As we all know, traditional industrial control devices put stability first, and as technology is increasing, in the pursuit of stability, it is necessary to make factors such as performance, function, and price, which makes the threshold in the industrial control. Less, especially in today's digital, voice, etc., high-rate transmission, etc., urgently requires powerful industrial control equipment. It happens that the author has been fortunate to get a Industrial Control Platform MYD-C4377-PRU development kit, which is launched by Mil Technology, which will talk to everyone, talk to everyone.
MYD-C4377-PRU Development Kit is Mil Technology to apply a specialized development platform for PRU-ICSS (programmable real-time unit subsystems and industrial communication subsystems), which consists of core board myc-c4377 and bottom plate MYB-C4377-PRU It can be used to assess, or the core board can be used for secondary development, selective diverse, let's take a look at this development kit.
The package is very large, and the corresponding accessories should be rich. Positive "Make Your IDEA REAL" indicates that the side of the sucks of the sunders can see the specific model of the suite: MYD-C4377-4E512D-100-I-PRU, if there is no guess, contain 4GB memory and 512MB to save this class information. The internal fitting includes a plate platform, a data disc, a power adapter, a mini USB cable, one network cable removes the electrostatic bag to show the true, the first eye, the interface is rich, full. Where supported adapters are 12V / 1.5A power supply, relatively, 12V supply voltages are also commonly used in industrial embedded control systems. MYD-C4377-PRU
MYD-C4378 develops all resources are distributed on the front, and the development board four-pool has fixed support columns, even for the careful wing, extremely care for the discerning users of the development board, there is no problem in developing a problem on the table, no additional purchase Or customize the housing.
The MYD-C4377-PRU development board's onboard resource distribution is the function on the board, which is really enough, which basically includes some of the mainstreams of the current industrial control, especially praise. Yes, the MYD-C4377-PRU development board uses a combined structure of the bottom plate + core plate, and the user can replace different core panels to achieve the desired function. Of course, the core board is used by Ti's same series of products, core board replacement The function change is more inclined to change the main application processing function, but it can be changed, which can be appropriately adopted to customize the most suitable development or project, and save costs. . The hardware block diagram of the MYD-C4377-PRU development board is as follows, and it will be at a glance. It can be seen that the board is more feasible, such as bringing 3 Ethernet interfaces, all the Gigabit Ethernet ports, is extended directly through the PHY on the core board, and the other two is the 100-sum Ethernet port. , Expand through the PHY on the bottom plate. In addition, the RJ45 Ethernet port is an LCD interface. The microcontroller of the core panel is a 24 Bit RGB LCD interface controller, while the bottom plate provides two interfaces of 16 BitLCD and 24 bit LCDs, but cannot display, maximum support at the same time. The resolution is 2048 * 2048.
Another important feature on the bottom plate is that rich signals are introduced through the expansion interface, which is convenient for engineers to DIY.
Like the CAN, the R485 interface has a dedicated IC as a signal conversion.
LED, buttons, TF cards, USB Host / Device, camera interfaces are also all right.
The MYD-C4378 development board also includes four different start-up mode, which can be set by setting the DIP switch through the onboard startup switch, which enables QSPI Flash, TF card, EMMC or Nand Flash, where EMMC and NAND Flash are in the core board. It has been compatible with compatible design, and the two have done one. There is no meta device on the back of the development board, very clean.
Although the core panel of the MYD-C4377-PRU development board can be separated from the bottom plate, but did not expect the core board and the bottom plate to use 2 100pin two-row pin interface, disassembly and replacement very convenient, ratio Traditional straight pin needle design is easy to replace.
Core Board Myc-C4377
Myc-c4377 core board is very delicate, only 60mm * 40mm size, it is not as good as our ID card, and the core board workmanship is also a lever, and the 8-story Shenjin PCB process is used. PCB is very strong.
Do a compatible design EMMC with NAND Flash, in addition, the board is also designed to design a QSPI flash design, connect the AM4377 SPI interface, which can be used as system start boot. The components of the core board are densely equipped, and the intensive phobia estimates that there are not many chips that cannot be collected on the core board. It is mainly Ti AM4377 processor, two 256MB DDR3 memory, 4GB EMMC, power management chip, Ethernet Net PHY and 32KB of EEPROM TI SITARA AM4377
The application processor AM4377 is a member in Ti (Texas Instrument) Sitra AM437x series, based on the ARM Cortex-A9 kernel, the highest frequency can reach 1GHz, integrated four-core programmable real-time unit (PRU) and dual camera, Many industrial protocols for automation and industrial drives, such as EtherCAT, Ethernet / IP, PROFIBUS, PROFINET-RT / IRT, POWERLINK, SERCOS III, IEC61850, etc., ENDAT motor feedback protocol, and Sensors and Sensors and The Biss interface protocol of the actuator.
In fact, if the engineer familiar with the Ti Sitra series line, it is not difficult to find TI's AM437X series of products. It is actually an AM335X upgrade version:
The first is the upgrade of the kernel, and the AM437X is upgraded from the Cortex-A8 processor of the AM335X era to Today's Cortex-A9, and the hardware accelerator of some graphic image processing is added while inheriting the SGX530 graphics accelerator, including graphics processing, superposition, scaling, and The color space transformation and other graphics processing IP, this benefit is that the graphic task that needs to occupy the ARM operational resource is completely transferred to the hardware accelerator to achieve efficiency.
Secondly, PRU is upgraded, saying PRU, this is TI different from other ARM processor developers' biggest features and is also a magic weapon. PRU, probably programming real-time logic units, users can design various communication subsystems or other protocols, such as industrial communication protocols, private encryption protocols, allowing the device to have FPGA flexibility. The AM437X will upgrade the two PRUs on the AM335x to 4, and the clock is also from 80 MHz ~
100 MHz upgrade to 150 MHz ~ 200 MHz, and support more industrial communication bus, as shown in the system architecture of the above picture, now PRU support includes EtherCAT, PROFINET, Ethernet / IP, motor feedback protocol, Sigma Delta modulation, etc. Real-time agreement.
In addition, the AM437X also has a small upgrade and optimization in memory, and can support more memory specifications, such as DDR2 / DDR3 / DDR3, and maintain the low power characteristics of AM437X, all internally The function is maintained within 1W power consumption without opening.
So we can see from these points, compare the AM335x series, AM437X has a large increase in performance and functionality.
The TI AM437X series includes AM4376, AM4377, AM4378, AM4379 four PIN-to-PiN compatible processors, each processor has
Support for 800MHz and 1GHz, while the support of each processor in 3D graphics acceleration and PRU-ICSS is different, and this C4377 on the MYD-C4377-PRU development board belongs to this series Medium and low-specific products, and no integration 3D graphics acceleration, as shown below.
Power-on development
The board is built into the Linux system, and the board card can be activated through the 12V / 1.5A adapter equipped in the MYD-C4377-PRU development board. From the previous situation, power consumption can also be maintained in the case of the internal function of the AM437X. Looking at 1W, this input source should be more than enough, even if there are many peripheral functions, it is entirely competent to deal with different working environment.
The MYD-C4377-PRU development board provides four different starting modes that can be set by the onboard DIP switch.
The EMMC started by default settings. Connect the serial line power, pay attention to select the UART0 debug serial port
You can view the system boot log through the serial tool
Login account is root, you can develop Linux after logging in. For example, the simplest LED control, implemented by echo command.
The MYD-C437X-PRU development board default factory firmware is PRU Ethernet working mode, implements a Gigabit Ethernet interface and two PRUSS1 extended Bass Industrial Ethernet interfaces, three network ports can work independently.
One of the Gigabit Ethernet ports can be directly connected to the Internet because the development board has been connected to the network cable.
In addition, the above-drawing test can also be found that the system only enables Eth0, Eth1, and Eth2 through the ifconfig ... UP command to manually set the IP address and enable.
If you want to experience your compiled system mirror, you need to build a Linux system environment on your own PC. The most common is to use the Ubuntu system, you can also implement the Linux development environment by Open source virtual machine software Virtualbox, in Minux Many ready-made application cases are provided in the official CD, which we can use directly.
summary
Introduction Mil Technology MYD-C4377-PRU development board, the development board uses the core board + bottom plate, the core board is based on Ti latest series of SITARA series processor AM4377, which can achieve flexible extension while ensuring performance. Used in the company's existing R & D projects; and specially designed bottom plates are enriching the expansion of peripheral peripherals, which can effectively assess the performance, functional power consumption of core boards, functional power consumption, and PRU-ICSS for TI application processors. Programmable real-time unit subsystems and industrial communication subsystems) conduct assessments; additional supporting boards, Mil Technology also provides development materials including user manual, PDF schematic, external expansion interface driver, BSP source package, development tools. The combination of these three provides developers with a complete software and hardware development environment, which can reduce product development cycles and achieve product rapid listing. Interested friends can trial the needs of the application.
Reference
PRU-ICSS Introduction
Multi-protocol Industry Ethernet Detection (using PRU-ICSS) Reference Design for Industrial Automation Applications
This article originally address: https://www.eeboard.com/evaluation/myd-c4377-pru/
Original declaration: This article is originally created by the panel network, declined!
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