OpenCPN Runs on Embedded ARM

[NahanniV]

Originally Posted by boat_alexandra

Does anyone know of a suitable daylight visible display for reasonable cost?

Pixel Qi 10.1 Inch Transflective LCD Display Screen | My Digital Discount

$200.
LED backlight for low light
Two options for sunlight:
-Transflective mode (lower color)
-Reflective mode (higher resolution grey)
LVDS interface so not easy to connect to Pi but perhaps CubieBoard ?

[seandepagnier]

There are some 7" lcd on ebay now which cost $25, but cannot work with raspberry unless a $50 hdmi to lvds adapter board is used. The display could work with a cubieboard however.

There is also a dual-core cubie board for $65 (probably about 4x faster than a raspberry), so with a power supply, case and gps, it might cost around $120 (or slightly more for touch screen) total. I am still unsure of hardware accelerated graphics capabilities.

Does anyone have experience with the cubieboard and opencpn?

[sbfreddie]

Originally Posted by boat_alexandra

There are some 7" lcd on ebay now which cost $25, but cannot work with raspberry unless a $50 hdmi to lvds adapter board is used. The display could work with a cubieboard however.

There is also a dual-core cubie board for $65 (probably about 4x faster than a raspberry), so with a power supply, case and gps, it might cost around $120 (or slightly more for touch screen) total. I am still unsure of hardware accelerated graphics capabilities.

Does anyone have experience with the cubieboard and opencpn?

Sean:
I have 3 Cubies, 2 CubieTrucks and a Cubie2. Both have Allwinner A20 dual core processors. I use an SSD with all Three of them and they are lots faster than either of my 2 Rasberry's. OpenCPN builds and works fine on the Cubie's especially the CubieTrucks because they have 2G of RAM. The File System I use is Debian instead of Ubuntu cause its considerably faster.
The Cubie's all have hardware accelerated graphics capabilities, but right now only the Cubie1 has them implemented. The other two will be working in the next few weeks, they are working on building for the CT and C2 as we speak. They do not have full OpenGL capabilities, only OpenGL ES2. The Mali video processor Manufacturer which is onboard has not released the Open Source code to implement full OpenGL.

The Cubie community is a very fast moving bunch of people from all over the world, and things are happening very quickly over there on the Cubie Forums (CubieBoard Forum - Index).

I have other of these types of boards, 2 UDOO's and 2 Wandboards. I like the Wandboards cause they have 2G of RAM instead of only 1G on the UDOOs.
The UDOO's software development is not moving along very fast so I don't believe they are that good of an investment.
The Wandboards are not moving at a very fast pace either but I have managed to build a very nice working Debian system that is really fast and not only runs OpenCPN with no sweat but also runs all the GNURadio stuff just fine. I built GNURadio using pybombs over night and most of the extras, including uhd, gqrx, gr-ais, rtl-sdr, gr-osmoscom and several others.
The UDOO's and Wandboards use the Freescale iMX6 processor with 4 cores. Freescale uses a different Video Processor that has had the Open Source Code released and does do Full OpenGL graphics acceleration.

Any other questions or comments concerning these boards?

Thanks,
Freddie

[monstads]

Sbfreddie, does the CubieTruck have a lvds interface? I see the two smaller Cubie ones have it..

[sbfreddie]

Originally Posted by monstads

Sbfreddie, does the CubieTruck have a lvds interface? I see the two smaller Cubie ones have it..

Monstads:
Yes it does, the CubieTruck has everything the other two Cubies have plus built-in Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and 2G of RAM!


Thanks,
Freddie

[dacust]

Originally Posted by sbfreddie

Monstads:
Yes it does, the CubieTruck has everything the other two Cubies have plus built-in Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and 2G of RAM!


Thanks,
Freddie

Someone should go edit wikipedia, then, because it specifically says it doesn't.

===> Cubieboard - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Cubietruck

The third version has a new and larger PCB layout and features the following hardware:[12]

• AllWinner A20 SoC (dual-core ARM Cortex-A7 @ 1 GHz CPU, with Mali-400MP2 GPU).
• 2 GB DDR3 @ 480 MHz
• 8 GB NAND flash built-in, 1x microSD slot, 1x SATA 2.0 port.
• HDMI 1080p output
• 10/100/1000 RTL8211E Ethernet PHY
• 2x USB Host, 1x USB OTG, 1x CIR.
• S/PDIF, headphone and HDMI audio out, mic and line in via extended pins
• Wi-Fi and Bluetooth onboard with PCB antenna (Broadcom BCM4329/BCM40181)
• 54 extended pins including I²C, SPI
• Dimensions: 11 cm × 8 cm

There is no LVDS support any longer. The RTL8211E NIC allows transfer rates up to 630–638 Mbits/sec (sending while 5–10% idle) and 850–860 Mbits/sec (receiving while 0–2% idle) when simultaneous TCP connections are established (testing was done utilising iperf with 3 clients against Cubietruck running Lubuntu desktop 1.0)[13]

To connect a 3.5" HDD the necessary 12 V power can be delivered by this 3.5 inch HDD addon package which can be used to power the Cubietruck itself as well. Also new is the option to power the Cubietruck from LiPo batteries.

Emphasis is mine.

-dan

[sbfreddie]

Originally Posted by dacust

Someone should go edit wikipedia, then, because it specifically says it doesn't.

===> Cubieboard - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia



Emphasis is mine.

-dan

Dan:
Perhaps you should talk to the people over on the Forum that have successfully attached LVDS displays to their Cubie's.
Here is a Link to linux-sunxi Wiki on how to hook up a LVDS display on the Cubie Board:
Cubieboard/LVDS - linux-sunxi.org

Please do a little more research before you post.

Thanks,
Freddie

[nohal]

Freddie...
I suppose Dan did his research. As he usually does. I got a bit curious as I'm looking at some ARM HW currently and it looks like the Cubietrack lacks (maybe lacked, I really don't know) LVDS ( https://groups.google.com/forum/#!ms...U/Yd6GvFdFx18J ) The link you posted sheds no light on it as it does not mention the truck at all.

Pavel

[CarinaPDX]

Originally Posted by sbfreddie

Please do a little more research before you post.

I was just cruising the forum and noticed the somewhat harsh reply. So I did a "little more research" myself. According to the manufacturer's site the CubieTruck does not have LVDS: News | Cubietruck

Please note that the comparison shows the CubieBoard 2 to have a 96 pin expansion header and lists RGB/LVDS but the CubieTruck has a 54 pin expansion header and does not list RGB/LVDS.

Your reference for connecting LVDS never mentioned CubieTruck (or CubieBoard 3 for that matter, or the A20 chip), so did not necessarily apply.

Could it be that you were the one that was mistaken?

Always say sweet words - they go down better when you have to eat them.

Greg

[dacust]

Originally Posted by sbfreddie

Dan:
Perhaps you should talk to the people over on the Forum that have successfully attached LVDS displays to their Cubie's.
Here is a Link to linux-sunxi Wiki on how to hook up a LVDS display on the Cubie Board:
Cubieboard/LVDS - linux-sunxi.org

Please do a little more research before you post.

Thanks,
Freddie

Sorry, my mistake. You were speaking so authoritatively, I made the mistake of thinking you knew what you were talking about. So I advised getting wikipedia fixed. I was expecting you to reply that, yes, it needed to be fixed. However, when your response was on the defensive, I reassessed my opinion of the situation and went to research better, like I should have the first time.

FIrst I looked at Pavel's link. Then, yours. So, I started comparing pinouts and looking for other links to confirm.

From the official cubie site: products:start [Cubieboard Docs]

Cubieboard 1 - 96 extend pin interface, including I2C, SPI, RGB/LVDS, CSI/TS, FM-IN, ADC, CVBS, VGA, SPDIF-OUT, R-TP, and more

Cubirboard2 - 96 extend pin interface, including I2C, SPI, RGB/LVDS, CSI/TS, FM-IN, ADC, CVBS, VGA, SPDIF-OUT, R-TP, and more

Cubietruck(Cubieboard3) - 54 extended pins including I2S, I2C, SPI, CVBS, LRADC x2,UART, PS2, PWMx2, TS/CSI, IRDA, LINEIN&FMIN&MICIN, TVINx4 with 2.0 pitch connectors

And other places, like
The feature of cubietruck comparing cubieboard2 | Cubietruck
The attached pic is the pinouts for the A10 and A20 (Cubieboard 1 and 2). The links on this page: products:start [Cubieboard Docs] for "Expansion Ports Introduction" points to that same page for both boards. They both show pinouts needed for LVDS (if the forums documenting them have it correct, and they probably do).
The Expansion Ports Introduction link for the truck goes to a totally different place, not even on their site. A20-Cubietruck - linux-sunxi.org The table they have only has the 54 pins, lacking the pins stated as being needed in the link you gave. This link, FWIW, comes from the same site you quoted...

So thanks for prompting me to research. I now know to research any thing you post before believing it.

Again, I apologize for my mistake.

-dan

PS: Also, sorry, this post is probably not really necessary after the CarinaPDX post, but I spent long enough putting it together that I just can't seem to delete it. Sorry. In my defense, I do include additional information.

[seandepagnier]

Originally Posted by sbfreddie

Sean:
I have 3 Cubies, 2 CubieTrucks and a Cubie2. Both have Allwinner A20 dual core processors. I use an SSD with all Three of them and they are lots faster than either of my 2 Rasberry's. OpenCPN builds and works fine on the Cubie's especially the CubieTrucks because they have 2G of RAM. The File System I use is Debian instead of Ubuntu cause its considerably faster.
The Cubie's all have hardware accelerated graphics capabilities, but right now only the Cubie1 has them implemented. The other two will be working in the next few weeks, they are working on building for the CT and C2 as we speak. They do not have full OpenGL capabilities, only OpenGL ES2. The Mali video processor Manufacturer which is onboard has not released the Open Source code to implement full OpenGL.

Specifically, how does eglgears compare between cubie and raspberry? Any other benchmarks? We don't really care about video playback though, more speed of texture uploads etc.. I know the raspberry is slow but has a reasonably fast gpu, but I am very unsure of the cubie's gpu capabilities.

Are you saying you cannot run glxinfo and get direct rendering on the cubie? I think this is ok, as soon as I can get my hands on some hardware (I have some funds for one board and screen now) I can modify opencpn to support OpenGL ES without xorg. It may even be possible to keep the dialogs (rendered to opengl now) with minimal effort, but the status bar will likely go away (use statusbar_pi instead) and possibly the toolbar will be rendered directly (much faster anyway and can support blending on all systems)

The 2gb ram for cubie truck is nice, but at $105 instead of $65, and without LVDS (another $50 for converter) I don't really think it is cost effective anymore. Having a solid state 8 or 16gb sata drive for charts might work well because it's much faster than the sd cards. The question is, can the whole 1gb be used for video memory?

The Cubie community is a very fast moving bunch of people from all over the world, and things are happening very quickly over there on the Cubie Forums (CubieBoard Forum - Index).

I have other of these types of boards, 2 UDOO's and 2 Wandboards. I like the Wandboards cause they have 2G of RAM instead of only 1G on the UDOOs.
The UDOO's software development is not moving along very fast so I don't believe they are that good of an investment.
The Wandboards are not moving at a very fast pace either but I have managed to build a very nice working Debian system that is really fast and not only runs OpenCPN with no sweat but also runs all the GNURadio stuff just fine. I built GNURadio using pybombs over night and most of the extras, including uhd, gqrx, gr-ais, rtl-sdr, gr-osmoscom and several others.
The UDOO's and Wandboards use the Freescale iMX6 processor with 4 cores. Freescale uses a different Video Processor that has had the Open Source Code released and does do Full OpenGL graphics acceleration.

The wandboards also look interesting, but more expensive. Since you have full opengl, this means it works in xorg and current opencpn? How does opencpn performance compare for wandboard with and without opengl, and to cubieboard2? Did you try my optimized opencpn fork on the wandboard?

[sbfreddie]

Gentlemen:
I stand corrected concerning the Cubie Truck and LVDS. You were right, when I looked at my Schematic I found that the port on the A20 that normally drives the LVDSl and the LCD0 is not connected to anything on the board. It appears that they didn't have enough room on the board to bring these pins out to a header some where (I'm guessing).

Thanks for correcting me,
Freddie

[dacust]

Originally Posted by sbfreddie

Gentlemen:
I stand corrected concerning the Cubie Truck and LVDS. You were right, when I looked at my Schematic I found that the port on the A20 that normally drives the LVDSl and the LCD0 is not connected to anything on the board. It appears that they didn't have enough room on the board to bring these pins out to a header some where (I'm guessing).

Thanks for correcting me,
Freddie

Cool.

I am interested on what you have to say on the questions boat_alexandra has. I am also looking for smaller board like this to run systems on. But I am way behind you on the boards I am familiar with.

Right now I have used basic stamp and just starting an arduino project. But next I'm looking at building a sensor suite package that will probably need a linux system to manage it, as it may take several arduinos. The wifi and BT adaptors for arduino are expensive, so a single Raspberry Pi could be cost efficient just for communications (not to mention having only one interface into the box). But having the option of more powerful systems that can run more mainstream code is very appealing. So, the various boards you are talking about sound exciting.

I probably won't have much to add to the conversation, so I'll mainly just read along.


-dan

[sbfreddie]

Sean:

Originally Posted by boat_alexandra

Specifically, how does eglgears compare between cubie and raspberry? Any other benchmarks? We don't really care about video playback though, more speed of texture uploads etc.. I know the raspberry is slow but has a reasonably fast gpu, but I am very unsure of the cubie's gpu capabilities.

The gpu on the cubie is the MALI 400 MP2. I am currently running the glxgears test and the answer is: 44-45 fps. I have not used the raspberry for a long time so I can't compare them.

Are you saying you cannot run glxinfo and get direct rendering on the cubie? I think this is ok, as soon as I can get my hands on some hardware (I have some funds for one board and screen now) I can modify opencpn to support OpenGL ES without xorg. It may even be possible to keep the dialogs (rendered to opengl now) with minimal effort, but the status bar will likely go away (use statusbar_pi instead) and possibly the toolbar will be rendered directly (much faster anyway and can support blending on all systems)

I don't know how to run glxinfo, teach me and I will give you the info.

The 2gb ram for cubie truck is nice, but at $105 instead of $65, and without LVDS (another $50 for converter) I don't really think it is cost effective anymore.

I only paid $89 for my CubieTrucks and they come with a case, wall wort power supply, and SATA cable. Here is where I got it: Products – r0ckstore
I just checked and the price is the same, you just have to wait for the shipping from China.

Having a solid state 8 or 16gb sata drive for charts might work well because it's much faster than the sd cards. The question is, can the whole 1gb be used for video memory?

I have a 250GB SSD and it is close to 10-15 times as fast as the SD card. The kernel has settings for how much RAM is committed to the MALI processor.

The wandboards also look interesting, but more expensive. Since you have full opengl, this means it works in xorg and current opencpn? How does opencpn performance compare for wandboard with and without opengl, and to cubieboard2? Did you try my optimized opencpn fork on the wandboard?

I have just now been playing with the Wandboards I have and haven't had much time to experiment. However I built the regular OpenCPN with all of your plugins last night and it is working just fine. When OpenCPN is running it uses about 20% of the 4 Cpu's power. The performance is equal to my Quad-Core Mac Pro.
The CubieTruck is currently using about 60% of the cpu's power when OpenCPN sits idling.

Thanks for all you do!

Freddie

[bcn]

This one - a A20 based board as well - is worth to have a look at.

Very flexible power requirements 6-16V onboard (see below).
Options for a lot of serial ports and GPIOs.

https://www.olimex.com/Products/OLin...ource-hardware

Deabian is just running fine on it.
And for Sean: in the Olimex A20 forum there are some posts how to work with the GPU
FEATURES

• A20 Cortex-A7 dual-core ARM Cortex-A7 CPU and dual-core Mali 400 GPU
• 1GB DDR3 RAM memory
• NO NAND FLASH memory
• NO BUILT-IN OS
• SATA connector with 5V SATA power jack
• Built-in FullHD support (1080p)
• 2 x USB High-speed host with power control and current limiter
• USB-OTG with power control and current limiter
• HDMI output with ESD protectors
• VGA output on 6-pin 1.25mm (0.05") step connector
• 100MBit native Ethernet
• Battery connector with battery-charging capabilities
• Audio headphones output
• Microphone input on connector
• 2 x UEXT connectors
• LCD connector compatible with with 4.3", 7.0", 10.1" LCD modules from Olimex
• 160 GPIOs on three GPIO connectors
• MicroSD card connector
• SD/MMC card connector
• DEBUG-UART connector for console debug with USB-SERIAL-CABLE-F
• GPIO LED
• Battery charge status LED
• Power LED
• 2KB EEPROM for MAC address storage and more
• 10 BUTTONS with ANDROID functionality + RESET button
• 4 mount holes
• 6-16V input power supply, noise immune design
• PCB dimensions: (5600 x 3250) mils ~ (142.24 x 82.55) mm