Hey, maybe someone of the hardware folks in here can help me out: couple friends and I want to do a student project with gsm-enabled IoT devices. Does anyone know a chipset vendor that is willing to work with students?! Chipset requirements are not huge, it should support 3G or EDGE, Wifi, CSI/DSI for screens and camera and if possible a couple of GPIOs.
We don't really want to go the route of using unlicensed phones like this one or hacks with a rpi and dozens of shields, so it'd be cool if there's anything available...
FOSS as in the BSP? Freescale’s chips tend to be decent (we’ll see how long that lasts now that Qualcomm owns them.) although I don’t think most of them have modems or GPUs.
I liked TI’s stuff but it’s definitely not meant for anything like a modern smart phone.
If you meant the SOC itself... I haven’t even heard of any outside of some fringe kickstarter things.
I've saved a few during my years of lab management as they ran our infrastructure, and they're cracking PCs. Sometimes I run into fringe issues with drivers, but never anything major. Pretty much all validated on Linux OS too, so better support than most client PCs.
Yeah, they were talking about this on the Amp Hour a few episodes ago. There's some universities that actually fab a physical chip as part of their coursework using MOSIS. If I remember correctly there was an edu discount.
http://valentfx.com/logi-pi/ (or logibone) is reasonably good, it's a Spartan6 LX9, easily programmable via SPI, and you can communicate with your design using the same SPI, easily clocked up to 30mbps.
For bigger designs (e.g., a full OpenRISC SoC fits, with ethernet and VGA and all that) you can use Digilent Atlys board, it's cheap for students (although communicating with it is a bit more complicated).
So on that note, do you have any brands/manufacturers/chipsets that you see as particularly good in terms of being a client?
Its always a gamble when I get a new phone/laptop/device if it will work with the multi-AP setup I have in my house, and I'm really tired of getting something and bringing it home only to find it hangs on to the furthest AP for dear life.
Wouldn't mind a larger board that exposes a number of pins for GPIO, I2C, SPI etc. from the SoC. I'm using the SoCs at www.gumstix.org with OpenEmbedded Linux for rapid work related prototyping.
Any Cortex A8 would probably suffice. I've been out of the game for a while but there was definitely a vendor push to 64-bit SoCs for even mundane tasks, not to mention all samples being Android based...
If you can get away with something low spec then you'll be fine, generally. Board bringup for any Cortex A8 or similar is comically easier than for lines ending in double digits.
I found Rockchip much easier to work with than TI, fwiw.
On CM3/4 CPUs I typically have been shipping with FreeRTOS based solutions. I've done this with LPC2478/1788, and I'm now working on a similar Kinetis K60 architecture.
It's a nice O/S, but doesn't have a real solid application layer on top of it. For that I've sometimes used FDI's uEZ system, but it also lacks a lot of the components I need for real IoT node work (Radio drivers, TCP, SSL, and as a stretch I could really use MQTT or AMQP).
Aside: Although not strictly custom silicon, one can get close to making a custom chip with a Programmable System On Chip (PSoC) made by Cypress who look to have been "consumed". [1]
I did toy with the idea of making application specific "chips" from this system, but couldn't find enough inspiration. The design tooling - last time I looked - was pretty good.
Have you looked at mBed stuff? From what I've tried and their marketing, it looks like the wide variety of chips in the ecosystem offer the required spectrum for production.
Yes, that’s been a frustration for me. I’ve settled on the Motorola 6847 which requires a couple supporting chips. This is scavenging parts off eBay though, which seems to be a plentiful source. I’ll find out shortly whether any of them are actually good.
I had a look at this just this week. One problem; all the io libraries out there rely on special functionality in the broadcom chips and thus don't work with the knock-off boards. Meaning anything that needs gpio/spi/i2c/serial can't run on a clone board without a code rewrite.
Are there any breadboard-style releases implementing this spec? I'm looking for the low(er) cost and open ecosystem that I find in ODROID and RasPi style boards, but still the robustness and standardization of this common spec.
We don't really want to go the route of using unlicensed phones like this one or hacks with a rpi and dozens of shields, so it'd be cool if there's anything available...
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