"If you want to evaluate the fastest-growing application processor SOC manufacturer in China in recent years, Quanzhi technology is definitely one of the top. Especially with the popularity of global open source hardware, Quanzhi's application processing SOC appears more frequently in front of engineers. For example, pcduino, banana pie and cubieboard2 are all equipped with Quanzhi's application processor SOC. Based on this popular open source hardware board, Quanzhi has not only attracted a batch of "Quanzhi powder", Moreover, it gradually expands its own product ecosystem. This is not true. Aiban has recently obtained an open-source single board computer based on Quanzhi application processing SOC - mixfile loft-q (Mitai) provided by Shenzhen Zhiqu technology. This prototype board is biased towards the home entertainment environment and supports 4K video decoding capability. It can be used to build its own home theater, watch movies and play games. Similarly, It can also touch the "noble" fields, such as the control center and data center of the current popular smart home.
Having said so much, let's first see the true face of mixfile loft-q development board. First of all, the packaging feels very ordinary.
When you open the packing box, it still looks very simple, and there are not many accessories in the box. A mixtile loft-q board and an adapter cable (it seems to be connected to a mobile hard disk) that you don't know what use it is for the time being. In addition, the board design is very considerate, and we have been equipped with a special card box.
Take off the "skin" of the card box and finally see the true face of the board. At first glance, you will feel very high-grade. However, there are two antennas attached to the transparent card box cover. It looks not beautiful, which may tangle Virgo friends. Fortunately, the official will launch a complete and expandable shell later. I believe you will never have such concerns again.
Turn to the back of the board and through the transparent card box, you can clearly see that the board is actually equipped with the application processing SOC of Quanzhi A31, which is integrated with a powerful GPU and can support 4K decoding. In addition, we also see that several long holes are opened at the card box at the SOC position. The purpose of the design is to dissipate heat. However, in my opinion, based on the distance from the chip to the card box, This kind of opening has little effect on heat dissipation.
I watched the board from inside to outside. Generally speaking, the first impression of mixfile loft-q is that the SOC of Quanzhi A31 application processor is powerful and has many scalable functions. What are the specific functions of the board? We have to keep looking down.
MixTile LOFT-Q
In order to understand the card more clearly, we remove the mixile loft-q card from the card box, as shown in the figure below. This is the overall situation of the mixile loft-q card before "peeling" the card box.
It can be seen that there are few functions attached to the card box. In addition to two antennas (WiFi / ZigBee), there is also a control panel (including power key, LED indicator and infrared receiver). The resources of mixile loft-q motherboard are as follows:
Quanzhi A31 application processing SOC, arm cortex ™- A7 4-core, powervr ™ SGX544MP2 GPU
Positive base ap6234 module, supporting 2.4g/5g WiFi & Bluetooth 4.0
NXP jn5168 (jn5168 Data Book) low power ZigBee chip
2GB 64 bit DDR3, on-board 8GB EMMC
HDMI support, Toslink interface, Gigabit Ethernet support, 2.5-inch SATA III hard disk interface
Dual microphone, 4-way USB2.0 support, onboard acceleration sensor, infrared remote control support
180pin expansion interfaces, including I2C, SPI, LCD, Mipi DSI, RGB / LVDS, CSI, Mipi CSI, ADC, CTP, RTP, spdif-out, SPDIF-in, GPIO, etc. (according to the official introduction, they have successively launched various types of function expansion boards for the reserved expansion interfaces, such as cameras, touch screens, various sensors, etc.)
Compared with other open source hardware I have seen, such as banana pie and raspberry pie, mixile loft-q has four main surprises:
1. Equipped with Quanzhi A31 application processing SOC
2. 2GB DDR3 memory is on board
3. On board 8GB high-speed EMMC
4. Onboard ZigBee and WiFi modules
Quanzhi A31 application processing SOC
First, let's take a look at Quanzhi's application processing SOC A31, which claims to support 4K video decoding, as shown in the figure below
From the system block diagram of A31 SOC, it is not difficult to find that A31 integrates rich resources, especially multimedia. It is equipped with rich display interfaces, such as HDMI 1.4, LCD RGB, Mipi DSI, LVDS, etc. it is also equipped with rich image input interfaces, including CSI and Mipi CSI, compared with other peripheral interface resources, We can still see that A31 focuses on the field of multimedia processing.
Of course, this does not mean that the A31 performs poorly in other aspects. On the contrary, the A31 is a very high-performance application processing SOC among the single board computers evaluated by Aiban. In this general way, maybe you don't have much impression. Let's compare it with other popular single board computers in the market. For example, the banana pie mentioned at the beginning of the article, which is just equipped with Quanzhi's previous generation application processing SOC A20. Compared with the two, we can clearly see the advantages of A31:
First, the CPU performance is improved, from dual core A7 to 4-core A7
Secondly, the GPU is upgraded from the mail-400 of arm to the sgx544mp2 of powervr series of imaging, which is the same supplier as apple GPU. The overall performance is twice higher than that of mail-400
Equipped with image signal processor (ISP) unit, it can support 12 million cameras and 1080p@60fps HD video recording, zero delay photographing, 1 second 10 continuous photographing and other functions, and a separate ISP hardware module can improve the photographing speed, have better image processing effect and reduce power consumption
ZigBee, WiFi module
ZigBee
The ZigBee solution on mixile loft-q board is a jn5168a single-chip solution based on NXP. It is a 2.4G wireless communication chip that supports Jennet IP, ZigBee smart energy, ZigBee light link, RF4CE and IEEE802.15.4 network protocol stack. It integrates flash, ram, EEPROM memory and other peripheral resources, and requires only a small amount of external components (less than US $0.15), A complete 2.4G wireless communication scheme can be realized.
RX power consumption 17mA, TX power consumption 15mA
Receiving sensitivity - 95dbm
Transmit power 2.5dbm
WiFi module
The on-board WiFi scheme of mixfile loft-q adopts positive base Ap6234 module supports 2.4g/5g WiFi & Bluetooth 4.0 and WiFi 802.11 a / g / N standard.
In addition to the above prominent features, mixfile loft-q is also rich in other on-board resources, such as on-board backup battery, Gigabit Ethernet port and 2.5-inch SATA 3 hard disk expansion interface. Here are no more examples.
Of course, it doesn't mean that the mixile loft-q is perfect. For example, the power design of the board is a little out of line with the "trend". The mixile loft-q adopts 12V DC voltage input, or at the beginning of the design, considering that the board is connected to peripheral resources as much as possible, the power load of the board is not enough. For example, the board is equipped with SATA hard disk interface, Considering the compromise of function, a 12V power supply interface is designed.
In short, compared with the current common open source hardware board, mixfile loft-q is much higher in performance and function, which is mainly due to the processing SOC of Quanzhi A31 application. In addition to the super multimedia playback function, what else can mixfile loft-q be used to do? I think the following figure well illustrates the other functions that mixfile loft-q can achieve.
Does it look familiar? By the way, in the Xiaozhi smart speaker disassembled by aiban.com, we said that the vision of Xiaozhi speaker is to become the control center of such a smart home. This may be the so-called hero thinks alike.
How to develop
After talking about the performance and functions of the development board, how should mixfile loft-q be developed?
On GitHub, the official provides the source code download of various systems. For friends who want to build their own system, it is also a good choice to do it yourself. However, for engineers who first contact this kind of board, they need to compile the system image themselves based on the Linux system development environment, which is also a large workload and may be troublesome. Fortunately, mixile loft-q has more detailed development steps for reference. Those who are interested can click to view it.
In addition, the official also provides ready-made system images. We can directly burn the system under Windows system. Take SD card startup as an example. The steps are as follows:
Download the system image with img matching text on the www.mixfile.com/downloads/loft-q/ page
Decompress the downloaded system and burn it into SD card through win32diskimager
Some people may have questions here. Quanzhi's application processor does not have a special SD card burning tool phoenix card. Why not use it? The official reply is "at present, their Linux The system uses mainline of uboot and kernel ， The generated image does not need Quanzhi's tool, but just needs to be directly burned to the SD card. "
Insert the SD after burning into the mixfile board and connect the necessary peripherals such as display, mouse and keyboard lamp (of course, you can also view the system startup through the serial port), as shown in the following figure
Login password: root password: Linux
After the system was started, I originally wanted to switch to the graphical interface. The result was "no startx installed". It seems that the official openSUSE factory system has castrated the graphical interface. We have no choice but to give up. We will gradually improve our experience of more functions of mixile loft-q in the future. What we see now is just the tip of the iceberg.
After watching the power on of mixile loft-q system, I had to pour another basin of cold water. Compared with other open source hardware boards on the market, the development documentation provided by mixfile loft-q board is not comprehensive enough, and there is no detailed step-to-step tutorial to guide you to learn. Therefore, some problems may be encountered in the development process. For example, in the above example, under windows, There is no clear description document on how to burn the compiled system image into the SD card, which is really a big problem for engineers without foundation. It may also be that engineers who have officially defaulted to using this development board have strong foundation. In addition, it must be emphasized that the essence of mixtile loft-q is to build an open-source intelligent hardware mutual aid design platform. The data will be gradually improved. Those who are interested can consider waiting for a while before making plans.
Summary
This paper introduces the functions, application scenarios and simple development environment of mixile loft-q development board. Mixile loft-q is equipped with Quanzhi A31 multimedia application processing SOC (arm cortex) ™- A7 4-core, powervr ™ Sgx544mp2 (GPU) supports 4K video decoding and can be used to set up a home theater or digital HD player; Onboard WiFi / Bluetooth module (positive base ap6234 module) and ZigBee module (jn5168a of NXP) can be used to build the wireless communication network of control center and data center of smart home; In addition, many rich peripheral resources on board can be used for engineers, makers, or geeks DIY's own creative products. In short, mixile loft-q is an open-source single board computer that meets the requirements of entertainment and smart home control.
reference material
Mixile loft-q development board
Quanzhi A31 application processing SOC data
Mixfile loft-q development board data
Github : https://github.com/mixtile
Download address of official website
Original statement: This article is original by Aiban. Reprint is declined“
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