Shiny new exynos 4412 board and hi-res touchscreen + mini210s black edition released on andahammer

It looks like www.andahammer.com and friendlyarm have been busy again and released a couple of new boards, first up we have the mini210s black edition, with some neat features, made exclusively for andahammer, they feature a 6pin header for access to the buzzer, pot and mic headers and a write protect for the eeprom which means you can safely store mac addresses, phone numbers, device serial numbers etc. and retrieve them at boot, lastly there is a jumper to silence the onboard piezo buzzer.

They're only small changes but from a developers point of view they open up some nice features, firstly it means that you're no longer tied to having the inconvenient onboard placement for the buzzer, pot and mic, once the min210 is in a case, those devices will be near useless so being able to place them where they can be used is a big help.

As mentioned for the eeprom, it's easy to see the advantages of having a write protect option, it means that you can store information on the device without worrying it will be wiped, it means you can have a small level of security over your stored data and uniquely identify the board and more importantly store a mac address which is useful if you have a lot of mini210S on a network.

The buzzer, it screeches like a banshee, being able to mute it with a jumper is manna from heaven :)

Onto the shiny new exynos 4412 board, the folks over at http://www.andahammer.com/tiny4412sdk-hd70/ have a system ready to go, it's a standard friendylarm 'tiny' form factor, so it's a core tiny board (cpu, ram, e-mmc) with an arm cortex-a9 quad core cpu, 1GB ddr 3, 4GB e-mmc flash, then you have the SDK board which has all of the headers for all of the peripherals like usb/micro usb, ethernet, SD socket, com ports, hdmi, g-sensor (accelerometer), audio out/mic in,buttons and most interestingly there is a cpld on board for some programmable logic fun, if you want more information keep an eye on the andahammer website for updates.

I almost forgot, the LCD that goes with the tiny4412 kit is a 7" high resolution 1280x800 capacitive touchscreen which gives it a very nice resolution for any of the modern OS distros.

I can't wait to see what this board can actually do, 1.5Ghz quad core should go like a rocket, lots of ram, the nand flash should be that bit faster on the e-mmc setup, it should have better 3d/2d support and the usual hd codec support, it will be running kernel 3.50 and android 4.2.

mini210S updates

Yet again it's been a while since my last post but things are moving forwards with the nand driver, there is currently an effort from some of the chinese developers on the arm9home.net forums to do various ports  for the tiny/mini210s, barebox, uboot and a kernel upgrade to 3.10, I've been helping to iron out issues with the nand driver port and this evening we got a working 3.10 nand driver, it's currently spitting out ecc errors but hey, don't they all?

All joking aside that is actually a reasonable state for the driver to be in, at that point the code has managed to query the nand chip and retrieve the ID bytes directly from it, so we know the read/write functions are working.

We also know at this point that we're hitting the correct register addresses because the functions are working and we're pulling in meaningful information, it was broken but we found that the nand_flash_dev struct had been altered so simply changing where we pull the current device id from fixed that.  As long as nothing else has changed in a big way in the nand driver then it's more than likely a mismatch between the version of superboot and our nand driver, more specifically it's probably the nand ecc pos layout that is at fault.

There was a pull request on github for the nand driver, there was a 'typo' in the ecc pos layout, which in fairness wasn't our error, we used a specific driver to dump information from to write our driver, the values for the ecc pos layout were a direct dump, which probably explains why our driver only ever worked with a specific version of superboot.  The next step is to dump information from the nand drivers from the newer dvds, if we use the kernel sources and matching superboot we can see if the 'typo' error is isolated or not.