"Remember, Experience Gained is Directly Proportional to the Amount of Equipment Destroyed!" *
ARM7, ARM9, ARM11, Cortex-A8. Don't settle for less when you can have sense and simplicity! ARMWorks ships products in discreet unmarked boxes.
May 3rd: Good news everyone! After delays from the Chinese May Day holiday and a slowdown in Chinese Customs, loads of Mini35's and other things are arriving and start shipping today. We have a lot of back orders. We just found out that the shopping cart has NOT been showing the "Out of Stock - Backorder Allowed" message! Our appologies to those who ordered expecting same day shipping. We will be tracking down that problem today. It explains all the Where is my stuff! emails we have been geting. Not to mention putting a big dent in our reputation.
New product: We looked around a lot for a good quad band GSM/GPRS MODEM and settled on a Wavecom with the P5186E chipset, and here it is. Till we get all the full volume pricing info, it is the same price as our dual band (non-USA) cell MODEM and a little shorter. RS232 interface DB9. This uses the OpenAT comand set and will work from any of the Linux systems, Arduinos, or Corridium ARM boards. There are a few other new products, including internal quad band MODEMs from Kingbird. Posting shortly.
Everyone tool kit needs a caliper and nearly every electronics site sells one. We brought in a batch with a really great price. After shipping costs we saw why they all sell for $14.95. So, now we sell them too, but probably only till they run out. They have a nice tough plastic box. Add one to the shopping cart for your tool kit. Or get a couple extra. You won't be sorry. Extra large digital readout.
April 27th: We have been busy! There is a Chinese holiday from May 1st to 5th which is slowing down some shipments. We expect to ship all backordered Mini35 and other items during that time. Cable kits will take a little longer. There is some sort of crackdown in Chinese Customs in Shenzhen and they are opening EVERYTHING. Backlog is as much as two weeks as of today.
April 4th: We have added the Coridium PROplus to our Arduino pin compatible ARM boards. Most of you are probably not in love with BASIC, but this nice little ARM Cortex M3 averages more than 25 million LINES of compiled BASIC per second! It doesn't get much easier than BASIC and this special compiler includes all the I/O and still keeps a small list of keywords. I/O is all 5V tollerant.
Feb 13th: How about a couple of new products? PoE is gaining more users all the time. Here are a couple of very useful PoE passive power injectors. The 8 port is ony 6 inches wide and fits about anywhere. The 16 port is a heavy guage steel for 19" racks but you can mount it anyplace it will fit. It is less than 2 inches deep, and leave room for a barrel jack plug for power. We tested some cool MuRata DC/DC converters that take up to 37 volts and deliver 5v or 3.3v and will post some part numbers and specs. They are great for DiY PoE and have a TO-220 form factor. DigiKey has them here.
Feb 6th: Good news everyone! We have standardized on some memory configurations for the Mini6410 (256M RAM and 1G NAND) and the Tiny6410 (256M RAM and 2G NAND). So naturally we have some units that don't fit. What to do? Clearance Sale! These other configurations have a little less memory and the same computing performance. We just don't have room for so many variations. We have Mini6410 with 128M RAM and 256M NAND here and Tiny6410 with 256M RAM and 1G NAND here. The display options are not listed. Grab any display you need in the "Spares" section or the OEM S70 in the Accessories and we will program to match. Oem versions are also listed in the Mini6410 and Tiny6410 sections. The sale items have an SS, as in Mini6410SS.....
On another note: Buyers have asked why the 7" Innolux displays are $116 and the S70 OEM is only $65? There is actually a good reason. The S70 is a simple LCD panel and drive electronics meant to be mounted by the buyer. The mounting has to be in a recessed frame with additional support. The A70 (Inn70 or Innolux 7.0) is a panel plus bezel/frame and full size PCB with matching mounting holes for the bezel. This gives full support on the back side and full mounting stiffened by a big slab of FR4 PCB.
Jan 18th: If you are desperate for some good solid tech fun, check out the free online DSP books linked here DSPGuru.
Jan 4th: Goog news everyone! More Mini210s arrived! Backorders will ship tomorrow. These are so cool with 512M RAM and built in wifi and USB2.0 and all that stuff. Aside from the Android we have seen before, the latest DVD also has Linux (2.6.35.7) with Qtopia and QtE or Qt4. Some testing is in order.
Jan 2nd: Miracle on 112th Street - CTO Charlie: Over the weekend I had an amazing experience. Guess what? You can assemble a new computer, install Ubuntu, build cross development tools and BSP, and generate a new Linux for the Mini2440 in one day! A few weeks ago I had decided to set up a new computer for experimenting with some Linux tool variations, to be followed by Mini2440/Mini6410 GUI tests. I ordered this "Bare Bones" system from Tiger Direct with a quad core AMD and 8Gbytes of DRAM. There was also a sale and rebate for Acer monitors so I duplicated my favorite setup with a pair of these and the dual monitor stand. It was cheaper to get the monitors with rebate and the stand seperatly than their combination discount. I'll add a $10 video card for the second display later. For now it goes to a Mac Mini and the keyboard and mouse are switched. If you don't know about the -joption for 'make', it sets the number of threads to run. For a quad core try -j12 and watch your Linux compile drop from over an hour to about 6 minutes. Kernel compiles don't leave time to get a cup of coffee. I wonder what one of the 12 core Macs would be be like with -j36 or more. WHne is Apple going to do a new spin on the 12 core Mac Pro and jump the2.66 MHz up to the i5's at 3.4 MHz? That is like adding 4 more cores at the current speed (don't forget burst mode to 3.9 or 4.0).
Saturday afternoon I gathered all the parts to begin what I thought would be a very long frustrating process only slightly less irritating than installing Windows. I have rarely been so glad to be wrong. I assembled the computer and installed Ubuntu 11. Everything worked quite easily. No wonder Ubuntu has become so popular. I have wanted to check out the Pengutronix system for building Linux systems .......read more.
Note: New English version of the Tiny6410 Hardware Spec. here and on the Tiny6410 pages.
Dec 30th and another year gone by: So, lets start off with a few new products. OEMs and DIYers who make their own housings and mountings will appreciate the convenience (and the price!) of the S70 7" LCD for OEMs. Here it is shown next to a Mini6410 (11x11cm, not included). The outside dimesnsions are nice round numbers, 265mm x 100mm and the panel is 4mm thick. The viewable area is only slightly less and we will get the manufacturer's drawing posted soon. It is listed under Accessories. Maybe we should start an OEM category?
Enough! People have been asking for a USB hub for the Mini2440, so we now stock a USB2.0 Octopus, or half an octopus, or more of a Squidward type device. In any case, it expands a USB host to 4 connectors and is the kind that can dangle. Yes, we tested with a keyboard and mouse and a Mini2440 and it works great. Opened a console and typed Linux commands, etc. Very cool. That is the human side of the meter stick - inches.
Dec 12th: Say, how big is that Mini210? I'm glad you asked. It can be hard to judge from the length and width. It is a very nice compact system with no wasted space and a very usable lauout of connectors and I/O. Here is the Mini210 and the great high-def W50 800x480 display next to a Mini2440 (10x10cm) and W35 (320x240 pixels).
And here it is with a man's average sized hand.
Dec 8th: Good news everyone! A note from CTO Charlie. Over the weekend I was reading threads on some FriendlyARM forums and noted the number of postings like "I am new to embedded Linux and ARM. Can you tell me how to control my (gizmo of your choice)?" and, without quick answers that give total solutions some of them get a bit demanding. This got me thinking about our products and the level of sophistication, which in turn got me thinking about performance compared to some old benchmarks. I am wondering how to convey just how much computing power we can hold in our hands, and the amount of computing power it takes to make Linux seem quick and graphics look snappy.
The PDP VAX11/780 has become a standard in benchmarking. It was 32 bits and ran at about 1 MHz. And one VAX handled 64 or 128 or ??? users on a small to middle sized college campus, or a Boeing engineering division. It had a staff to keep it running, swap the big stacks of removeable hard drives, do OS updates, and work with the many people writing or running applications with remote terminals, or the Vector General vector displays and Tektronix storage tube graphics systems that had to be in the same room as the CPU. And all in a tiny amount of RAM, like 64K per user. The performance of this system is called one VAXMIPS or VMIPS. (MIPS is Million Instructions Per Second).
I had an Apple IIe (8bit 65C02) with an 8MHz accelerator, so I cheat with the Apple IIe values in the Dhrystone benchmarks. (Apple could have done 8 or 10 MHz 65C02 if they wanted the Apple II line to continue - then moved to ARM). That IIe performed at 0.18 VMIPS. That is not a very good comparison. If the Apple IIe had 128 serial cards, it would have burned up. An IBM PC/XT was a little slower and a Mac 512 was about 2 times faster (16 times faster than a base Apple IIe) at 0.35 VMIPS. Three of the earliest Macs combined had better benchmarks than a room sized VAX!
Now here is where it gets interesting. An 8MHz Arduino Pro executes the Dhrystone benchmark at 1.1 VMIPS and a Cray supercomputer from the 80's is only 11 VMIPS. The ARMMite Pro on this web site, an ARM7 at 60MHz in Arduino Pro form, does 59 VMIPS. 59 VAX's!
What about the Mini2440? ARM says the ARM9 core executing from local RAM and cache runs at a rate of 1.1 VMIPS/MHz. So, we get 445 VMIPS. 445 Vax computers? Yes, and orders of magnitude more RAM and Flash (or hard drive) than VAX users ever dreamed of. Then the Mini6410 is rated 662 VMIPS and the Mini210 Cortex A8, an awesome 1935 VMIPS. It is absolutely amazing that one person can develop sophisticated applications on these processors. The most impressive software to run on these systems is Linux. Think of the thousands of man-years invested in Linux that makes it possible for a single user to actually jump in and get a project going in a day or two. That great effort has also led to the expectations that one person who is new to embedded and Linux should be able to do the same and then complain when they can't, never realizing that what they hold in their hand is the equivalent of a building with 445 air conditioned rooms full of 1980 state of the art computing equipment and an army of support personel.
Here is the benchmark list and I have added the A9 core and Intel CoreI7 with burst clocking.
| System | Processor | Speed | VMIPS |
| Apple IIe | 65C02 | 8 MHz | 0.17 |
| IBM PC/XT | 8088 | 4.77 MHz | 0.15 |
| Mac512 | 68000 | 7.7 MHz | 0.35 |
| VAX-11/780 | 1.00 | ||
| Arduino Pro | AT328 | 8 MHz | 1.11 |
| Cray X-MP/48 | | 105 MHz | 11.00 |
| ARMite Pro | ARM7 | 60 MHz | 59.00 |
| Mini2440 | ARM9 | 405 MHz | 445.00 |
| Mini6410 | ARM11 | 533 MHz | 662.00 |
| Mini210 | A8 Cortex | 1000 MHz | 1935.00 |
| | A9 | 1000 MHz | 2500.00 |
| Intel | Core I7 | 2.8 - 3.6GHz | 10,094.00 |
Nov 23rd: Good news everyone! Check this very good and very complete (and very readable) blog by "Wingz". Among other thing, he goes through the process of using the Pengutronix BSPs. Highly recomended. Great job Wingz!
Nov 15th: Good news everyone! The latest herd of newly manufactured boards is coming in. Today a load of Tiny6410 with 7" LCD. The default configuration of Tiny6410 is now 256M RAM and 2G of NAND. For Mini6410 the default is 256M RAM and 1G NAND. Tomorrow we expect Mini6410 systems, and all backorders will be shipped within 24 hours.
Oct 15th: Good news everyone! So many blogs and web sites (and other resellers) have linked to our downloads as if they are their own, that it is sucking up all our bandwidth. The only easy way out looks like killing all the files until we install a security systems and set up Apache so that downloads must originate from our own pages. Sorry for the inconvenience. It is temporary.
Oct. 7th: Good news everyone! Is it a new product? Yes! The Mini210? That is right, a Mini with a hi-def 800x480 W50 LCD and the Samsung S5PV210. How fast? 1GHz. How much RAM? 512 MBytes. Are you kidding? 512? Wow! How much NAND? 1GByte. Is that all? Plus two TF/SD slots for 64 GBytes possible. Oh. But the graphics must be slow? Not at all! 2D/3D graphics acceleration and 1080P 30 fps MPEG decode/encode. Really? Encode? Yes, and on-board WiFi and HDMI video out and extra connecters for embedded access to USB and serial. Plus a lot more. A dual camera interface means the possibiity of some amazing stereo vision and robotics. About 10 in stock with some allocated for OEM evaluation. Look and see!
Sept 8th: How about a new product? These Yagi antennas provide 14 to 16 dB gain and we have them for Wifi and for GPRS/Cellular frequencies. Great for anyplace a bit out of range of a cell tower or for extending Wifi over a large piece of property. They are 24 inches long and clamp to any post up to 2.5" diameter (60cm and 6 cm) - or bolt to anything flat. Weight is a very back-packable 14oz. Set up a hot spot in a camp site. Use for Wifi across a valley in data collection. Or, as below, provide net access in a remote woodland hideaway. We are testing with a Wavecom Fastrack and anything else with an antenna connection. I supose you could aim the WiFi version out the window and down the street to a hot-spot at the coffee shop? These are Called "Wifi" at 2400 MHz and "3G" at 1920 - 2170 MHz. There is an arc in the mounting bracket that allows about plus or minus 10 degrees of elevation.
July 1st: Good news everyone! To get in the mood for some new products that are on their way, here are some short clips from the China trip.
First is a pair of mighty fine pick and place machines making sweet music. OK, I'll add some music later. The audio is off because the conversation was rather proprietary. What is that flashy redish light? Preheat with IR diodes! It makes sure there is absolutely no moisture on the leads when they hit the solder paste on the boards. Moves a lot of parts at a time, doesn't it? Anyway, they feed straight into reflow then test and through-hole rework.
Now for somethng completely different: Here is what happens when you tell a real expert that you want to try another kind of NAND Flash. Note no solda-wick or anything. Just a can to bang the iron on to knock off excess solder.
Makin cables. Here is some cable making at one of the manufacturers of cables made for us. We can easily have custom lengths made of any typical cables.
Street of dreams. Apparently people who sell LED signs have a strong affinity for each other.
Places to go and things to do. This is a street corner in Canton (Guangzhou). Notice in the background there is an escalator to a pedestrian overpass. Everyone is going someplace and pushing carts. Whole offices worth of computers and networking stuff go by every minute or so. (Note: Top Secret Starship under construction near end of video).
June 17th: Good news everyone! Charlie, Clete, and Forrest are back from 2 weeks in China. This is not the best time of year for Seatlites to hit the 90 deg (F) 100% humidity, but we caught the Dragon Boat Festival and made a full day side trip to the Sun Yat-Sen Museum outside Guangzhou (Canton), which was definitly worthwhile. FYI, most of the place spellings that look like they are for Western pronounciation are actually PinYin, a phonetic system of using the alphabet in Chinese and is nothing like it looks. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c35GDOHgrnQ The kids are saying "I am" and the letter sound.) Guangzhou is more like "Gwang Joe". Test your ear with this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dZdGXW-EQU
Here are a few highligts. For instance we met an actual Transformer (maybe an Autobot?) named FAW. It wouldn't talk or transform but we got this picture as proof.
View from an office window. In fact, looking away from SEG. In Guangzhou there were a lot of windmills and solar collectors on the roofs. Not so much in Shenzhen. We didn't get a chance to investigate but think they are mostly used to run air-conditioning.
Of course, the SEG building in Senzhen is mandatory. The only drawback is that unless it is trade fair season, things like CDMA and GPRS MODEMs tend to be for locals and not quad band so we have to go visit the manufacturers to get samples - even if they have a booth at SEG.
The main market is the big part, the first 5 floors. More details next week! And here is Kowloon from a hotel room at North Point in Hong Kong.
May 16th: Good News Everyone! Well, maybe for everyone in the PRC? Today is financial talk day. As some of you know, the Chinese RMB or Yuan is no longer linked directly to a particular currency like the Dollar, and floats, partly determined by the market and partly by the Chinese leadership. The RMB is rising in value (to be honest, it has been undervalued for a long time) plus Western inflation is weakening the Dollar and Euro. The RMB has climbed 5% in the last two weeks alone. We have ignored it during 2011 but now the precentages are higher and affecting our ability to buy inventory and expand the product line. Beginning later this week, there will be about a 10% price increase on most items from China. We are considering ways to keep the individual SDK's as low as possible to keep the entry level products the bargains they have always been.
Aside from the good news of the price increases, there is some really good news. The new release of the StarGPS is King Cool! Now it is on a breakout board so that a typical Mini2440 COM cable (included) will power the GPS and Rx/Tx the serial connection to the GPS. Works with the Mini/Micro2440 Mini/Tiny6410. The new breakout also has a new much lower price. We will link to some nice GPS packages for Linux shortly.
May 6th: Good news everyone! Our newest batch of Tini6410-SDK70 units have a new mounting scheme. The SDK carrier board is mounted reversed (as you always could if you wanted) but with shorter FFC cable through a slot and a set of short standoffs so you can lay it on a work surfave or mount it without interference. We have the origianl length FFC available as well as a new 50cm for those who need to mount any of the displays further from a Mini/Micro2440 or 6410.
We also have a new cable kit for the Mini6410. Woohoo!
All the click box sizes living happily together.
April 28th: Good news everyone! We have added the Mini6410 English Manual to the Downloads page. FriendlyARM did a nice job on this.
April 18th: Good news everyone! We have a few new products today. The clik-boxes for parts storage are back and we have two additional larger sizes. These things are so nice we are using them all over the company. Plus we have added three sizes of small solderless breadboards to go with our jumper wires. They interlock in nice ways and the power supply rail sections can be moved around. They are all backed by adhesive foam. The boxes and breadboards are under "Acessories" for the time being. Oh, yes. We renamed the smallest click-box the "Cube" and the next bigger one is "Small" (it was medium). The Acessory page calles them all "snap-top" but we are liking "Click-Box" better.
April 15th: Note new download of Mini2440 DVD iso on the downloads page. This is an update to our English DVD and reflects all the software currently shipping on Mini and Micro2440.
March 22nd: We have added E.L.L.K. versions for all the combinations of Mini2440 and LCDs. See the new category at the top on the left.
Feb 25th: Good news everyone! The Elk are here! The Mini2440 E.L.L.K. by Doug Abbott is an Embedded Linux Learning Kit that is a great piece of work with a tremendous amount of the good stuff without a six pound Linux book. Impossible you say? Just look!
Time for new products: First up is the G2403-M, a GRPS MODEM with industrial housing. We have some fleet customers who are ready to try this out for mobile reporting. It includes a serial cable and power supply and takes a SIM card. Be the first on your block to build your own OnStar! Add a GPS and a Mini2440 and keep track of just about anything.Note: This one i900/1800 MHz and will not work in the US. Quad bands are coming soon. They will work anywhere (Don't try Antarctica).
Many have asked if there will be a Micro6410. No. Too many manufacturers use the name 'Micro'. So, there is a Tiny6410, visible on the left of the SDK board. One of the cooler features is the backlight control. With a little more patience than this photographer had, you can adjust the backlight to match the ambient light and get great pictures of the board and display. If you need the math, the 6410 has the VFP* for you! Note Qt and QtE on the Qtopia 2.2.0 desktop. Woohoo! *(Vector Floating Point processor)
Also, Tiny6410SDK with 7" 800x480 Innolux display and Tiny6410-SDK with 4.3" LCD without wifi kit. Up next, SDIO Wifi unit and EZVGA - real soon now.
Jan 30th: Out of stock of Mini6410 128/256. All Mini6410 links now point to the new Mini6410 with 256MBytes RAM and 1GByte NAND. Those of you who ordered in the window between us running out and changing the pricing and pages, will get the larger memory version. We are also out of the miniUSB cables used by the 6410 boards. If you can get one localy, we will ship without the cable. This was going to be a new product announcement over the weekend. More of the 128/256 are coming but Spring Festival starts soon in China and things will be slowed down till some time after February 12th.
New Products this week: We start of with the simple and useful. These "click" boxes interlock and are great for small parts. The small one is sold in 10x8 blocks of 80 for $19.95 and the larger model is sold in 2x8 blocks of 16 for $5.95. Very nifty! Great word, nifty.
High Quality German power supply. 5.2V and 2.4A with barrel adapter for Mini/Micro2440 and Mini6410. CE and all the good certs. $9.95.
Univeral RS232. This adpater works with the TTL COM ports on Mini2440, Micro2440, and Mini6410. $12.95
USB to RS232 Converter: We have been giving these away with ARM9 SDKs if requested for about 2 years to help insure success with the product. There is nothing like a happy customer. Need more? $9.95
Jan 5th: Do you develope your Linux software with NFS (Network FIle System) so your working directories are on your work station and mounted over Ethernet on your Mini/Micro2440 or Mini6410? Don't like to mess with your Ethernet setup and plug the target system into a hub? You need a USB to Ethernet converter! Add more ports with this simple device (and simplify your addressing)! Use static IP for your development system. Yes, there is an RJ45 in the end of the green part. Sorry for the picture. Hmmm. At $9.95 I wonder about using my PC as a server with several of these.....
Dec 1: Have you been frustrated trying to do downloads with USB in Linux? Check the improved s3c2410 boot usb utility. (In the "Other Linux" section).
Nov 11th: Here is the mystery item from the Nov 9th post. Will it fit our embedded specialty? We will see. Ever wonder where those Robot One competiton systems come from? The ones all over YouTube? This is a very high quaity item from South Korea and we have the oportunity to distribute. I'm really more excited about getting their digital servos than the whole robots. The Bioloid has IR I/O and it seems they could be controlled by about anything. Just how sophisticated can your prgramming get? Expert systems with backwards chaining inference engines anyone? Romotely handled by a Mini6410? That Mini6410 Vector Processing Unit could come in handy! We will see if there is interest among education and experimenters.
The Bioloid Premium Kit is pretty big. The Robotis digital servos are fast and precise and will also be available.
That is a lot of expensive digital seros. Cool thing is they are numbered and daisy-chain like I2C, so a lot fewer wires. How big are they?
Not so small, eh? It is a good sized system. The next layer of the box has all the mechanical connectors.
There are bags and bags of bits and pieces to assemble. Joy! You can see them in action here http://www.robotis.com/xe/bioloid_en
What can you do with a Supercomputer in your pocket?*
We are outgrowing our space and will have to move for the second time in a year. Charlie thinks he found the perfect new location. We think it was the price that got him. Lets see how it looks with a nice ARMWorks sign.
"Experience Gained is Directly Proportional to the Amount of Equipment Destroyed." *
Embedded Linux? Violating the Laws of Nature since 2004!
What can you do with a Supercomputer in your pocket?*
Only theWorthy can Navigate this Site!
** Good news everyone! is the standard Professor Farnsworth greating.
*Dr. C. Towne Springer quoting Professor Z. F. Danes. A famous Danes thought experiment was proposed at an American Geophysical Union convention in the mid 1960s. A NASA scientist was speaking on the upcoming Moon missions and proclaimed that once they had some Moon rock they would be able to explain the origin and evolution of the Moon. Danes stood for attention and asked "What if it is basalt?". The speaker paused and asked him to please repeat the question. Danes replied "You said if you had a Moon rock you could tell us the origin and history of the Moon. What if it is basalt?". Of course, there was no answer because the claim was fantastic and part of the politics of the space program, not the science. Danes has never been patient with exagerations or outlandish statements by scientists.
*What is the opposite of a positron? A negatron, of course.
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