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Summary of Contents for Spectris Arcom VIPER
- Page 1 VIPER RedBoot and AEL Quickstart Contents VIPER RedBoot and AEL PC/104 400MHz PXA255 Single Board Computer Quickstart Manual www.arcom.com...
- Page 2 New layout, major modifications. Issue D May 2005 Update for V4I1 Development Kit. © 2005 Arcom. Arcom is a subsidiary of Spectris plc. For contact details, see page 33. Arcom operates a company-wide quality management system, which has been certified by the...
- Page 3 VIPER RedBoot and AEL Quickstart Contents Contents Introduction ............................4 Handling your board safely ....................4 About this manual ..........................5 Related documents ........................5 Conventions ...........................6 Getting started ...........................7 What’s in the kit?........................7 What else do I need? ......................8 What peripherals are supported?...................9 Unpacking and connecting up......................10 Power supply ...........................12 RedBoot ............................13...
- Page 4 VIPER RedBoot and AEL Quickstart Introduction Introduction The VIPER is an ultra low power PC/104-compatible single board computer based on the Intel 400MHz PXA255 XScale processor. The PXA255 is an implementation of the Intel XScale micro-architecture combined with a comprehensive set of integrated peripherals including: •...
- Page 5 VIPER RedBoot and AEL Quickstart About this manual About this manual This manual gets you started using the VIPER RedBoot and Arcom Embedded Linux (AEL) single board computer. It lists the items you should find in your kit, and tells you how to unpack, connect and configure the board.
- Page 6 VIPER RedBoot and AEL Quickstart About this manual Conventions Symbols The following symbols are used in this guide: Symbol Explanation Note - information that requires your attention. Tip - a handy hint that may provide a useful alternative or save time. Caution - proceeding with a course of action may damage your equipment or result in loss of data.
- Page 7 VIPER RedBoot and AEL Quickstart Getting started Getting started What’s in the kit? The VIPER RedBoot and AEL Development Kits contain the VIPER Industrial Compact Enclosure (ICE), which includes: • VIPER-400-M64-F32. • UPS power supply. • Flat panel display 5.5" NEC (optional). •...
- Page 8 VIPER RedBoot and AEL Quickstart Getting started What else do I need? An x86 Linux system compliant with version 1.3 of the Linux Standard Base is required for the Arcom Embedded Linux host environment. Suitable systems include PCs with Debian GNU/Linux, RedHat Linux, Fedora Core or SUSE Linux. In addition, the following information may be useful: •...
- Page 9 VIPER RedBoot and AEL Quickstart Getting started What peripherals are supported? Linux supports the following peripherals in this release: • 5 UARTs, COM1 through COM5, including the processor’s internal FFUART, BTUART and STUART. • On-board Flash array. • CompactFlash+. • Ethernet interface.
- Page 10 VIPER RedBoot and AEL Quickstart Unpacking and connecting up Unpacking and connecting up This section guides you, step-by-step, through the process of connecting up the VIPER for the first time and powering up the system. The VIPER is delivered ready to run. There are no link settings or configuration switches that need to be adjusted for the board to operate.
- Page 11 VIPER RedBoot and AEL Quickstart Unpacking and connecting up Switch on the VIPER board once the terminal emulator is set up on the host PC. What happens next depends on whether you have a basic RedBoot Development Kit, an AEL Development Kit or a CYCLOPS: •...
- Page 12 VIPER RedBoot and AEL Quickstart Power supply Power supply The AC Power Supply Unit (PSU) supplied in the kit is rated at 2.5A @ +24V DC. This is designed to support the requirements of the VIPER ICE or CYCLOPS. If additional devices are powered from this supply, ensure that the overall current rating is not exceeded.
- Page 13 VIPER RedBoot and AEL Quickstart RedBoot RedBoot What is RedBoot? RedBoot is a complete bootstrap environment for embedded systems. Based on the eCos Hardware Abstraction Layer, RedBoot inherits the eCos qualities of reliability, compactness, configurability, and portability. RedBoot enables download and execution of embedded applications via serial or Ethernet, including embedded Linux and eCos applications.
- Page 14 VIPER RedBoot and AEL Quickstart RedBoot CPU Core Clock Frequency and the clock command Versions of RedBoot on the VIPER up to and including V3I3 initialized the CPU clock to 200MHz at boot time. For version V3I4 this was changed to boot at 400MHz. The current version (V3I5) no longer changes the clock rate, so it remains at the default 100MHz setting.
- Page 15 VIPER RedBoot and AEL Quickstart Arcom Embedded Linux (AEL) Arcom Embedded Linux (AEL) What’s in AEL? AEL is a space optimized Linux distribution that includes many of the standard file, shell and text utilities. As well as the basic Linux system, the default installation includes: •...
- Page 16 10) the board automatically boots to a Linux prompt, as follows: Uncompressing Linux....done, booting the kernel. CPU: XScale−PXA255 [69052d06] revision 6 (ARMv5TE) Machine: Arcom VIPER SBC Memory policy: ECC disabled, Data cache writeback Memory clock: 99.53MHz (*27) Run Mode clock: 398.13MHz (*4)
- Page 17 VIPER RedBoot and AEL Quickstart Arcom Embedded Linux (AEL) Logging in You may login to the VIPER as root (the superuser or administrator) using the following details: Login name: root Default password: arcom © 2005 Arcom Issue D...
- Page 18 VIPER RedBoot and AEL Quickstart Arcom Embedded Linux (AEL) Setting up networking As supplied, the board uses the DHCP protocol to configure the network. This requires a DHCP server to be available on your network. For more information, please consult your network administrator.
- Page 19 VIPER RedBoot and AEL Quickstart Arcom Embedded Linux (AEL) The file system The file system used on the VIPER Flash is a compressed Journaling Flash File System (JFFS2). JFFS2 has the following advantages: • Robustness. • Power fail safe. • No integrity scan (fsck) is required at boot time.
- Page 20 VIPER RedBoot and AEL Quickstart Arcom Embedded Linux (AEL) Linux kernel The version of the Linux kernel used on the VIPER is a standard Linux kernel tree with patches to provide support for Arcom’s boards. Source and configuration The kernel sources are installed in the host environment as /opt/arcom/src/linux-source- VERSION.tar.gz.
- Page 21 VIPER RedBoot and AEL Quickstart Arcom Embedded Linux (AEL) Hardware configuration Touchscreen Controller (TSC1) If your VIPER ICE was supplied with a touchscreen, the touchscreen controller is attached to /dev/ttyS2 (COM3). In a CYCLOPS system, the touchscreen controller is attached to /dev/ttyS4 (COM5). PC/104 bus The PC/104 bus on the VIPER is attached via the second PCMCIA controller built in to the PXA255 processor.
- Page 22 VIPER RedBoot and AEL Quickstart Arcom Embedded Linux (AEL) For more information, see the VIPER Technical Manual and PXA255 Developer’s Manual. CPU clock frequency scaling The PXA255 processor used on the VIPER can scale the core clock frequency from 100 to 400MHz, allowing an application to dynamically trade off performance against power consumption.
- Page 23 VIPER RedBoot and AEL Quickstart Arcom Embedded Linux (AEL) • The ‘powersave’ governor selects the lowest available frequency from the available powersave frequencies. • The ‘userspace’ governor allows direct userspace selection of a frequency from the available performance frequencies. The default is to use the performance governor with a maximum frequency of 400MHz. The powersave and userspace governors are supplied as loadable kernel modules, called cpufreq_powersave and cpufreq_userspace respectively.
- Page 24 VIPER RedBoot and AEL Quickstart Arcom Embedded Linux (AEL) The cpufreq-set utility can be used to select a governor and to set the minimum and maximum allowable frequency. This is illustrated by the following examples: • To select the performance governor and limit the maximum allowed speed to 200MHz: # cpufreq-set --governor performance --max 199065 •...
- Page 25 VIPER RedBoot and AEL Quickstart Arcom Embedded Linux (AEL) If you intend to use the PXA255’s internal RTC as a wake up source, you must unload the driver for the external RTC (which cannot perform the wake up function) and load the driver for the internal RTC, as follows: Remove the external DS1307 RTC driver: # rmmod ds1307...
- Page 26 VIPER RedBoot and AEL Quickstart Arcom Embedded Linux (AEL) Parameter Description Default pixclock The pixel clock, expressed in picoseconds pixclock:157500 s). This value is used in conjunction with the current memory clock rate to calculate LCCR3[PCD]. left, right, The timing parameters. All parameters are left:7, given as a number of pixel clock ticks.
- Page 27 VIPER RedBoot and AEL Quickstart Arcom Embedded Linux (AEL) Parameter Description Default hsync:0,vsync:0 hsync and Configures the polarity of the horizontal and vsync vertical sync pulses. A value of 0 indicates an active low sync pulse, while 1 indicates active high.
- Page 28 VIPER RedBoot and AEL Quickstart Software configuration Software configuration The CYCLOPS and VIPER-LITE systems require some additional configuration. For example you must specify flat panel driver parameters to support the panel supplied with the CYCLOPS. If using the VIPER-LITE, you must inform the Linux kernel of the reduced CPU speed.
- Page 29 VIPER RedBoot and AEL Quickstart Support software Support software Target support software When building applications for the VIPER board, you must use the AEL host environment. This consists of a set of utilities that provide a cross-compile environment targeting the VIPER board. A cross-compile environment is required in order to produce binaries for the XScale processor.
- Page 30 VIPER RedBoot and AEL Quickstart Real-time Linux on the VIPER Real-time Linux on the VIPER Linux was not designed with hard real-time capabilities in mind. It usually meets the needs of soft real-time applications. However, under certain circumstances the scheduling and other latencies do not meet the needs of hard real-time control and communication applications.
- Page 31 VIPER RedBoot and AEL Quickstart Real-time Linux on the VIPER Performance To indicate the level of performance achieved using RTLinuxPro, Arcom prepared a test application to exercise the Ethernet port with a ping flood and repeatedly write two large files to the JFFS2 flash drive. Essentially, this represents a ‘busy’ foreground task running under Linux.
- Page 32 VIPER RedBoot and AEL Quickstart Real-time Linux on the VIPER Set the CPU speed to either 200MHz or 400MHz as follows: • To set it to 200MHz enter: # echo 200000 > /proc/sys/cpu/0/speed • To set it to 400MHz enter: # echo 400000 >...
- Page 33 VIPER RedBoot and AEL Quickstart Appendix - Contacting Arcom Appendix - Contacting Arcom Arcom sales Arcom’s sales team is always available to assist you in choosing the board that best meets your requirements. Contact your local sales office or hotline. Sales office US Sales office Europe Arcom...
- Page 34 VIPER RedBoot and AEL Quickstart Index Index Flash array · 9 flat panel · 9 applications, embedded · 13 gateway · 8 battery · 4 getting started · 7 board features · 4 GPIO · 9, 12 boot loader · 10 strap ·...
- Page 35 VIPER RedBoot and AEL Quickstart Index sleep · 24 source code · 33 networking · 18 SRAM · 9 details · 8 static · 4 IP address · 18 STUART · 9 support packaging · 4 software · 29 PC/104 · 9, 21 technical ·...
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