost:

#!/bin/sh
# Causes .Xauthority and other temp files to be written to /root/ rather than default /
export HOME=/root/
# Disables icewm toolbars
export ICEWM_PRIVCFG=/mnt/root/root/.icewm/

# minimalistic window manager
icewm-lite &

# this loop verifies the window manager has successfully started
while ! xprop -root | grep -q _NET_SUPPORTING_WM_CHECK
do
    sleep 0.1
done

# This launches the fullscreen browser.    If the xinit script ever closes, x11 will close.  This is why the last
# command is the target application which is started with "exec" so it will replace the xinit process id.
exec /usr/bin/fullscreen-webkit http://localhost

/mnt/root/ts/config

This config file can be used to alter many details of the initramfs boot procedure.

## This file is included by the early init system to set various bootup settings.
## if $jp7 is enabled none of these settings will be used.

## Used to control whether the FPGA is reloaded through software.
## 1 to enable reloading (default)
## 0 to disable reloading
#CFG_FPGARELOAD="0"

## By default dns-sd is started which advertises the ts<model>-<last 6 of mac> 
## telnet and http services using zeroconf.
## 1 to enable dns-sd (default)
## 0 to disable dns-sd
#CFG_DNSSD_EN="0"

## This is used to discover hosts and advertise this host over multicast DNS.
## 1 to enable mdns (default)
## 0 to disable mdns
#CFG_MDNS_EN="0"

## ifplugd is started in the initramfs to start udhcpc, and receive an ipv4ll
## address.
## 1 to enable ifplugd (default)
## 0 to disable ifplugd
#CFG_IFPLUGD_EN="0"

## By default telnet is started on port 2323.
## 1 to enable telnet (default)
## 0 to disable telnet
##CFG_TELNET_EN="0"

## The busybox webserver is used to display a diagnostic web interface that can
## be used for development tasks such as rewriting the SD or uploading new
## software
## 1 to enable (default)
## 0 to disable
##CFG_HTTPD_EN="0"

## This eanbles a reset switch on DIO 29 (TS-7700), or DIO 9 on all of the 
## boards (except TS-7250-V2).  Pull low to reset the board immediately.
## 1 to enable the reset sw (default)
## 0 to disable
#CFG_RESETSW_EN="0"

## The console is forwarded through xuartctl which makes the cpu console available
## over telnet or serial console.
## 1 to enable network console (default)
## 0 to disable network console
#CFG_NETCONS_EN="0"

## By default Alsa will put the SGTL5000 chip into standby after 5 seconds of 
## inactivity.  This is desirable in that it results in lower power consumption,
## but it can result in an audible popping noise.  This setting prevents 
## standby so the pop is never heard.  
## 1 to disable standby
## 0 to enable standby (default)
#CFG_SGTLNOSTBY="1"

## xuartctl is used to access the FPGA uarts.  By default it is configured to
## be IRQ driven which is optimized for best latency, but at the cost of 
## additional CPU time.  You can reduce this by specifying a polling rate.
## The xuartctl process also binds to all network interfaces which can provide a 
## simple network API to access serial ports remotely.  You can restrict this to
## the local network with the bind option.
## Configure XUART polling 100hz
## Default is IRQ driven
CFG_XUARGS="--irq=100hz"
## Configure xuartctl to bind on localhost
## Default binds on all interfaces
#CFG_XUARGS="--bind 127.0.0.1 --irq=100hz"
## For a full list of arguments, see the xuartctl documentation here:
## http://docs.embeddedts.com/wiki/Xuartctl#Usage

## By default the system will probe for up to 10s on USB for a mass storage device
## and mount the first partition.  If there is an executable /tsinit script in the
## root this will be executed.  This is intended for production or updates.
## 2 to enable USB init always (adds 10s or $CFG_USBTIME to startup)
## 1 to enable USB init when jp1=0 (default)
## 0 to disable USB init always
#CFG_USBINIT="2"

## The USB init script by default blocks for 10s to detect a thumb drive that 
## contains the tsinit script.  Most flash media based drives can be detected 
## in 3s or less.  Some spinning media drives can take 10s, or potentially longer.
## This options is the number of seconds to wait before giving up on the 
## mass storage device.
#CFG_USBTIME="3"

### TS-8700
## Using the TS-8700 baseboard the board will by default initialze all of the 
## ethernet ports as individual vlan ports, eg eth0.1, eth0.2, eth0,3, and eth0.4
## The alterantive option sets Port A to eth0.1, and Ports B-D to eth0.2, or
## you can configure all ethernet ports as a single eth0 port.
## See http://docs.embeddedts.com/wiki/TS-8700 for more information
## 2 disables any vlan and passes through all interfaces to eth0
## 1 enables "WLAN" mode setting "A" as eth0.1, and all others as eth0.2
## 0 enables "VLAN" mode for 4 individual ports (default)
#CFG_4ETH="1"

### TS-4712 / TS-4720
## These boards include an onboard switch with 2 external ports.  By default
## the switch will detect if it is on a known baseboard that supports the second
## ethernet switch port, and set up VLAN rules to define eth0.1 and eth0.2.  The
## other option is to configure the switch to pass through the packets to eth0
## regarless of port.
## 2 Disable VLAN and pass through to eth0
## 1 Enable VLAN on all baseboards
## 0 Enable VLAN on supported baseboards (Default)
#CFG_2ETH="1"

Debian Configuration

For development, it is recommended to work directly in Debian on the SD card. Debian provides many more packages and a much more familiar environment for users already versed in Debian. Through Debian it is possible to configure the network, use the 'apt-get' suite to manage packages, and perform other configuration tasks. Out of the box the Debian distribution does not have any default username/password set. The account "root" is set up with no password configured. It is possible to log in via the serial console without a password but many services such as ssh will require a password set or will not allow root login at all. It is advised to set a root password and create a user account when the unit is first booted.

Note: Setting up a password for root is only feasible on the uSD image.

It is also possible to cross compile applications. Using a Debian host system will allow for installing a cross compiler to build applications. The advantage of using a Debian host system comes from compiling against libraries. Debian cross platform support allows one to install the necessary development libraries on the host, building the application on the host, and simply installing the runtime libraries on the target device. The library versions will be the same and completely compatible with each other. See the respective Debian cross compiling section for more information.

Configuring the Network

From almost any Linux system you can use "ip" or the ifconfig/route commands to initially set up the network. To configure the network interface manually you can use the same set of commands in the initramfs or Debian.

# Bring up the CPU network interface
ifconfig eth0 up

# Or if you're on a baseboard with a second ethernet port, you can use that as:
ifconfig eth1 up

# Set an ip address (assumes 255.255.255.0 subnet mask)
ifconfig eth0 192.168.0.50

# Set a specific subnet
ifconfig eth0 192.168.0.50 netmask 255.255.0.0

# Configure your route.  This is the server that provides your internet connection.
route add default gw 192.168.0.1

# Edit /etc/resolv.conf for your DNS server
echo "nameserver 192.168.0.1" > /etc/resolv.conf

Most commonly networks will offer DHCP which can be set up with one command:

Configure DHCP in Debian:

# To setup the default CPU ethernet port
dhclient eth0
# Or if you're on a baseboard with a second ethernet port, you can use that as:
dhclient eth1
# You can configure all ethernet ports for a dhcp response with
dhclient

Configure DHCP in the initrd:

udhcpc -i eth0
# Or if you're on a baseboard with a second ethernet port, you can use that as:
udhcpc -i eth1

To make your network settings take effect on startup in Debian, edit /etc/network/interfaces:

 # Used by ifup(8) and ifdown(8). See the interfaces(5) manpage or 
 # /usr/share/doc/ifupdown/examples for more information.          
                                                                   
 # We always want the loopback interface.                          
 #                                                                 
 auto lo                                                           
 iface lo inet loopback                                            
                                                                   
 auto eth0                                                         
 iface eth0 inet static                                            
   address 192.168.0.50                                            
   netmask 255.255.255.0                                           
   gateway 192.168.0.1                                             
 auto eth1                                                         
 iface eth1 inet dhcp
Note: During Debian's startup it will assign the interfaces eth0 and eth1 to the detected mac addresses in /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules. If the system is imaged while this file exists it will assign the new interfaces as eth1 and eth2. This file is generated automatically on startup, and should be removed before your first software image is created. The initrd network configuration does not use this file.

In this example eth0 is a static configuration and eth1 receives its configuration from the DHCP server. For more information on network configuration in Debian see their documentation here.

WIFI Client

This board optionally supports 802.11 through the WIFI-N-USB-2 module using the ath9k_htc driver.

Scan for a network

ifconfig wlan0 up

# Scan for available networks
iwlist wlan0 scan

In this case I'm connecting to "default" which is an open network:

          Cell 03 - Address: c0:ff:ee:c0:ff:ee
                    Mode:Managed
                    ESSID:"default"
                    Channel:2
                    Encryption key:off
                    Bit Rates:9 Mb/s

To connect to this open network:

iwconfig wlan0 essid "default"

You can use the iwconfig command to determine if you have authenticated to an access point. Before connecting it will show something similar to this:

# iwconfig wlan0
wlan0     IEEE 802.11bgn  ESSID:"default"  
          Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.417 GHz  Access Point: c0:ff:ee:c0:ff:ee   
          Bit Rate=1 Mb/s   Tx-Power=20 dBm   
          Retry  long limit:7   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Encryption key:off
          Power Management:off
          Link Quality=70/70  Signal level=-34 dBm  
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:0

If you are connecting using WEP, you will need to define a network key:

iwconfig wlan0 essid "default" key "yourpassword"

If you are connecting to WPA you will need to use wpa_passphrase and wpa_supplicant:

wpa_passphrase the_essid the_password > /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf

Now that you have the configuration file, you will need to start the wpa_supplicant daemon:

wpa_supplicant -Dwext -iwlan0 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf -B

Now you are connected to the network, but this would be close to the equivalent of connecting a network cable. To connect to the internet or talk to your internal network you will need to configure the interface. See the #Configuring the Network for more information, but commonly you can just run:

dhclient wlan0
Note: Some older images did not include the "crda" and "iw" packages required to make a wireless connection. If you cannot get an ip address you may want to connect over ethernet and install these packages with "apt-get install crda iw -y".

Host a WIFI Access Point

The software image includes a build of compat-drivers from 3.8 so a large amount of wireless devices are supported. Some devices support AP/Master mode which can be used to host an access point. The WIFI-N-USB-2 module we provide also supports this mode.

First install hostapd to manage the access point:

apt-get update && apt-get install hostapd -y

Edit /etc/hostapd/hostapd.conf to include:

interface=wlan0
driver=nl80211
ssid=YourAPName
channel=1
Note: Refer to the kernel's hostapd documentation for more wireless configuration options.

To start the access point launch hostapd:

hostapd /etc/hostapd/hostapd.conf &

This will create a valid wireless access point, however many devices will not be able to connect without either a static connection, or a DHCP server. Refer to Debian's documentation for more details on DHCP configuration.

Installing New Software

Debian provides the apt-get system which manages pre-built applications. Before packages can be installed, the list of package versions and locations needs to be updated. This assumes the device has a valid network connection to the internet.

Debian Wheezy has been moved to archive status, this requires an update of /etc/apt/sources.list to contain only the following lines:

 deb http://archive.debian.org/debian wheezy main non-free
 deb-src http://archive.debian.org/debian wheezy main non-free
apt-get update
apt-get install --allow-unauthenticated debian-archive-keyring
apt-get update

For example, lets say you wanted to install openjdk for Java support. You can use the apt-cache command to search the local cache of Debian's packages.

 <user>@<hostname>:~# apt-cache search openjdk                                                                                  
 icedtea-6-jre-cacao - Alternative JVM for OpenJDK, using Cacao                                                           
 icedtea6-plugin - web browser plugin based on OpenJDK and IcedTea to execute Java applets                                 
 openjdk-6-dbg - Java runtime based on OpenJDK (debugging symbols)                                                        
 openjdk-6-demo - Java runtime based on OpenJDK (demos and examples)                                                      
 openjdk-6-doc - OpenJDK Development Kit (JDK) documentation                                                              
 openjdk-6-jdk - OpenJDK Development Kit (JDK)                                                                            
 openjdk-6-jre-headless - OpenJDK Java runtime, using Hotspot Zero (headless)                                             
 openjdk-6-jre-lib - OpenJDK Java runtime (architecture independent libraries)                                            
 openjdk-6-jre-zero - Alternative JVM for OpenJDK, using Zero/Shark                                                       
 openjdk-6-jre - OpenJDK Java runtime, using Hotspot Zero                                                                 
 openjdk-6-source - OpenJDK Development Kit (JDK) source files                                                            
 openoffice.org - office productivity suite                                                                               
 freemind - Java Program for creating and viewing Mindmaps                                                                
 default-jdk-doc - Standard Java or Java compatible Development Kit (documentation)                                       
 default-jdk - Standard Java or Java compatible Development Kit                                                           
 default-jre-headless - Standard Java or Java compatible Runtime (headless)                                               
 default-jre - Standard Java or Java compatible Runtime                                                                   

In this case you will likely want openjdk-6-jre to provide a runtime environment, and possibly openjdk-6-jdk to provide a development environment. You can often find the names of packages from Debian's wiki or from just searching on google as well.

Once you have the package name you can use apt-get to install the package and any dependencies. This assumes you have a network connection to the internet.

apt-get install openjdk-6-jre
# You can also chain packages to be installed
apt-get install openjdk-6-jre nano vim mplayer

For more information on using apt-get refer to Debian's documentation here.

Setting up SSH

On our boards we include the Debian package for openssh-server, but we remove the automatically generated keys for security reasons. To regenerate these keys:

dpkg-reconfigure openssh-server

Make sure your board is configured properly on the network, and set a password for your remote user. SSH will not allow remote connections without a password or a shared key.

Note: Setting up a password for root is only feasible on the uSD image.
passwd root

You should now be able to connect from a remote Linux or OSX system using "ssh" or from Windows using a client such as putty.

Note: If your intended application does not have a DNS source on the target network, it can save login time to add "UseDNS no" in /etc/ssh/sshd_config.

Starting Automatically

From Debian the most straightforward way to add your application to startup is to create a startup script. This is an example simple startup script that will toggle the red led on during startup, and off during shutdown. In this case I'll name the file customstartup, but you can replace this with your application name as well.

Edit the file /etc/init.d/customstartup to contain this:

 #! /bin/sh
 # /etc/init.d/customstartup
 
 case "$1" in
   start)
     /path/to/your/application
     ## If you are launching a daemon or other long running processes
     ## this should be started with
     # nohup /usr/local/bin/yourdaemon &
     ;;
   stop)
     # if you have anything that needs to run on shutdown
     /path/to/your/shutdown/scripts
     ;;
   *)
     echo "Usage: customstartup start|stop" >&2
     exit 3
     ;;
 esac
 
 exit 0
Note: The $PATH variable is not set up by default in init scripts so this will either need to be done manually or the full path to your application must be included.

To make this run during startup and shutdown:

update-rc.d customstartup defaults

To manually start and stop the script:

/etc/init.d/customstartup start
/etc/init.d/customstartup stop

While this is useful for headless applications, if you are using X11 you should modify "/usr/bin/default-x-session":

#!/bin/sh

export HOME=/root/
export ICEWM_PRIVCFG=/mnt/root/root/.icewm/

icewm-lite &

while ! xprop -root | grep -q _NET_SUPPORTING_WM_CHECK
do
    sleep 0.1
done

exec /usr/bin/fullscreen-webkit http://127.0.0.1

Replace fullscreen-webkit with your own graphical application.

Creating a Custom Startup Splash

The default image includes a splash image that displays the TS logo. You can replace this with your own logo by replacing the files in /ts/splash/, or disable the splash screen by removing these files. The fbsplash utility that displays the splash logo in a ppm format. You can use graphics applications such as Gimp which can export to ppm, or you can use imagemagick in Linux to convert another file to ppm:

convert splash.png splash.ppm

The image resolution usually should match the screen, but otherwise it will be aligned to the upper left corner. If the system is configured to automatically boot to Debian it will display the splash screen until X11 is started.

Backup / Restore

If you are using a Windows workstation there is no support for writing directly to block devices. However, as long as one of your booting methods still can boot a kernel and the initrd you can rewrite everything by using a usb drive. This is also a good way to blast many stock boards when moving your product into production. You can find more information about this method with an example script here.

Note: Note that the MBR installed by default on this board contains a 446 byte bootloader program that loads the initial power-on kernel and initrd from the first and second partitions. Replacing it with an MBR found on a PC would not work as a PC MBR contains an x86 code bootup program.

MicroSD Card

WARNING: While tools exist for writing image from Windows or other operating systems, we do not support their use. If they are not careful to make sure the OS has not mounted the FS, or existing drivers have ceased any access to the card, they may end up with corruption that is not immediately apparent upon using the card. This may present as sublte corruption, or a card that does not boot at all. We do not encourage use of any other process other than what is described in this section.
MicroSD.png Click to download the latest 4GB SD card image.

Using onboard web interface

The initramfs contains a #Web interface that can be used to backup/restore the software image. From the main page, you can download a complete backup containing the MBR, Kernel, initramfs, and Debian filesystem by clicking "backup.dd". You can click "Choose File" and browse to a previous backup.dd, or the link above to rewrite the SD card.

Using another Linux workstation

If you do not have an SD card that can boot to the initramfs, you can download the sd card image and rewrite this from a Linux workstation. A USB MicroSD adapter can be used to access the card. First, you must find out which /dev/ device corresponds with your USB reader/writer.

Step 1 Option 1 (lsblk)


Newer distributions include a utility called "lsblk" which allows simple identification of the intended card:

lsblk
 NAME   MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
 sda      8:0    0   400G  0 disk 
 ├─sda1   8:1    0   398G  0 part /
 ├─sda2   8:2    0     1K  0 part 
 └─sda5   8:5    0     2G  0 part [SWAP]
 sr0     11:0    1  1024M  0 rom  
 sdc      8:32   1   3.9G  0 disk 
 ├─sdc1   8:33   1   7.9M  0 part 
 ├─sdc2   8:34   1     2M  0 part 
 ├─sdc3   8:35   1     2M  0 part 
 └─sdc4   8:36   1   2.8G  0 part  

In this case my SD card is 4GB, so sdc is the target device.

Step 1 Option 2 (dmesg)


After plugging in the device, you can use dmesg to list

 scsi 9:0:0:0: Direct-Access     Generic  Storage Device   0.00 PQ: 0 ANSI: 2
 sd 9:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 0
 sd 9:0:0:0: [sdb] 7744512 512-byte logical blocks: (3.96 GB/3.69 GiB)

In this case, sdc is shown as a 3.96GB card.

Step 2


Once you have the target /dev/ device you can use "dd" to backup/restore the card. To restore the board to stock, or rewrite to the latest SD image:

wget https://files.embeddedTS.com/ts-socket-macrocontrollers/ts-4710-linux/binaries/ts-images/4gbsd-471x-latest.dd.bz2
bzip2 -d 4gbsd-471x-latest.dd.bz2

# Specify your block device instead of /dev/sdc
# Note that this does not include a partition, so use /dev/sdc instead of
# using /dev/sdc1
dd if=4gbsd-471x-latest.dd conv=fsync bs=4M of=/dev/sdc

To take a backup of your entire SD card, you can switch the input file and the output file:

dd if=/dev/sdc conv=fsync bs=4M of=backup.dd

Software Development

Most of our examples are going to be in C, but Debian will include support for many more programming languages. Including (but not limited to) C++, PERL, PHP, SH, Java, BASIC, TCL, and Python. Most of the functionality from our software examples can be done from using system calls to run our userspace utilities. For higher performance, you will need to either use C/C++ or find functionally equivalent ways to perform the same actions as our examples. Our userspace applications are all designed to go through a TCP interface. By looking at the source for these applications, you can learn our protocol for communicating with the hardware interfaces in any language.

The most common method of development is directly on the SBC. Since debian has space available on the SD card, we include the build-essentials package which comes with everything you need to do C/C++ development on the board.


Editors

Vim is a very common editor to use in Linux. While it isn't the most intuitive at a first glance, you can run 'vimtutor' to get a ~30 minute instruction on how to use this editor. Once you get past the initial learning curve it can make you very productive. You can find the vim documentation here.

Emacs is another very common editor. Similar to vim, it is difficult to learn but rewarding in productivity. You can find documentation on emacs here.

Nano while not as commonly used for development is the easiest. It doesn't have as many features to assist in code development, but is much simpler to begin using right away. If you've used 'edit' on Windows/DOS, this will be very familiar. You can find nano documentation here.

Compilers

We only recommend the gnu compiler collection. There are many other commercial compilers which can also be used, but will not be supported by us. You can install gcc on most boards in Debian by simply running 'apt-get update && apt-get install build-essential'. This will include everything needed for standard development in c/c++.

You can find the gcc documentation here. You can find a simple hello world tutorial for c++ with gcc here.

Build tools

When developing your application typing out the compiler commands with all of your arguments would take forever. The most common way to handle these build systems is using a make file. This lets you define your project sources, libraries, linking, and desired targets. You can read more about makefiles here.

If you are building an application intended to be more portable than on this one system, you can also look into the automake tools which are intended to help make that easier. You can find an introduction to the autotools here.

Cmake is another alternative which generates a makefile. This is generally simpler than using automake, but is not as mature as the automake tools. You can find a tutorial here.

Debuggers

Linux has a few tools which are very helpful for debugging code. The first of which is gdb (part of the gnu compiler collection). This lets you run your code with breakpoints, get backgraces, step forward or backward, and pick apart memory while your application executes. You can find documentation on gdb here.

Strace will allow you to watch how your application interacts with the running kernel which can be useful for diagnostics. You can find the manual page here.

Ltrace will do the same thing with any generic library. You can find the manual page here.

Accessing Hardware Registers

The standard assumption in Linux is that kernel drivers are required in order to control hardware. However, it is also possible to talk to hardware devices from user space. In doing so, one does not have to be aware of the Linux kernel development process. This is the recommended way of accessing hardware on a TS-SOCKET system. The special /dev/mem device implements a way to access the physical memory from the protected user space, allowing reading and writing to any specific memory register. Applications may be allowed temporary access through memory space windows granted by the mmap() system call applied to the /dev/mem device node.

The following C code is provided as an example of how to set up user space access to the SYSCON registers at base address 0x80004000:

#include <sys/mman.h>
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <sys/stat.h>
#include <fcntl.h>
#include <assert.h>
static volatile unsigned short *syscon;
static unsigned short peek16(unsigned int adr) {
	return syscon[adr / 2];
}
static void poke16(unsigned int adr, unsigned short val) {
	syscon[adr / 2] = val;
}

int main(void) {
        int devmem = open("/dev/mem", O_RDWR|O_SYNC);

	assert(devmem != -1);
	syscon = (unsigned short *) mmap(0, 4096,
	  PROT_READ | PROT_WRITE, MAP_SHARED, devmem, 0x80004000);

        poke16(0x6, 0x3); // disable watchdog
        poke16(0x12, peek16(0x12) | 0x1800); // turn on both LEDs

        return 0;
}

Important Notes about the preceding example:

  • The peek16 and poke16 wrapper functions make the code more readable due to how pointer arithmetic/array indexing works in C, since the same offsets from the register map appear in the code.
  • Make sure to open using O_SYNC, otherwise you may get a cachable MMU mapping which, unless you know what you're doing, probably is not what you want when dealing with hardware registers.
  • mmap() must be called only on pagesize (4096 byte) boundaries and size must at least have pagesize granularity.
  • Only the root user can open '/dev/mem'. For testing, this just means the tester needs to be root, which is normal in embedded Linux. For deployment in the field under Debian, this can be an issue because the init process does not have root privileges. To get around this, make sure the binary is owned by root and has the setuid bit set. The command 'chmod +s mydriver' will set the setuid flag.
  • The pointers into memory space should have the same bit width as the registers they are accessing. In the example above, the TS-4710 FPGA registers are 16 bits wide, so an unsigned short pointer is used. With very few exceptions, FPGA registers on TS-SOCKET macrocontrollers will be 16 bits wide and CPU registers will be 32 bits wide. Unsigned int, unsigned short, and unsigned char pointers should be used for 32, 16, and 8 bit registers, respectively.
  • When compiling ARM code that emits 16 bit or 8 bit hardware register accesses, it is important to add the compiler switch -mcpu=arm9. Otherwise the wrong opcodes may be emitted by the compiler and unexpected behavior will occur.
  • Pointers into memory space must be declared as volatile.

Graphical Development

For drawing interfaces in linux there are a few options. To speak at the lower levels, you can use DirectFB or X11. If you want to draw a simple user interface at a much higher level you should use a graphical toolkit as listed below.

Linux has 3 major toolkits used for developing interfaces. These include QT, GTK, and WxWidgets. For development you may want to build the interface on your desktop PC, and then connect with any specific hardware functionality when it runs on the board. You should also be aware of the versions of GTK, QT, and WX widgets available in the current provided distribution as their APIs can all change significantly between versions. These examples below should help get you started in compiling a graphical hello world application, but for further development you will need to refer to the documentation for the specific toolkits.

QT

http://qt.digia.com/


Development environment available for Windows, Linux, and Mac. The most common utility used is QT Creator which includes the IDE, UI designer, GDB, VCS, a help system, as well as integration with their own build system. See QT's documentation for a complete list of features. QT can connect with our cross compilers. If you are working with Linux you can use the same cross compiler and connect it with qtcreator. QT also offers professional training from their website. QT has a large range of supported language bindings, but is natively written with C++.

Hello world example

Install the build dependencies

# Make sure you have a valid network connection
# This will take a while to download and install.
apt-get update && apt-get install libqt4-dev qt4-dev-tools build-essential -y

For deployment you only need the runtime libraries. These are divided up by functionality, so use 'apt-cache search' to find the necessary qt4 modules for your project. You can also use the 'libqt4-dev' for deployment, it just may contain more than you need.

This simple hello world app resizes the window when you press the button.

'qtexample.cpp'

#include <QApplication>
#include <QPushButton>

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
        QApplication app(argc, argv);

        QPushButton hello("Hello world!");
        hello.resize(100, 30);

        hello.show();

        return app.exec();
}

To compile it:

# Generate the project file
qmake -project

# generate a Makefile
qmake

# build it (will take approximately 25 seconds)
make

This will create the project named after the directory you are in. In this example I'm in /root/ so the binary is 'root'.

# DISPLAY is not defined from the serial console
# but you do not need to specify it if running 
# xterm on the display.
DISPLAY=:0 ./root

Official Documentation

QT for beginners

GTK GTK

http://www.gtk.org/


GTK Development is possible on Windows, Linux, and Mac, but will be significantly easier if done from Linux. Typically you would use the Anjuta IDE which includes IDE, UI designer (GtkBuilder/glade), GDB, VCS, devhelp, and integration with the autotools as a built system. This is only available for Linux. GTK also has a large range of supported bindings, though is natively written in C.

Hello world example

Install the build dependencies

# Make sure you have a valid network connection
# This will take a while to download and install.
apt-get update && apt-get install libgtk2.0-dev pkg-config build-essential -y

For deployment you only need the runtime library 'libgtk2.0-0'. The below example will echo to the terminal the application is run from every time you press the button.

main.c

#include <gtk/gtk.h>

static void hello_cb(GtkWidget *widget, gpointer data)
{
        g_print ("Hello World\n");
}

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
        GtkWidget *window;
        GtkWidget *button;

        gtk_init(&argc, &argv);

        window = gtk_window_new(GTK_WINDOW_TOPLEVEL);
        button = gtk_button_new_with_label("Hello World");

        g_signal_connect(button, "clicked", G_CALLBACK(hello_cb), NULL);
        gtk_container_add(GTK_CONTAINER(window), button);

        gtk_widget_show_all(window);
        gtk_main();

        return 0;
}

To compile this:

gcc main.c -o test `pkg-config --cflags --libs gtk+-2.0`

To run this example:

# DISPLAY is not defined from the serial console
# but you do not need to specify it if running 
# xterm on the display.
DISPLAY=:0 ./test

Hello world tutorial. This uses the simplest example as it does not use any interface design and creates all widgets from code.

Micah Carrick's GTK/glade tutorial. This will show you how to use the Glade designer (integrated with Anjuta as well) to create an xml description for your interface, and how to load this in your code.

Official Documentation

wxWidgets

http://www.wxwidgets.org/


wxWidgets is a cross platform graphics library that uses the native toolkit of whichever platform it is on. It will draw winforms on Windows, and GTK on Linux. While wxWidgets has many tools available for development, Code::Blocks seems the most recommended as it includes wxSmith for designing the user interface, as well as including an IDE and GDB support. The wxWidgets toolkit has some binding support, and is natively written in C++.

Hello world example

Install the build dependencies

# Make sure you have a valid network connection
# This will take a while to download and install.
apt-get update && apt-get install wx2.8-headers wx2.8-i18n libwxgtk2.8-dev build-essential -y

The below example will simply draw a frame that prints 'hello world'.

main.cpp

#include "wx/wx.h"
 
class HelloWorldApp : public wxApp
{
public:
        virtual bool OnInit();
};
 
DECLARE_APP(HelloWorldApp)

IMPLEMENT_APP(HelloWorldApp)
 
// This is executed upon startup, like 'main()' in non-wxWidgets programs.
bool HelloWorldApp::OnInit()
{
        wxFrame *frame = new wxFrame((wxFrame*) NULL, -1, _T("Hello wxWidgets World"));
        frame->CreateStatusBar();
        frame->SetStatusText(_T("Hello World"));
        frame->Show(true);
        SetTopWindow(frame);
        return true;
}

To compile this example:

g++ main.cpp  `wx-config --cxxflags --libs` -o test

To run this example:

# DISPLAY is not defined from the serial console
# but you do not need to specify it if running 
# xterm on the display.
DISPLAY=:0 ./test

Official Tutorials

Official Documentation

Wiki


The TS-8390-47xx also gives the downstream developer access to a fullscreen-webkit solution allowing for extremely rapid solution deployment and UI development through the use of HTML5 and other web interface technologies. Simply replace /var/www/index.html with your choice of local content, or even point the webkit at remote content via editing either /usr/bin/x-session-manager (if you prefer booting the system to full Debian), or /ts/initramfs-xinit (recommended for systems using only remote content).

Cross Compiling

While you can develop entirely on the board itself, if you prefer to develop from another x86 compatible Linux system we have a cross compiler available. For this board you will want to use this toolchain. To compile your application, you only need to use the version of GCC in the cross toolchain instead of the version supplied with your distribution. The resulting binary will be for ARM.

[user@localhost]$ /opt/arm-2008q3/bin/arm-none-linux-gnueabi-gcc hello.c -o hello
[user@localhost]$ file hello
hello: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, ARM, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked (uses shared libs), for GNU/Linux 2.6.14, not stripped

This is one of the simplest examples. If you want to work with a project, you will typically create a makefile. You can read more about makefiles here. Another common requirement is linking to third party libraries provided by Debian on the board. There is no exact set of steps you can take for every project, but the process will be very much the same. Find the headers, and the libraries. Sometimes you have to also copy over their binaries. In this example, I will link to sqlite from Debian (which will also work in the Ubuntu image).

Install the sqlite library and header on the board:

apt-get update && apt-get install -y libsqlite3-0 libsqlite-dev

This will fetch the binaries from the internet and install them. You can list the installed files with dpkg:

dpkg -L libsqlite3-0 libsqlite3-dev

The interesting files from this output will be the .so files, and the .h files. In this case you will need to copy these files to your project directory.

I have a sample example with libsqlite3 below. This is not intended to provide any functionality, but just call functions provided by sqlite.

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include "sqlite3.h"

int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
	sqlite3 *db;
	char *zErrMsg = 0;
	int rc;
	printf("opening test.db\n");
	rc = sqlite3_open("test.db", &db);
	if(rc){
		fprintf(stderr, "Can't open database: %s\n", sqlite3_errmsg(db));
		sqlite3_close(db);
		exit(1);
	}
	if(rc!=SQLITE_OK){
		fprintf(stderr, "SQL error: %s\n", zErrMsg);
	}
	printf("closing test.db\n");
	sqlite3_close(db);
	return 0;
}

To build this with the external libraries I have the makefile below. This will have to be adjusted for your toolchain path. In this example I placed the headers in external/include and the library in external/lib.

CC=/opt/arm-2008q3/bin/arm-none-linux-gnueabi-gcc
CFLAGS=-c -Wall

all: sqlitetest

sqlitetest: sqlitetest.o
        $(CC) sqlitetest.o external/lib/libsqlite3.so.0 -o sqlitetest
sqlitetest.o: sqlitetest.c
        $(CC) $(CFLAGS) sqlitetest.c -Iexternal/include/

clean:  
        rm -rf *o sqlitetest.o sqlitetest

You can then copy this directly to the board and execute it. There are many ways to transfer the compiled binaries to the board. Using a network filesystem such as sshfs or NFS will be the simplest to use if you are frequently updating data, but will require more setup. See your linux distribution's manual for more details. The simplest network method is using ssh/sftp. You can use winscp if from windows, or scp from linux. Make sure you set a password from debian for root or set up a shared key. Otherwise the ssh server will deny connections. From winscp, enter the ip address of the SBC, the root username, and the password you have set or the use of a shared key. This will provide you with an explorer window you can drag files into.

Note: Setting up a password for root is only feasible on the uSD image.

For scp in linux, run:

#replace with your app name and your SBC IP address
scp sqlitetest root@192.168.0.50:/root/

After transferring the file to the board, execute it:

ts:~# ./sqlitetest 
opening test.db
closing test.db

Compile the Kernel

For adding new support to the kernel, or recompiling with more specific options you will need to have an X86 compatible linux host available that can handle the cross compiling. Compiling the kernel on the board is not supported or recommended. Before building the kernel you will need to install a few support libraries on your workstation:

Prerequisites

RHEL/Fedora/CentOS:

yum install ncurses-devel ncurses
yum groupinstall "Development Tools" "Development Libraries"

Ubuntu/Debian:

sudo apt-get install build-essential libncurses5-dev libncursesw5-dev git
## If you are on a 64-bit system then 32-bit libraries will be required for the toolchain
# sudo apt-get install ia32-libs
# On newer distributions with Multiarch support:
#sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386
#sudo apt-get update
#sudo apt-get install libc6-dev:i386 zlib1g-dev:i386

For other distributions, please refer to their documentation to find equivalent tools.

Set up the Sources and Toolchain

# Download the cross compile toolchain (EABI)from Technologic Systems:
wget ftp://ftp.embeddedTS.com/ts-socket-macrocontrollers/ts-4700-linux/cross-toolchains/arm-2008q3.tar.gz

# Extract the toolchain
tar xvf arm-2008q3.tar.gz

# Move arm-2008q3 to a permanent location, eg /opt/toolchains/
mkdir /opt/toolchains/
mv arm-2008q3 /opt/toolchains/

# Download the Kernel sources
git clone https://github.com/embeddedTS/linux-2.6.34-ts471x.git

cd linux-2.6.34-ts471x

# Set the CROSS_COMPILE variable to the absolute path to the toolchain.
export CROSS_COMPILE=/opt/toolchains/arm-2008q3/bin/arm-none-linux-gnueabi-
export ARCH=arm

# This sets up the default configuration that we ship with for the TS-471x
make ts471x_defconfig

Once you have the configuration ready you can make your changes to the kernel. Commonly a reason for recompiling is to add support that was not built into the standard image's kernel. You can get a menu to browse available options by running:

make menuconfig

You can use the "/" key to search for specific terms through the kernel.

Build the kernel

Once you have it configured you can begin building the kernel. This usually takes about 5-10 minutes.

make

The new kernel will be at "arch/arm/boot/Image".

Install the Kernel and Modules

Install the target SD card in your workstation, and mount the Debian partition. For example, if your workstation's SD card is /dev/sdb:

# Update this to point to your SD card block device
export DEV=/dev/sdb
sudo mkdir /mnt/sd/
sudo dd if=arch/arm/boot/zImage of="$DEV"1 conv=fsync
sudo mount "$DEV"2 /mnt/sd/
INSTALL_MOD_PATH=/mnt/sd/ sudo -E make modules_install
INSTALL_HDR_PATH=/mnt/sd/ sudo -E make headers_install
sudo umount /mnt/sd/
sync

Build compat-drivers (optional)

Optionally if you use the WIFI-N-USB2 module or another recent USB wireless device you can build "compat-drivers" which provides more recent compatibility on this kernel.

# Assuming you are still in the 2.6.34 kernel directory
cd ../
export ARCH=arm
export CROSS_COMPILE=/opt/toolchains/arm-2008q3/bin/arm-none-linux-gnueabi-

# Update this to point to your SD card block device
export DEV=/dev/sdb
export KLIB=/mnt/sd
# Update these paths to point to the linux tree
export KLIB_BUILD=../linux-2.6.34-ts471x/

wget http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/projects/backports/stable/v3.8.3/compat-drivers-3.8.3-2-snpu.tar.bz2 && \
tar xf compat-drivers-3.8.3-2-snpu.tar.bz2 && \
cd compat-drivers-3.8.3-2-snpu/ && \
make && \
sudo mount "$DEV"2 /mnt/sd/ && \
INSTALL_MOD_PATH=/mnt/sd/ sudo -E make install-modules && \
sudo umount /mnt/sd/ && \
sync

Features

CPU

The TS-4710 supports the PXA166 from Marvell's Armada 100 series. The common features will be described in other sections, but for more details see the CPU user guide.

Feature PXA166 (88AP166)
Frequency 800MHz
Video Playback Acceleration (gstreamer) Supported up to D1
Maximum Framebuffer Resolution Up to WUXGA

MicroSD Card Interface

This System-on-Module (SoM) uses our SD controller implementation which supports microSD, microSDHC, and microSDXC cards. This controller has been tested with Sandisk Extreme SD cards which allow read speeds up to 20.5MB/s, and write speeds up to 21.5MB/s.

The support for the SD controller is provided by sdctl which serves up a /dev/nbd0 for the entire block device. The kernel also includes a module that will break this up into partitions. Our default software image contains 2 partitions:

Device Contents
/dev/nbd0 SD Card block device
/dev/nbd0p1 Kernel and initramfs
/dev/nbd0p2 Full Linux Root

DoubleStore

This series supports DoubleStore which can be used to significantly increase the reliability of SD cards. This allows one SD image to be written to two cards allowing redundancy among both SD cards. See our white paper for more information on the concept. Development can take place with a single MicroSD card, but for using DoubleStore 2 MicroSD cards are used.

The default SD image is 3GB which is designed to fit in a dual-card Doublestore configuration. When dual card doublestore is used it stores the same image on both cards and also includes metadata and checksums for the entire image.

You can use the dblstorctl utility to work with DoubleStore on your Linux workstation. The simplest way to get doublestore set up is to first take a backup of your SD image, and then use dblstorctl on a workstation to convert it:

export INPUTIMAGE="yourimagebackup.dd"
eval $(stat -c "imgsize=%s" $INPUTIMAGE)
dblstorctl --primary ${INPUTIMAGE}.dblstor --fallback ${INPUTIMAGE}.dblstor.fallback --init --writeimg "$INPUTIMAGE" --size=${imgsize}B

This will output yourimagebackup.dd.dblstor which can be written directly to both SD cards:

dd if=yourimagebackup.dd.dblstor bs=4M conv=fsync of=/dev/sdb # replace sdb with your SD card device

The board will boot the same using the DoubleStore MicroSD cards, but sdctl includes additional information:

# sdctl --stats
nbdpid=338
nbd_readreqs=1508
nbd_read_blks=95490
nbd_writereqs=0
nbd_write_blks=0
nbd_seek_past_eof_errs=0
sdcard_resets=4
read_seeks=1261
write_seeks=0
size=0x641800
humanized_size=3.35GB
fb_offset=-6559744
primary_tainted=0
primary_failed=0
fallback_tainted=0
fallback_failed=0
resilver_pct_done=0
lifetime_write_blks=59038888
humanized_lifetime_write_blks=30.22GB
errors=0
unrecoverable_errors=0
conflicts=0
fallback_configuration="separate disk"

fallback_configuration should read "seperate disk" when booting doublestore correctly. For diagnostics, the tainted and failed settings are the most relevant:

primary_tainted=0
primary_failed=0
fallback_tainted=0
fallback_failed=0

When a card is tainted, the LED near the card will begin to blink. This indicates Doublestore has seen the card perform an unexpected behavior that DoubleStore was able to correct.

Interrupts

We include a userspace IRQ patch in our kernels. This allows you to receive interrupts from your applications where you would normally have to write a kernel driver. This works by creating a file for each interrupt in '/proc/irq/<irqnum>/irq'. The new irq file allows you to block on a read on the file until an interrupt fires.

The original patch is documented here.

The Linux kernel supports up to 16 IRQs from the FPGA. When the CPU receives an IRQ from the FPGA, it uses the IRQ register in the #Syscon to find out which IRQ on the MUX is triggering. Currently only three IRQs are used. Off-board IRQs 5, 6, and 7 correspond to FPGA IRQs 0, 1, and 2, respectively. FPGA IRQs 3 to 15 are reserved for future uses. If the DIO pins are not being used as IRQs, they can be masked out by writing 0 to the corresponding bit in the IRQ mask register.

IRQ # Name Socket Location
49 Combined GPIO Interrupt Any MFP pin
64 XUART IRQ N/A
65 CAN1 IRQ N/A
66 CAN 2 IRQ N/A
67 IRQ5/DIO_00[1] CN1-93
68 IRQ6/DIO_01[1] CN1-91
69 IRQ7/DIO_02[1] CN1-89
70 EVGPIO N/A
  1. 1.0 1.1 1.2 The PC/104 IRQs need to have the MUXBUS bus enabled in order to function as IRQs

This example below will work with any of our products that support userspace IRQs. It opens the IRQ number specified in the first argument, and prints when it detects an IRQ.

#include <stdio.h>
#include <fcntl.h>
#include <sys/select.h>
#include <sys/stat.h>
#include <unistd.h>

int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
	char proc_irq[32];
	int ret, irqfd = 0;
	int buf; // Holds irq junk data
	fd_set fds;

	if(argc < 2) {
		printf("Usage: %s <irq number>\n", argv[0]);
		return 1;
	}

	snprintf(proc_irq, sizeof(proc_irq), "/proc/irq/%d/irq", atoi(argv[1]));
	irqfd = open(proc_irq, O_RDONLY| O_NONBLOCK, S_IREAD);

	if(irqfd == -1) {
		printf("Could not open IRQ %s\n", argv[1]);
		return 1;
	}
	
	while(1) {
		FD_SET(irqfd, &fds); //add the fd to the set
		// See if the IRQ has any data available to read
		ret = select(irqfd + 1, &fds, NULL, NULL, NULL);
		
		if(FD_ISSET(irqfd, &fds))
		{
			FD_CLR(irqfd, &fds);  //Remove the filedes from set
			printf("IRQ detected\n");
			
			// Clear the junk data in the IRQ file
			read(irqfd, &buf, sizeof(buf));
		}
		
		//Sleep, or do any other processing here
		usleep(10000);
	}
	
	return 0;
}

Any of the MFP pins can be repurposed to trigger IRQ 49. For example, to make MFP_46 (CN2_72) trigger on a rising edge:

# Enable rising edge detection on MFP_46
peekpoke 32 0xD4019034 0x4000

# Unmask MFP_46
peekpoke 32 0xD40190A0 0x4000

# to clear the interrupt after it has been triggered
peekpoke 32 0xD401904c 0x4000

See page 169 of the CPU manual for more information on the interrupt controller.

External Reset

The external reset pin (DIO 9) will reset the CPU by default when it is low. You can disable this functionality to use this as a DIO by running:

tshwctl --resetswitchoff

This can be disabled with the CFG_RESETSW_EN=0 option in the #Initramfs.

RTC

The RTC is accessed using tshwctl. This is automatically retrieved on startup, but must be set manually.

# Save the running system clock to the RTC
tshwctl --setrtc

# Set the system clock from the RTC
tshwctl --getrtc

NVRAM

The RTC has an included 128-byte battery-backed NVRAM which can be accessed using tshwctl. Its contents will remain with the main power off, so long as the RTC battery is installed and withing a valid voltage range.

tshwctl --nvram

This will return a format such as:

 nvram0=0xf7f8a73e
 nvram1=0x2fef5ae0
 nvram2=0x48ca4278
 ...
 nvram31=0x70544510

This breaks up the NVRAM into 32 32-bit registers which can be accessed in bash. As this uses the name=value output, "eval" can be used for simple parsing:

eval `tshwctl --nvram`
echo $nvram2

From the above value, this would return 0x48ca4278. To set values, the respective environment variable name can be set:

nvram0=0x42 tshwctl --nvram

Note that the command 'tshwctl --nvram' will output the current contents of NVRAM before setting any new values. At this point, running 'tshwctl --nvram' once more will print the updated contents for verification. This can be used for reading a 32-bit quantity and updating it with a single command.

Temperature Sensor

This System-on-Module includes temperature sensors located on the CPU and RTC. Both of these can be read using tshwctl:

tshwctl --rtctemp
tshwctl --cputemp

Both of these will return the temperature in millicelsius.

LEDs

On all of our baseboards we include 2 indicator LEDs which are under software control. You can manipulate these using tshwctl --greenledon --redledon or tshwctl --greenledoff --redledoff. The LEDs have 4 behaviors from default software. The LEDs are also controllable via the Syscon register at offset 0x12.

Green Behavior Red behavior Meaning
Solid On Off System is booted and running
Solid On On for approximately 15s, then off Once the system has booted the kernel and executed the startup script, it will check for a USB device and then determine if it is a mass storage device. This is used for updates/blasting through USB. Once it determines this is not a mass storage device the red LED will turn back off.
On for 10s, off for 100ms, and repeating Turns on after Green turns off for 300ms, and then turns off for 10s The watchdog is continuously resetting the board. This happens when the system cannot find a valid boot device, or the watchdog is otherwise not being fed. This is normally fed by tshwctl once a valid boot media has started. See the #Watchdog section for more details.
Off Off The FPGA is not able to start. Typically either the board is not being supplied with enough voltage, or the FPGA has been otherwise damaged. If a stable 5 V is being provided and the supply is capable of providing at least 1 A to the System-on-Module (SoM), an RMA is suggested.
Blinking about 5ms on, about 10ms off. Blinking about 5ms on, about 10ms off. The board is receiving too little power, or something is drawing too much current from the SoM's power rails.

LCD Interface

This interface presents a standard 24 bit LCD video output. The Linux operating system we provide includes drivers for the framebuffer device and X11 support. If you are using our displays the driver is typically set up in the init-xorgenv file in the initrd which will detect which display you are using and set up the resolution accordingly.

See the #Graphical Development section of the manual for more details on examples on drawing to this interface.

For the specifics of this interface for custom baseboard implementations please refer to the CPU manual.

Web Interface

This System-on-Module includes a web interface that can be used to simplify common tasks when working with our embedded systems. Note that this is only available in the initramfs, and not the full Debian boot.

Uploading files


On the main page you can select a file and upload. These have various functions depending on the file extensions:

Filename/Extension Description
*.vme.bz2 Upload FPGA to be soft reloaded automatically on startup. This will be copied to /ts/ path in the Linux root filesystem.
ko.tar.bz2 While most kernel modules will be loaded automatically when needed, if you include a ko.tar.bz2 this will insmod each file in the archive automatically on startup. This will be copied to the /ts/ path in the linux root filesystem.
init If this file exists and the JP1 is not set, the board will boot to the initramfs and execute this script. This can be used to have an application automatically run on startup without proceeding with the Linux root filesystem's traditionally lengthy startup. This can have an application running within seconds after power-on. The $PATH variable is set up to be able to resolve most applications in the Linux root filesystem, and the libraries of the full distribution are available. As this does not run through the normal startup, any running services or network configuration will need to be started manually.
Image, zImage, kernel*.dd This will automatically replace the first partition containing the Kernel.
root*.dd This will completely replace the second partition with the uploaded dd file.
mbr.dd|mbr*.dd Replace the MBR on the current boot image.
*.dd Any file not caught by one of the previous *.dd filenames will entirely replace the SD image.
*.sh Any file named *.sh will automatically be copied to /tmp, set as executable and run.
root*.tar This will remove all data from the Linux root filesystem and replace it with the contents of the uploaded root*.tar file.
src*.tar This will extract the contents to the /ts/ directory in the Linux root filesystem and if present, execute the Makefile. This could be used to build a project, and automatically install it.
*.c *.cpp Any uploaded C/C++ file will automatically be compiled and executed. The applications stdout will be printed out to the web page.
* Any other files not captured by a previous pattern will be copied to the /ts/ path in the Linux root filesystem.

Any uploaded file can be compressed with bzip2 or gzip before uploading. The file will be decompressed and then processed as normal as described in the above table.

Downloading Files


On the main page there is a download link for 4 files. Any downloaded file will be renamed to contain the date in the format date -Iminutes.

Filename Description
backup.dd This is a backup containing the MBR, Kernel/initramfs, and Linux root filesystem.
root.dd This is a backup of a complete dd of the Linux root filesystem.
root.tar The root.tar contains a complete tar of the contents in the root filesystem.
kernel.dd This file contains a copy of the kernel and initramfs.

Duplicating an SD card


This page can be used to either duplicate an SD card, or convert a software image to a single or dual DoubleStore card configuration. When this page is loaded it copies the kernel/initramfs to ram. You will need to have the root.tar downloaded before continuing.

Once you have loaded this page and you have a copy of the root.tar, you can either remove the current SD card, or leave it in if you intend to convert it to DoubleStore. On step 2, you can select "Standard" to write a new SD card without DoubleStore, or you can create a single or dual card configuration. Click "Format card" after selecting either option.

After being formatted you can upload the root*.tar file to reformat the rest of the card. Once this is completed, you can reboot to test out the card, or restart the procedure to create another card.

Find other TS-41XX devices


By default this board broadcasts itself using multicast DNS which can be used to detect all other similar boards on the network. This will print out the last 6 of the MAC address which can be used to uniquely identify each board.

Ethernet Port

The Marvell processor implements a 10/100 ethernet controller with support built into the Linux kernel. You can use standard Linux utilities such as ifconfig/ip to control this interface. See the #Configuring the Network section for more details. For the specifics of this interface see the CPU manual.

Note: Ethernet Magnetics should be placed as close to CN2 as possible on the base board.

DIO

This board uses both CPU and a DIO controller in the FPGA.

The CPU DIO typically has 1-7 functions associated with various pins (I2C, PWM, SPI, etc). See the CPU manual for the complete listing and for information on how to control these DIO. For purposes of identity, all FPGA DIO will be labelled DIO_n (where n is the DIO pin number), and all CPU dio will be labelled MFP_n.

CPU DIO

Full details on CPU pins can be found in the CPU manual, along with mode and mapping assignments specific to the CPU. The MFP pins can have multiple functions and not all default to GPIO, so understanding each one you wish to modify is important to your development process. The MFP definition registers are described in the CPU manual starting in Section A1, pages A7 through A12 (note these are appendix pages). This wiki will assume the reader already has a thorough understanding of these settings and is comfortable moving forward using them as a GPIO. NOTE: The default TS boot scripts set some MFP pins up with functions other than the default functionality. It is important to set the MFP you wish to use to the function you desire before using it. Do not assume default functionality is present on all MFP pins. The base address for the MFP alternate function block is at 0xD401E000, each MFP pin has its own address as listed in the table starting on page A-7. Alternate function definitions start in the table on page 58.

The CPU GPIO are divided into four banks, GPIO bank 0 through 3. These banks are controlled by several registers. Full information on these registers is found in the CPU manual starting at page A-832. The most important registers for general GPIO usage are the bit-value register (GPIO_GPLR / GPIO_PLR0-3), the GPIO direction register (GPIO_GPDR / GPIO_PDR0-3), the GPIO Output Set register (GPIO_GPSR / GPIO_GPIO_PSR0-3), and the GPIO Output Clear Register (GPIO_GPCR / GPIO_PCR0-3). The GPIO section in the CPU manual contains a typo in the GPIO control base address. The correct base address is 0xD4019000.


It can be generally assumed MFP # and GPIO bit # are identical for the purposes of this table.

Register Name Address Offset GPIO Start (bit 0) GPIO End (bit 31) Function
GPIO_PLR0 0x0000 0 31 DIO Data (RO)
GPIO_PLR1 0x0004 32 63
GPIO_PLR2 0x0008 64 95
GPIO_PLR3 0x0100 96 122
GPIO_PDR0 0x000c 0 31 DIO Direction
GPIO_PDR1 0x0010 32 63
GPIO_PDR2 0x0014 64 95
GPIO_PDR3 0x010c 96 122
GPIO_PSR0 0x0018 0 31 DIO Set
GPIO_PSR1 0x001c 32 63
GPIO_PSR2 0x0020 64 95
GPIO_PSR3 0x0118 96 122
GPIO_PCR0 0x0024 0 31 DIO Clear
GPIO_PCR1 0x0028 32 63
GPIO_PCR2 0x002c 64 95
GPIO_PCR3 0x0124 96 122

There are also edge-detect registers that work via set and status bits documented in the CPU manual, see section A.36.5 starting at page A-386.

FPGA DIO

All FPGA DIO are controlled by three distinct register types: Direction, Input Data, and Output Data. To use any DIO pin, the direction register must be set (0 for input, 1 for output), then either the input register may be read, or the output register may be written to. These registers are described in the Syscon memory table.

For example, to write to DIO_0, bit 0 (the LSB) of 0x80004018 (The direction register for DIO_0 through DIO_14) must be set high, then the desired value (high = 1 low = 0) should be written to bit 0 of 0x80004010 (the Output Data register for DIO_0 through DIO_14). Alternatively to read the status of that pin, the Direction Register must be set low, then bit zero of 0x80004020 would reflect the status of that pin.

All 60 of the DIO from the FPGA will default to the DIO mode. These pins coming from the FPGA are all 3.3V tolerant. To manipulate these DIO you can access the #Syscon.

Bit masking: Any bits not expressly mentioned here should be masked out. Direction setting: 0 is input, 1 is output.

For simple operations you can use tshwctl to set the FPGA DIO pins:

# Set DIO 30 as a high output
tshwctl --setdio 30

# Set DIO 30 as a low output
tshwctl --clrdio 30

# Read the input value of DIO 42, 43, 44
# This will set the pin to an input and return the value
tshwctl --getdio 42,43,44
DIO Number Location Alternate Function
19 DIO Header pin 9 SPI_MISO
MFP_38 [1] DIO Header pin 11 SPI_CS2#
18 DIO Header pin 12 SPI_MOSI
17 DIO Header pin 13 SPI_CS1#
20 DIO Header pin 14 SPI_CLK
MFP_48 [1] DIO Header pin 17
28 DIO Header pin 19
26 DIO Header pin 20
8 DIO Header pin 21
24 DIO Header pin 22
9 DIO Header pin 23 #External Reset
23 DIO Header pin 24
22 DIO Header pin 25
2 DIO Header pin 26 Offboard IRQ 69
3 DIO Header pin 27 12.5MHz Clock
1 DIO Header pin 28 Offboard IRQ 68
4 DIO Header pin 29 XUART 5 CTS
0 DIO Header pin 30
MFP_37[1] DIO Header pin 31
MFP_45[1] DIO Header pin 32
MFP_54[1] DIO Header pin 33
MFP_42[1] DIO Header pin 34
27 DIO Header pin 35
MFP_44[1] DIO Header pin 36
MFP_39[1] DIO Header pin 38
MFP_46[1] DIO Header pin 40
  1. 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8 Refer to the CPU manual Page A-1 for more information on the CPU registers

Baseboard ID

All of our off the shelf baseboards contain a hard wired 3-state 8-input multiplexers. This is not required to implement in custom baseboards, but it can be useful to identify the board in software. During startup of the System-on-Module, 4 DIO are used to obtain the baseboard model ID. The red LED (CN2_06) is state 0, green LED (CN2_08) is state 1, BUS_DIR (CN1_98) is state 2, and BD_ID_DATA (CN1_83) is used for data.

The first 6 lines are used as the six bits that define the baseboard. The last two lines (Y6 & Y7 in the schematic image below) define the bits to indicate the board revision.

You can find example code for accessing the baseboard ID in tshwctl. For example, "tshwctl -B" will return "baseboard_model=" with the detected baseboard.

For custom baseboards we have reserved the address 42 which will never be used by our standard products.

TS-8160 baseboard ID resulting in ID 6.


TS-Baseboard IDs
ID Baseboard
0 TS-8200
1 Reserved, do not use
2 TS-TPC-8390
4 TS-8500
5 TS-8400
6 TS-8160
7 TS-8100
8 TS-8820-BOX
9 TS-8150
10 TS-TPC-8900
11 TS-8290
13 TS-8700
14 TS-8280
15 TS-8380
16 TS-AN20
17 TS-TPC-8920
19 TS-8550
20 TS-TPC-8950
22 TS-8551
42 Reserved for customer use, never used by us
63 TS-8200

USB

USB Host

The USB host port is a standard USB 2.0 at 480Mbps. The Linux kernel provides most of the USB support, and some devices may require a kernel recompile. Common devices such as keyboards, mice, wifi, and ethernet should mostly work out of the box.

The libusb project can also be used to communicate directly with USB peripherals from userspace.

TWI

These pins provide a standard two-wire interface. This bus also connects to an RTC on the System-on-Module. MFP105 and MFP106 can be used as a second TWI bus directly from the CPU. For more information, see the CPU manual here.

Audio Output

This board includes the SGTL5000 audio codec which is supported using the alsa framework. You can use utilities like aplay, mplayer, or many others for outputting audio to this interface. For more information on alsa see their website here.

SPI

The SPI controller is implemented in the FPGA. This core is found at 0x80004800, and should only be accessed using 16-bit reads/writes.

The table below is the register map for the SPI in the FPGA:

Offset Access Bit(s) Description
0x0 Read Only 15 SPI MISO state
Read/Write 14 SPI CLK state
Read/Write 13:10 Speed - 0 (highest), 1 (1/2 speed), 2 (1/4 speed)...
Read/Write 9:8 LUN (0-3 representing the 4 chip selects)
Read/Write 7 CS (1 - CS# is asserted)
N/A 6:1 Reserved
Read/Write 0 Speed
0x2 Read Only 15:0 Previous SPI read data from last write
0x4 N/A 15:0 Reserved
0x6 N/A 15:0 Reserved
0x8 Read/Write 15:0 SPI read/write with CS# to stay asserted
0xa Read Only 15:0 SPI pipelined read with CS# to stay asserted
0xc Read/Write 15:0 SPI Read/Write with CS# to deassert post-op
0xe N/A 15:0 Reserved

The SPI clk state register should be set when CS# is deasserted. Value 0 makes SPI rising edge (CPOL=0), 1 is falling edge (CPOL=1). This only applies to speed >= 1.

Where the base clock is 75Mhz (extended temp alters this to 50Mhz), speed settings break down as follows:

Value Speed
0 75Mhz
1 37.5MHz
2 18.75MHz
3 12.5MHz
4 9.375MHz
5 7.5MHz
6 6.25MHz
7 5.36MHz
8 4.68MHz
9 4.17MHz
15 2.5MHz
19 1.97MHz
31 1.21MHz

The pipelined read register is for read bursts and will automatically start a subsequent SPI read upon completion of the requested SPI read. Reading from this register infers that another read will shortly follow and allows this SPI controller "a head start" on the next read for optimum read performance. This register should be accessed as long as there will be at least one more SPI read with CS# asserted to take place.

Video Acceleration

The Marvell PXA16X includes video acceleration for a few different video codecs. We provide an example application that decodes mp4/h264. First download the bmm_drv.ko for either the 2.6.34 or 3.14 kernel here.

## Insmod the correct one for your kernel
#insmod -f bmm_drv_2.6.34.ko
#insmod -f bmm_drv_3.14.ko

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/gst/ipp/lib:/opt/gst/gst/lib/:/opt/gst/gstdeps/lib/:/tmp
export GST_LIB=/opt/gst/gst/lib/
export IPP_LIB=/opt/gst/ipp/lib
export GST_PLUGIN_PATH=/opt/gst/gst/lib/gstreamer-0.10/
export GSTDEPS_LIB=/opt/gst/gstdeps/lib
export PATH=$PATH:/opt/gst/gst/bin
export DISPLAY=:0

/opt/gst/gst/bin/gtest /path/to/file.mp4

FPGA

All macrocontrollers feature an FPGA. Any external interfaces called for by the TS-SOCKET specification that are not provided by the CPU are implemented in the FPGA whenever possible. The FPGA is connected to the CPU by a static memory controller, and as a result the FPGA can provide registers in the CPU memory space.

While most common functionality is accessed through layers of software that are already written, some features may require talking directly to the FPGA. Access to the FPGA is done through either the 8-bit or 16-bit memory regions. Code should access 16-bit or 8-bit depending on the access designed for the specific hardware core. For example, the CAN core is 8 bit, the 8 bit MUXBUS space is 8 bit, and some 8 bit cycles are needed for the SPI core if you want to do 8 bit SPI transactions. To access hardware cores in the FPGA, add the offset in the table below to the base address.

Bit Width Base Address
16 0x80000000
8 0x81000000
Offset Usage Bit Width
0x0000 16KB blockram access (for XUART buffer) 16
0x4000 Syscon registers 16
0x4400 ADC registers (for off-board ADC) 16
0x4800 SPI interface 16
0x4C00 CAN controller 8
0x4D00 2nd CAN controller 8
0x5000 Touchscreen registers 16
0x5400 XUART IO registers 16
0x8000 32KB MUXBUS space 16/8

FPGA Bitstreams

The FPGA has the capability to be reloaded on startup and reprogram itself with different configurations. The default bitstream is hardcoded into the FPGA, but the soft reloaded bitstreams can be placed in /ts/ts<model>-fpga.vme.gz on the Debian root to make the board load the bitstream on startup. If we do not have a configuration you need, you can build a new bitstream, or contact us for our engineering services.

Bitstream XUARTs CAN Touchscreen SPI ADC
Default (8K LUT) 0-6 On On On Off
ts4710-fpga-rev4-default-ADC.vme.bz2 0-6 On On On On

FPGA Programming

Note: We do not provide support for the opencores under our free support, however we do offer custom FPGA programming services. If interested please contact us.

We provide an open version of the Verilog project that contains the functionality of the default FPGA bitstream. The FPGA bitstream is built using Lattice Diamond which is free and runs under Windows or Linux (Redhat). This allows you to modify the verilog and create a jedec file with your custom logic. The jedec is converted to a vme file which is loaded from the SD card and used to reprogram the SRAM of the FPGA on every startup. This requires approximately a second during startup to reprogram, but allows you to recover by removing the bitstream file from the SD card in the case of a faulty bitstream.

The opencore FPGA sources are available here. These sources are supported on the TS-4710, TS-4712, and TS-4720. Custom logic can be built by implementing a wishbone compatible core, or by extending the cores we already have connected.

The ts4710_top.v file is used to connect all of the wishbone cores, and map any DIO. The syscon.v is used for most common system configuration registers. As a simple example these next steps will modify the custom load register located at 0x2a in the syscon.v.

Open up the Lattice diamond tools and open the .ldf file to open the project. On the bottom left there are 3 tabs to control the left panel (Files, Process, and Hierarchy). Go to Files, and double click syscon.v. Around line 40 is:

localparam [3:0] revision = 4'h2;
localparam [15:0] custom = 16'h0000;

You can edit the custom value to:

localparam [15:0] custom = 16'h0001;

The custom register is not used by any default software and is a safe register to use for a custom version number. The default bitstream will always use 0.

Save the file and go to the "Process" tab. Double click "Place & Route Trace" to begin synthesizing the bitstream. This will take approximately 5-10 minutes. Once this is finished open the "Reports" tab from the top open file list. Under "Analysis Reports" click on "Place & Route Trace". This is used to verify timing of your build. Under "Preference Summary" make sure none of the clock domains list errors. If timing is not met this will cause seemingly random issues with the bitstream which will usually present first as SD corruption.

Once the timing has been verified, double click "JECEC File" on the "Process" tab to build the jed file. Once this is finished there will be a "ts4710_default.jed" in the project folder. In order for the board to use this it must be converted to a vme file. This is generated using "jed2vme":

jed2vme ts4710_default.jed | bzip2 > ts4710-fpga.vme.bz2
WARNING: Generating a VME using other Lattice's tools can generate a flash bitstream which will render your board unbootable.

Once this is built it should be placed on the second partition of the SD card as "/ts/ts<model>-fpga.vme.bz2" This should match the device's model such as "/ts/ts4710-fpga.vme.bz2".

Once it is loaded on the SD card the board can be booted normally. The green and red LEDs will shut off during programming, and then turn back on after the bitstream has been reloaded. Commands should not be run during reload since issuing a bus cycle during programming can interfere with timing and cause the reload to fail. Once it has reloaded you can use devmem to verify the register has changed:

devmem 0x8000802a 16

On the default bitstream this should return "0x0000", or "0x0001" if modified as suggested above.

Syscon

The registers listed below are all 16 bit registers and must be accessed with 16 bit reads and writes. This register block appears at base address 0x80004000. For example, to identify the model:

devmem 0x80004000 16

This will return 0x4710, 0x4712, 0x4720, or 0x4740 depending on the model.

Many of the syscon options can be manipulated using tshwctl.

 Usage: tshwctl [OPTION] ...
 Technologic Systems TS-471x / TS-77XX FPGA manipulation.
 
 General options:
   -g, --getmac            Display ethernet MAC address
   -s, --setmac=MAC        Set ethernet MAC address
   -R, --reboot            Reboot the board
   -t, --getrtc            Get system time from RTC time/date
   -S, --setrtc            Set RTC time/date from system time
   -F, --rtcinfo           Print RTC temperature, poweron/off time, etc
   -v, --nvram             Get/Set RTC NVRAM
   -i, --info              Display board FPGA info
   -e, --greenledon        Turn green LED on
   -b, --greenledoff       Turn green LED off
   -c, --redledon          Turn red LED on
   -d, --redledoff         Turn red LED off
   -D, --setdio=<pin>      Sets DDR and asserts a specified pin
   -O, --clrdio=<pin>      Sets DDR and deasserts a specified pin
   -G, --getdio=<pin>      Sets DDR and gets DIO pin input value
   -x, --random            Get 16-bit hardware random number
   -W, --watchdog          Daemonize and set up /dev/watchdog
   -n, --setrng            Seed the kernel random number generator
   -X, --resetswitchon     Enable reset switch
   -Y, --resetswitchoff    Disable reset switch
   -l, --loadfpga=FILE     Load FPGA bitstream from FILE
   -q, --cputemp           Display the CPU die temperature
   -U, --removejp=JP       Remove soft jumper numbered JP (1-8)
   -J, --setjp=JP          Set soft jumper numbered JP (1-8)
   -k, --txenon=XUART(s)   Enables the TX Enable for an XUART
   -K, --txenoff=XUART(s)  Disables a specified TX Enable
   -N, --canon=PORT(s)     Enables a CAN port
   -f, --canoff=PORT(s)    Disables a CAN port
   -h, --help              This help
   -j, --bbclkon           Enables a 12.5MHz clock on DIO 3
   -H, --bbclkoff          Disables the 12.5MHz clock
   -E, --bbclk2on          Enables a 25MHz clock on DIO 34
   -I, --bbclk2off         Disables the 25MHz clock
   -r, --touchon           Turns the touchscreen controller on
   -T, --touchoff          Turns the touchscreen controller off
   -B, --baseboard         Display baseboard ID
   -a, --adc               Display MCP3428 ADC readings in millivolts
   -P, --ethvlan           Configures a network switch to split each port individually in a vlan
   -y, --ethswitch         Configures a network switch to switch all of the outside ports to one interface
   -e, --ethwlan           Configures the first network port (A) to its own VLAN, and all other ports to a shared switch
   -C, --ethinfo           Retrieves info on the onboard switch
Offset Bits Usage
0x00 15:0 Returns board model, eg 0x4710 = TS-4710
0x02 15 Reset switch enable (Use DIO 9 input)
14 Enable touchscreen (override DIO 30-35)
13 Enable UART4 TXEN (override DIO 14)
12 Enable UART0 TXEN (override DIO 12)
11 Enable 12.5MHz base board clock (override DIO 3)
10 Enable SPI (override DIO 17-20)
9 Enable 2nd CAN (override DIO 10,11)
8 Enable CAN (override DIO 15,16)
7:6 Scratch Register
5 Mode2
4 Mode1
3:0 FPGA revision
0x04 15:0 Muxbus configuration register
0x06 15:0 Watchdog feed register
0x08 15:0 Free running 1MHz counter LSB
0x0a 15:0 Free running 1MHz counter MSB
0x0c 15:0 Hardware RNG LSB
0x0e 15:0 Hardware RNG MSB
0x10 15 Baseboard 25MHz Clock (override DIO 34)
14:0 DIO 14:0 output data
0x12 15:14 Reserved
13 Enable alternate touch controller pins
12 Red LED (1 = on)
11 Green LED (1 = on)
10:6 DIO 26:22 output data
5:0 DIO 20:15 output data
0x14 15:0 DIO 42:27 output data
0x16 15 Enable UART2 TXEN (override DIO 10)
14 Enable UART1 TXEN (override DIO 8)
13 Enable UART5 TXEN (override DIO 7)
12 Enable UART3 TXEN (override DIO 13)
11:0 DIO 59:48 output data
0x18 15 Reserved
14:0 DIO 14:0 data direction
0x1a 15:11 Reserved
10:6 DIO 26:22 data direction
5:0 DIO 20:15 data direction
0x1c 15:0 DIO 42:27 data direction
0x1e 15:12 Reserved
11:0 DIO 59:48 data direction
0x20 15 Reserved
14:0 DIO 14:0 input data
0x22 15:11 Reserved
10:6 DIO 26:22 input data
5:0 DIO 20:15 input data
0x24 15:0 DIO 42:27 input data
0x26 15:12 Reserved
11:0 DIO 59:48 input data
0x28 15:4 Reserved
3:0 FPGA TAG memory access [1]
0x2a 15:0 Custom load ID register [2]
0x2c 15:6 Reserved
5 Offboard IRQ 7
4 Offboard IRQ 6
3 Offboard IRQ 5
2 CAN2 IRQ
1 CAN IRQ
0 XUART IRQ
0x2e 15:6 Reserved
5 Offboard IRQ 7 mask (1 disabled, 0 on) [3]
4 Offboard IRQ 6 mask (1 disabled, 0 on) [3]
3 Offboard IRQ 5 mask (1 disabled, 0 on)[3]
2 CAN2 IRQ mask (1 disabled, 0 on)[3]
1 CAN IRQ mask (1 disabled, 0 on)[3]
0 XUART IRQ mask (1 disabled, 0 on)[3]
0x34 0 Enable 14.3MHz baseboard clock on DIO 3
1 USB 5V disable [4]
2 LCD 3.3V disable [5]
  1. TAG memory stores persistent data on the FPGA such a the MAC address, CPU settings, and the born on date. Software using this data should instead use tshwctl rather than accessing this register manually.
  2. Reads back 0 on default load. Used to identify customized bitstreams
  3. 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 The IRQ masks are handled automatically by the kernel after an IRQ is requested. Under most circumstances these registers should not be manipulated.
  4. This toggles a DIO on CN1_04 and requires offboard circuitry on the baseboard to toggle USB power.
  5. This toggles a DIO on CN1_48 and requires offboard circuitry on the baseboard to toggle LCD power.

Watchdog

By default there is a /dev/watchdog with the tshwctl daemon running at the highest possible priority to feed the watchdog. This is a pipe that is created in userspace, so for many applications this may provide enough functionality for the watchdog by verifying that userspace is still executing applications. If you would like to have the watchdog functionality more tightly integrated with your application you can specify various feed options.

At the lower level there are 3 valid watchdog feed values that are written to the watchdog register in the #Syscon:

Value Result
0 feed watchdog for another .338s
1 feed watchdog for another 2.706s
2 feed watchdog for another 10.824s
3 disable watchdog

The watchdog is armed by default for 10s for the operating system to take over, after which the startup scripts autofeed the watchdog with:

echo a2 > /dev/watchdog

The /dev/watchdog fifo accepts 3 types of commands:

Value Function
f<3 digits> One time feed for a specified amount of time which uses the 3 digit number / 10. For example, "f456" would feed for 45.6 seconds.
"0", "1", "2", "3" One time feed with the value in the above table.
a<num 0-3> This value autofeeds with the value in the above table.

Most applications should use the f<3 digits> option to more tightly integrate this to their application. For example:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <fcntl.h>
#include <unistd.h>

void do_some_work(int data) {
	/* The contract for sleep(int n) is that it will sleep for at least n
	 * seconds, but not less.  If other kernel threads or processes require
	 * more time sleep can take longer, but when your process has a high
	 * priority this is usually measured in millseconds */
	sleep(5);
}

int read_some_io() {
	/* If this function (or do_some_work) misbehave and stall thee watchdog 
         * will not be fed in the main loop and cause a reboot.  You can test 
         * this by uncommenting the next line to force an infinite loop */
	// while (1) {}
	return 42;
}

int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
	int wdfd;
	/* In languages other than C/C++ this is still essentially the same, but
	 * make sure you are opening the watchdog file synchronously so the writes
	 * happen immediately.  Many languages will buffer writes together to make 
	 * them more efficient, but the watchdog needs the writes to be timed 
	 * precisely */
	wdfd = open("/dev/watchdog", O_SYNC|O_RDWR);

	while (1) {
		int data;
		/* This loop is expected to take about 5-6 seconds, but to allow some
		 * headroom for other applications, I will feed the watchdog for 10s. */
		write(wdfd, "f100", 4);

		data = read_some_io();
		do_some_work(data);
	}
}

XUARTS

The XUARTs are ttl serial ports implemented in the FPGA. These communicate with the userspace driver xuartctl. Each XUART core in the FPGA can handle up to 8 XUARTs, though the default TS-4710 FPGA contains 6. The XUART serial ports have a single shared 4kByte receive FIFO which makes real time interrupt latency response less of a concern and in actual implementation, the serial ports are simply polled at 100Hz and don't even use an IRQ. Even with all 8 ports running at 230400 baud, it is not possible to overflow the receive FIFO in 1/100th of a second. The "xuartctl --server" daemon is started by default in the init scripts which sets up listening TCP/IP ports for all XUART channels on ports 7350-7357. An application may simply connect to these ports via localhost (or via the network) and use the serial ports as if they were network services.

The typical method for accessing xuarts is using the pts layer. For example:

eval $(xuartctl --server --port 3 --mode=8n1 --speed 9600 2>&1); ln -s $ttyname /dev/ttyxuart3

This will set up XUART port 3 to 9600 baud, 8n1, and symlink it to /dev/ttyxuart3. In your application you can open the /dev/ttyxuart3 and for most part you can access this just like any other uart. When using the PTS layer, there are several operations that are not supported. The mode and baud rate must be set up with xuartctl, and cannot be programatically changed with the standard ioctl.

The XUARTs can be managed with xuartctl. See the xuartctl page for more details on programming with XUARTs. See either of these links for more information on using serial ports in Linux:

All COM Ports on the TS-4710 are TTL. Typically the baseboard will contain any tranceivers to bring this to RS232, RS485, etc.

COM Port mapping
XUART Port TX RX TX Enable [1]
0 CN2_78 CN2_80 CN1_67
1 CN2_82 CN2_84 CN1_77
2 CN2_86 CN2_88 CN1_71
3 CN2_90 CN2_92 CN1_65
4 CN2_94 CN2_96 CN1_63
5 CN2_98 CN2_100 CN1_79
6 N/A CN1_65 N/A
  1. The TX Enable pin is used to toggle an RS485 tranciever on the baseboard from TX to RX.

CAN

The CAN controller contained in the FPGA is compatible with the register interface for the SJA1000. This is implemented using SocketCAN.

Before proceeding with the examples, see the Kernel's CAN documentation here.

This board comes preinstalled with can-utils which can be used to communicate over a CAN network without writing any code. The candump utility can be used to dump all data on the network

## First, set the baud rate and bring up the device:
ip link set can0 type can bitrate 250000
ip link set can0 up

## Dump data & errors:
candump -cae can0,0:0,#FFFFFFFF &

## Send the packet with:
#can_id = 0x7df
#data 0 = 0x3
#data 1 = 0x1
#data 2 = 0x0c
cansend can0 7Df#03010c

This example packet is designed to work with the Ozen Elektronik myOByDic 1610 ECU simulator to read the RPM speed. This device will return data from candump with:

 can0  7DF  [3] 03 01 0C                  '...'
 can0  7E8  [8] 04 41 0C 2F C0 00 00 00   '.A./....'
 can0  7E9  [8] 04 41 0C 2F 80 00 00 00   '.A./....'

In this case, 0x2f is the current RPM value. This shows a simple way you can prove out the communication before moving to another language, but this next example sends the same packet and parses the same response in C:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <pthread.h>
#include <net/if.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <net/if.h>
#include <sys/ioctl.h>
#include <assert.h>
#include <linux/can.h>
#include <linux/can/raw.h>

int main(void)
{
	int s;
	int nbytes;
	struct sockaddr_can addr;
	struct can_frame frame;
	struct ifreq ifr;
	struct iovec iov;
	struct msghdr msg;
	char ctrlmsg[CMSG_SPACE(sizeof(struct timeval)) + CMSG_SPACE(sizeof(__u32))];
	char *ifname = "can0";
 
	if((s = socket(PF_CAN, SOCK_RAW, CAN_RAW)) < 0) {
		perror("Error while opening socket");
		return -1;
	}
 
	strcpy(ifr.ifr_name, ifname);
	ioctl(s, SIOCGIFINDEX, &ifr);
	addr.can_family  = AF_CAN;
	addr.can_ifindex = ifr.ifr_ifindex;
 
	if(bind(s, (struct sockaddr *)&addr, sizeof(addr)) < 0) {
		perror("socket");
		return -2;
	}
 
 	/* For the ozen myOByDic 1610 this requests the RPM guage */
	frame.can_id  = 0x7df;
	frame.can_dlc = 3;
	frame.data[0] = 3;
	frame.data[1] = 1;
	frame.data[2] = 0x0c;
 
	nbytes = write(s, &frame, sizeof(struct can_frame));
	if(nbytes < 0) {
		perror("write");
		return -3;
	}

	iov.iov_base = &frame;
	msg.msg_name = &addr;
	msg.msg_iov = &iov;
	msg.msg_iovlen = 1;
	msg.msg_control = &ctrlmsg;
	iov.iov_len = sizeof(frame);
	msg.msg_namelen = sizeof(struct sockaddr_can);
	msg.msg_controllen = sizeof(ctrlmsg);  
	msg.msg_flags = 0;

	do {
		nbytes = recvmsg(s, &msg, 0);
		if (nbytes < 0) {
			perror("read");
			return -4;
		}

		if (nbytes < (int)sizeof(struct can_frame)) {
			fprintf(stderr, "read: incomplete CAN frame\n");
		}
	} while(nbytes == 0);

	if(frame.data[0] == 0x4)
		printf("RPM at %d of 255\n", frame.data[3]);
 
	return 0;
}

Other languages have bindings to access CAN such as Python using C-types, Java using JNI.

Power Consumption

The TS-TPC-8390-4710's power consumption is primarily dominated by the backlight current. There are also some power savings that happen automatically when the cpu is idle. These tests are performed with the Kernel 2.6 based image which uses dynamic ticks, whereas the Kernel 3.14 image is optimized for low latency and uses a 1000khz tick which will result power consumption with a smaller gap between idle and 100% cpu usage.

These tests do not include Ethernet or other peripherals unless otherwise stated. These tests are also performed using 12V input.

TS-4710-512-10S-I + TS-TPC-8390
Test Max (W) Average (W)
Idle CPU, Backlight 100% 7.84 6.51
100% CPU, Backlight 100% 8.95 7.23
Idle CPU, Backlight 50% 5.56 4.6
Idle CPU, Backlight 0% 4.59 3.61
Idle CPU, Backlight 100%, Ethernet Connected 7.77 6.71

External Interfaces

7-inch Display

The 7" display is an Okaya RV800480T-7X0WP-A3 (datasheet). Features include:

  • 800x480 Resolution
  • 800nits Brightness
  • Integrated Resistive Touch

The Linux operating system we provide includes drivers for the framebuffer device and X11 support. See the #Graphical Development section for more information on creating a graphical interface for your application.

Backlight

The backlight brightness on our off the shelf LCD products use the LCD_PWM output. This example takes an integer percentage as the only argument which will set the brightness.

/* Compile with:
 * gcc name.c -o output -mcpu=arm9
 */
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdint.h>
#include <sys/mman.h>
#include <sys/stat.h>
#include <assert.h>
#include <fcntl.h>

volatile uint32_t *mvpwmregs = 0;
void set_brightness(int pct) 
{
	if(mvpwmregs == 0) {
		int mem = open("/dev/mem", O_RDWR|O_SYNC);
		assert(mem != -1);
		mvpwmregs = (unsigned int *) mmap(0, 4096,
	  	  PROT_READ | PROT_WRITE, MAP_SHARED, mem, 0xd401a000);
	}

	// duty cycle floor is 57, max is 128
	mvpwmregs[0x004/4] = 57 + ((pct * 71)/100);
}

int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
	set_brightness(atoi(argv[1]));
	return 0;
}

Touchscreen

The baseboard includes the ADS7843 touchscreen controller, and the FPGA includes a controller to simplify this access. The FPGA presents 2 registers at 0x80005000 which include the x/y values from 0-4096, and a bit indicating if the touch is currently being activated. Linux implements this at a higher level using the "ts_lcd" driver which abstracts this through Linux's event input interface. X11 can use this with the "evdev" driver by default.

Offset Bits Description
0x0 15:1 X touch position value
0 Touch Flag (1=touch)
0x2 15:1 Y touch position
0 Touch Flag (1=touch)

The calibration values appropriate to this touchscreen are passed to the "ts_lcd" driver as module parameters. We have found that the same calibration values work consistently in this model, but it is possible to get new calibration values using tscalib.

Note: The hard coded calibration values should be used unless you are experiencing a problem with our default values.

To get calibration values manually you can use tscalib. This needs to be downloaded and built to be used on the board:

# Install prerequisites:
apt-get install pkg-config libdirectfb-dev build-essential fbset -y

# Download & Build
wget ftp://ftp.embeddedTS.com/ts-socket-macrocontrollers/ts-4710-linux/sources/tscalib.c
gcc -mcpu=arm9 `pkg-config directfb --libs --cflags` tscalib.c -o tscalib
mv tscalib /usr/bin/

# DirectFB requires the video mode you are using to be the first in
# the /etc/fb.modes file.  This file uses the same format as fbset.
cp /etc/fb.modes /etc/fb.modes.orig
fbset > /etc/fb.modes

# Now that everything is installed you can calibrate:
killall Xorg
tscalib --calibrate --test

This will draw crosshairs in each corner which need to be pressed to generate values like these:

calib_x0=87
calib_dx=3867
calib_y0=129
calib_dy=3848

You can test these by passing them to ts_lcd:

modprobe -r ts_lcd
modprobe ts_lcd calib_x0=87 calib_dx=3867 calib_y0=129 calib_dy=3848
startx # or start_xinit from initramfs if you aren't in Debian

ADC Header

The Analog to Digital Converter consists of a 4-channel 16 bit sigma-delta converter and two, 2-channel analog switches. These are configured to allow input and conversion on two differential channels and 4 single ended channels. The 6-channel Analog to Digital signals are contained on connector HD5 which is a 16 pin (2x8) 0.1" spacing header. The connector layout and the signals carried by each pin are defined below. The input range for the differential input channels is 0- 2 VDC, and the input range on the single-ended channel is nominally 0-10 VDC.

Pinout Header
Pin Type Signal
1 Single ended Channel 6
2 N/A GND
3 Single ended Channel 5
4 N/A GND
5 Single ended Channel 4
6 N/A GND
7 Single ended Channel 3
8 N/A GND
9 N/A Not connected
10 N/A GND
11 Differential Channel 2-
12 Differential Channel 2+
13 N/A GND
14 Differential Channel 1-
15 Differential Channel 1+
16 N/A GND
TS-8390-ADC.png

Our default core shipped with the TS-4710 does not include support for ADC. Support can be included with this opencore bitstream. See the FPGA section for more information on loading this bitstream, or building a custom one.

This example prints out all 6 ADC readings in millivolts:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdint.h>
#include <sys/mman.h>
#include <sys/stat.h>
#include <assert.h>
#include <fcntl.h>


volatile uint16_t *syscon = 0;
inline void syscon_init() {
	if(syscon == 0) {
		int mem = open("/dev/mem", O_RDWR|O_SYNC);
		syscon = mmap(0,
			getpagesize(),
			PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE,
			MAP_SHARED,
			mem,
			0x80004000);
	}
}

uint16_t peek16(uint16_t addr)
{
	syscon_init();
	return syscon[addr/2];
}

void poke16(uint16_t addr, uint16_t value)
{
	syscon_init();
	syscon[addr/2] = value;
}

int main()
{
	int x, i;

	// Select AN_SEL line:
	// For the TS-TPC-8390 baseboard:
	poke16(0x400, 0x28);

	// enable all 6 channels
	poke16(0x402, 0x3f);

	// allow time for conversions
	usleep(500000);

	for (i = 1; i <= 6; i++) {
		x = (signed short)peek16(0x402 + 2*i);
                if (i > 2) x = (x * 1006)/200;
                x = (x * 2048)/0x8000;
                printf("adc%d=%d\n", i, x);
	}

	return 0;
}


Running this code on the TS-TPC-8390 with pin 7 of the ADC header (channel 3) connected to 3.3V returns:

 root@ts4700:~# ./adctest 
 adc1=0
 adc2=0
 adc3=3302
 adc4=0
 adc5=0
 adc6=0
ADC Core Register Map
Offset Bits Description
0x0 15:8 Core ID register (reads 0xad)
7:6 Reserved
5:4
Analog Select Pin
Value Description
0 Do not use an AN+SEL
1 use CN1 pin 77 for AN_SEL (TS-8100)
2 use CN1 pin 74 for AN_SEL (TS-8390)
3 Reserved
3:2
Speed
Value Description
0 240Hz, 12 bit resolution
1 60Hz, 14 bit resolution
2 15Hz, 16 bit resolution
3 Reserved
1:0
Programmable Gain Amplifier
Value Description
0 No gain
1 2x gain
2 4x gain
3 8x gain
0x2 15:0 Channel Mask
0x4 15:0 Channel 1 most recent conversion value
0x6 15:0 Channel 2 most recent conversion value
0x8 15:0 Channel 3 most recent conversion value
0xa 15:0 Channel 4 most recent conversion value
0xc 15:0 Channel 5 most recent conversion value
0xe 15:0 Channel 6 most recent conversion value

The channel mask register controls which channels are enabled. Bits 0-5 enable channels 1-6 respectively. If a given channel is not enabled, (enable bit == 0) it will not be sampled and its conversion value register will contain an obsolete and meaningless value. The more channels that are enabled, the lower the sampling speed on each channel.

Expansion Header

The DIO header is a 0.1" pitch 2x40 header.

DIO Header Pinout
Pin Description
1 XUART2 RS232 RX
2 XUART4 RS485-
3 XUART1 RS232 RX
4 XUART4 RS485+
5 XUART1 RS232 TX
6 XUART2 RS232 TX
7 CAN2_H [1]
8 CAN2_L [1]
9 XUART3 RS232 RX
10 XUART5 RS232 TX
11 XUART6 RS422-
12 XUART3 RS232 TX
13 XUART6 RS422+
14 XUART0 RS422-
15 5V
16 XUART0 RS485+
17 CAN_H
18 CAN_L
19 VIN
20 VIN
TS-8390-Expansion.png
  1. 1.0 1.1 The second CAN transceiver is not supported by this board.

DIO Header

The DIO header is a 0.1" pitch 2x40 header.

DIO Header Pinout
Pin Description
1 FPGA TDO [1]
2 FPGA TMS [1]
3 Ground
4 FPGA TDI [1]
5 RS232 XUART 5 RXD
6 FPGA TCk [1]
7 TTL DEBUG_TXD
8 TTL DEBUG_RXD
9 SPI_MISO
10 3.3V Supply
11 SPI_CS2#
12 BUF_SPI_MOSI
13 BUF_SPI_CS1#
14 BUF_SPI_CLK#
15 5V Supply
16 EXT_RESET# [2]
17 MFP_48
18 Ground
19 DIO_28
20 DIO_26
21 DIO_08
22 DIO_24
23 DIO_09
24 DIO_23
25 DIO_22
26 DIO_02
27 DIO_03
28 DIO_01
29 DIO_04
30 DIO_00
31 MFP_37
32 MFP_45
33 MFP_54
34 MFP_42
35 DIO_27
36 MFP_44
37 I2C_DAT
38 MFP_39
39 I2C_CLK
40 MFP_46
TS-8390-DIO.png
  1. 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 The FPGA JTAG pins are only intended for production. Use of these for reprogramming the FPGA is not recommended or supported. See the #FPGA Programming section for more information about the supported mechanism for reloading the FPGA.
  2. Pull low to reset the CPU. Do not drive high (use open drain).

Ethernet Ports

The TS-8390 includes 2x 10/100 Ethernet ports. The CPU #Ethernet (eth0) is next to the 3.5mm Audio Port. The second ethernet (eth1) is added through the USB SMSC LAN9514 chip using the smsc95xx driver. See the #Configuring the Network section for more information on using these ports in Linux.

TS-8390 Ethernet.jpg

3.5mm Audio

TS-8390-47xx 3.5mm Audio

Speaker

The TS-8390 includes a small speaker capable of 82dBA (100mW). This is accessed in most typical applications using the alsa software interface.

USB Ports

The TS-TPC-8390 includes 2 USB Type A ports on the edge of the board labelled J8. There are also 2 standard 5-pin USB headers. These can be connected to USB adapters such as the CB-USB-AF5P which allow for simple mounting in custom enclosures.

CB-USB-AF5P
Signals Pin Layout
Pin Signal
1 5V
2 USB -
3 USB +
4 GND
5 Frame

TS-8390-USB.png

COM1 Header

The COM1 header is a 2x5 0.1" pitch header with RS232, RS485, and CAN. These follow a different pin layout which corresponds with a standard 10 pin header standard for UARTs. The RC-DB9 is available to convert these ports to a DB9.

Pin Description
1 XUART0 RS485+
2 XUART1 RS232 RX
3 XUART1 RS232 TX
4 CAN_H
5 Ground
6 XUART0 RS485-
7 XUART2 RS232 TX
8 XUART2 RS232 RX
9 CAN_L
10 Not connected
TS-8390-COM1.png
Note: XUART1 can be replaced with the console ttyS0 by setting the "Console Enable" jumper.

COM2 Header

The COM2 header is a 2x5 0.1" pitch header with RS232 and RS485. These follow a different pin layout which corresponds with a standard 10 pin header standard for UARTs. The RC-DB9 is available to convert these ports to a DB9.

Pin Description
1 XUART4 RS485+
2 XUART3 RS232 RX
3 XUART3 RS232 TX
4 XUART6 RS485+
5 Ground
6 XUART4 RS485-
7 XUART5 RS232 TX
8 XUART5 RS232 RX
9 XUART4 RS422-
10 Not connected
TS-8390-COM2.png

Revisions and Changes

TS-4710 PCB Revisions

Revision Changes
A
  • Initial Release

TS-8390 PCB Revisions

Revision Changes
A
  • Initial Release
B
C
  • Fix for SGTL5000 VCC ramp rate which can lead to rare i2c latchup condition. A mod is available for older boards to prevent this as well.
D
  • Added gigabit capable ethernet port for CPU ethernet. This is intended for the TS-4900/TS-47470 and will not affect 10/100 only capable CPUs.
  • USB OTG under speaker populated by default

FPGA Changelog

FPGA Revision Log
Revision Changes
5
  • XUART FIFO blockram corruption fix
4
  • Added PWM core (used on baseboards like the TS-8700 for slow ADC)
  • Initial TS-4720 support
3
  • Opencore fixed to meet timing (previous opencores would cause SD corruption on writes)
  • reduced to 6 xuarts to help meet timing
  • 8-bit I/O fixed
  • Added auto mute TX when TXEN enabled on XUARTs
  • Added optional 14.3MHz clock
2
  • Added alternate touch screen pin location
  • Added optional 25MHz clock
1 Enabled XUARTs and CAN
0 Initial release

You can update to the latest FPGA by booting to Debian and running:

cd /ts/
wget ftp://ftp.embeddedTS.com/ts-socket-macrocontrollers/ts-4710-linux/binaries/ts-bitstreams/ts4710-fpga-latest.vme.bz2
# The TS-4710 and TS-4712 use the same FPGA.  This will 
# move it to the correct name for either.
mv ts4710-fpga-latest.vme.bz2 ts$(cat /dev/tsmodel)-fpga.vme.bz2

The FPGA is loaded in to the FPGA SRAM on every load, so this file will need to exist for all future boots.

Software Images

2.6 Debian Changelog

This is the changelog for the software image which is shared from the TS-4710, TS-4712, TS-4720, TS-4740, TS-7700, and the TS-7250-V2.

2.6.34 Based Image
Image File Changelog Known Issues
2gbsd-471x-20130221.dd.bz2
  • Initial release
2gbsd-471x-20130221.dd.bz2
  • Updates to Debian Wheezy
  • TS specific utilities exported to Debian
    • Including tshwctl, xuartctl, sdctl
    • Includes busybox for vconfig and devmem
  • Includes more baseboard support
    • TX EN is automatically enabled on known baseboards
  • LCD support
    • TS-TPC-8900 support added
  • Touchscreen supported added
    • TS-TPC-8900 support added
  • Initial driver for SocketCAN support added
  • ts4700ctl revised to tshwctl for consistency among other products
    • tshwctl adds simple support for FPGA DIO with --getdio --setdio --clrdio options
  • tsrf2cf support added
  • ts4700_isa16550 support added for pc104 peripherals like TS-SER4 or TS-MULTI104
  • smsc95xx ethernet support added
  • Icewm removed.
  • fullscreen-webkit added
    • Command is ./fullscreen-webkit <url> to run a full screen browser
    • Replaces icewm as default desktop
  • Fixed FPGA Reload support with release of opencore
  • Added new soft jumpers.
    • JP2 & JP3 are baseboard specific.
      • Controls support such as ethernet switch config
    • JP4 enables read only mode
    • JP5 disables network autoconfig from initramfs. This can still be set from Debian
  • CAN Controller currently inaccesible
  • Second SD card not supported in sdctl
  • smsc95xx periodically does not set MAC address correctly (already fixed in next image)
  • mdnsd is not correctly started
  • Debian Wheezy boot speed not yet optimized
2gbsd-471x-20130515.dd.bz2
  • Updated kernel. See git for the full changelog.
  • TS-8700 support
  • TS-8280 support
  • Added SocketCAN support and example userspace utilities (cansend, candump, etc)
  • Fixed FPGA reload to be reliable
  • mdnsd started correctly
  • fixed JP1 causing serial console to break
  • USB OTG not yet supported
  • Second SD card not supported in sdctl
2gbsd-471x-20130522.dd.bz2
  • Second SD card not supported in sdctl
  • No audio support
  • PCIe breaks kernel register interface to FPGA
2gbsd-471x-20130531.dd.bz2
  • Disabled PCIe pending fixes for SMC FPGA interface
  • Added TS-8150 support.
  • Added TS-8920 support.
  • Marvell switch chip drops fragmented packets (TS-4712 only)
    • Set MTU to 1501 on eth0 as a workaround.
  • PCIe disabled pending fix.
  • No Audio support
  • Second SD card not supported in sdctl
2gbsd-471x-20130806.dd.bz2
  • Implemented default splash screen, see /ts/splash
  • Audio support (sgtl5000, wm8750, sii9022)
    • Audio startup noise added, see /ts/startup.wav
  • AutoStart X11 in the initramfs
    • Configure started apps with /ts/initramfs-xinit
  • Default x session changed to icewm-lite for faster boot time
  • ifplugd is no longer run when jp1 is set due to race condition
    • Configure the network in Debian once you are booting there
  • check-usb-update implemented
    • Plug in a USB drive with 1 partition containing /tsinit which will automatically run. Used primarily for production.
  • sdctl updated to support dual SD
    • Start "nbd-client 127.0.0.1 7501 /dev/nbd1" to access second card
    • Doublestore fixes added
  • PCIe fixes included, PCIe enabled by default on suported macros with pxa168
  • compat-drivers included
    • Includes common wireless drivers
  • Marvell Switch Chip fixes added
  • Wheezy updated to latest in repository
  • Added support for both onboard/offboard switches
    • Used in cases such as TS-4720 + TS-8700
  • Added initial TS-4740 support
    • Uses Xilinx FPGA for reload, added spiflash tools
      • spiflashctl added
      • bin2coe added
      • new tshwctl commands
    • eMMC support
  • TS-4720 support added
  • Generates random MAC address if none is programmed.
    • Should only be used for production
  • Added Kexec support
    • Allows support for NFS/http/ftp/etc kernel and rootfs loading
  • Xuartctl defaults to 100hz instead of IRQ driven
    • IRQ behavior is specifically tuned for best latency, but requires high CPU
  • Debian Wheezy configured to continue booting in the event of a fsck error unless it is completely unrepairable
  • ts-sendsigs-omit script fixes so multiple nbd-clients or xuartctls are not killed early in shutdown
  • Root filesystem is now always /dev/rootfs rather than /dev/nbd0p2
    • TS-4740/TS-4720 can boot to /dev/nbd1p2, so the actual rootfs is automatically symlinked to /dev/rootfs
  • Unionfs crashes with a kernel oops when JP4 is enabled.
2gbsd-471x-20130815.dd.bz2
  • TS-8700 switch reset race condition fixed
  • Fixed FPGA reload for TS-4712/20
  • tshwctl minor fixes
    • ethinfo overflow fixed
    • tagmem is now only written if value actually changed with setjp/removejp/setmac
  • Unionfs crashes with a kernel oops when JP4 is enabled.
4gbsd-471x-20131004.dd.bz2
  • Switched to EXT3 by default
    • Doublestore users should disable journaling to reduce writes vs old ext2
  • Image sized for already shipping 4GB MicroSD cards
  • TS-8400 support completed
  • ifpulgd now starts on switch interfaces correctly
  • /ts/config file create to allow for further configuration of the initramfs. See this file for more information.
  • Soft Jumpers 2,3,4,5 have been removed and are implemented in the /ts/config file which allows more than 8 settings
    • The config file allows enabling and configuring utilities like ifplugd, xuartctl, mdnsd, and more.
    • Read only jumper 4 removed due to bugs with unionfs.
    • Behavior of JP1 and JP8 are not changed
    • JP7 added to minimize initramfs initialization for manual boot.
  • Reloading the TS-4712 and TS-4720 now resets the model number correctly after a soft reload
  • X11 in Debian started with correct HOME variable so a valid .Xauthority file is created
    • This allows DISPLAY=:0 to work, and fixes some dns resolution issues
  • /etc/init.d/motd updated to include additional information for debugging
  • tshwctl updated
    • TS-7700 EVGPIO (getdio/setdio/clrdio) added
    • --getdio is fixed which would previously change the direction for all DIO in the first register when used (DIO 0-15)
    • --rtcinfo implemented which provides more status information on the RTC
  • Kernel updated
    • Included commonly requested features in default config
        • Bluetooth, ipv6, netfilter (iptables), bridging, and more device support.
    • wm8750 support added for TS-8400
    • sgtl5000 supports an option to disable standby to prevent audible pops
    • See git for the full changelog.
  • Unionfs support disabled
4gbsd-471x-20140306.dd.bz2
  • Fixed rare reboot lockup
  • Added Marvell switch chip errata fix for 10Mb/s ethernet
  • Added minimum packet size for TS-4712/TS-4720 to work around corrupt FCS from switch chip
  • Added TS-4720 support
  • Added TS-4740 support
4gbsd-471x-20140430.dd.bz2
  • Initial TS-7250-V2 support
  • Initramfs now prints boot device on TS-7250-V2 and TS-4720
  • Initramfs zeroconf/ipv4ll IP is now only used as a fallback if dhcp fails
    • Fixes mdns resolving zeroconf to a system with no route to it
  • Updated tshwctl with rtcinfo, and 7250v2 dio/adc support
  • Updated sdctl for 7250v2
  • Debian updated with empty killprocs script
    • Normal killprocs ignores debians list of processes not to kill which kills the nbd-client
    • Empty killprocs will succeed these updates, but not restart processes
  • USB WiFi modules not compiled with the kernel. USB WiFi will not work, and requires a kernel compile and rebuilding the modules as outlined in the Compile the Kernel section.
* 4gbsd-471x-20140724.dd.bz2
  • Fixed TS-7250-V2 ADCs
  • Fixed 16550 driver for 7250v2
  • Fixed USB WIFI module regression
  • eMMC on 7250v2 is now converted to SLC.
  • Enabled /dev/i2c interface in the default kernel
  • Added new CFG options
    • CFG_MUTE_CPU_UART=1 will completely disable output on /dev/ttyS0 after the bootrom messages
    • CFG_XUART_CONSOLE_EN=<0-7> will use an XUART for console instead of /dev/ttyS0
* EVGPIO IRQ #2 requires a build from the latest kernel sources
* 4gbsd-471x-20140924.dd.bz2
  • Using older images if multiple copies of tshwctl are run at the same time which access tagmem, this can corrupt the mac address and the soft jumpers. In some cases this could also break the touchscreen loading random data as calibration. This new tshwctl includes locking that will prevent multiple copies from accessing tagmem simultaneously.
  • Removed udev rule that allocates eth# to a mac address
* 4gbsd-471x-20141013.dd.bz2
  • Switched sdctl to using Unix Domain Sockets instead of localhost tcp.
    • This gets around a rare bug that would cause the kernel to drop packets on localhost under heavy congestion.
    • This changes only involves a new kernel/initramfs and does not impact the debian filesystem.
  • Fixed touchscreen regression
    • On older images the calibration was slightly off in the bottom right corner of the TS-TPC-8390
    • Fixed in ts_lcd.c in the kernel
  • Updated Debian for shellshock vulnerability.
    • Older images can just "apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade"
  • Fixed booting to lun1
  • Updated touchscreen calibration for all TPCs
  • Added SLC eMMC image for TS-4720
  • Fixed tshwctl tagmem regression
  • Fixed I210 support (4740)
  • CAN fixed for TS-7250-V2
  • Full size SD now supported on TS-7250-V2
    • Make a single read to scan the device "dd if=/dev/nbd2 bs=512 count=1 of=/dev/null", and then read /dev/nbd2p1 for the first partition.
  • Updated to latest Debian Wheezy
  • Fixed initramfs so DIO9 does not reset the carrier boards without a push switch.

3.14 Debian Changelog

3.14 Based Image
Image File Changelog Known Issues
* 4gbsd-471x-3x-20140828.dd.bz2
  • This is a beta image
  • New 3.14.16 kernel
  • Fixed ts_lcd which would incorrectly attempt to load calibration from tagmem which is no longer used.
  • Fixed udev bug which broke keyboards & mice on x11
    • Fixed with this on older systems:
    • echo "SUBSYSTEM==\"input\", ENV{ID_INPUT}==\"\", IMPORT{builtin}=\"input_id\"" >> /etc/udev/rules.d/50-udev-default.rules
  • USB OTG host does not work. The 1 CPU USB host still works.
  • PCIe, and intel I210 (TS-4740) support not yet functional.
  • Muxed IRQs (PC104, CAN, optionally XUART) currently do not work.
  • Switched sdctl to using Unix Domain Sockets instead of localhost tcp.
    • This gets around a rare bug that would cause the kernel to drop packets on localhost under heavy congestion.
    • This changes only involves a new kernel/initramfs and does not impact the debian filesystem.
  • Fixed touchscreen regression
    • On older images the calibration was slightly off in the bottom right corner of the TS-TPC-8390
    • Fixed in ts_lcd.c in the kernel
  • Updated Debian for shellshock vulnerability.
    • Older images can just "apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade"
  • No Audio
  • LCD still requires timing updates since vsync is off
  • USB OTG is not currently working
  • More common devices included in default kernel
  • USB OTG Fixed
  • tshwctl tagmem regression fixed
  • LCD timing off
  • No Audio
  • Fixed I210 support (4740)
  • CAN fixed for TS-7250-V2
  • Full size SD now supported on TS-7250-V2
    • Make a single read to scan the device "dd if=/dev/nbd2 bs=512 count=1 of=/dev/null", and then read /dev/nbd2p1 for the first partition.
  • Updated to latest Debian Wheezy
  • Fixed initramfs so DIO9 does not reset the carrier boards without a push switch.
  • Fixed LCD timing
  • Fixed Ethernet link unreliability without onboard switch
  • No Audio
  • No change in SD image, eMMC image reuploaded after noticing some missing files.

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Product Notes

FCC Advisory

This equipment generates, uses, and can radiate radio frequency energy and if not installed and used properly (that is, in strict accordance with the manufacturer's instructions), may cause interference to radio and television reception. It has been type tested and found to comply with the limits for a Class A digital device in accordance with the specifications in Part 15 of FCC Rules, which are designed to provide reasonable protection against such interference when operated in a commercial environment. Operation of this equipment in a residential area is likely to cause interference, in which case the owner will be required to correct the interference at his own expense.

If this equipment does cause interference, which can be determined by turning the unit on and off, the user is encouraged to try the following measures to correct the interference:

Reorient the receiving antenna. Relocate the unit with respect to the receiver. Plug the unit into a different outlet so that the unit and receiver are on different branch circuits. Ensure that mounting screws and connector attachment screws are tightly secured. Ensure that good quality, shielded, and grounded cables are used for all data communications. If necessary, the user should consult the dealer or an experienced radio/television technician for additional suggestions. The following booklets prepared by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) may also prove helpful:

How to Identify and Resolve Radio-TV Interference Problems (Stock No. 004-000-000345-4) Interface Handbook (Stock No. 004-000-004505-7) These booklets may be purchased from the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC 20402.

Limited Warranty

See our Terms and Conditions for more details.