Freescale Vybrid based lowcost OLINUXINO

[kpa]

Dear Olimex,

I dream of a new OLINUXINO board based on one of the new Vybrid chip from Freescale. Theses chip are really nice: they have one Cortex-A5 and one Cortex-M4, dual ethernet, all the power converter internally and lots of really nice peripherals. It would be amazing to have a really small board with two ethernet, two USB port, a NOR QSPI flash, uSD, UEXT and access to most of the free IOs for a really good price.

Oh and I would be happy to help you for the schematic and the PCB !

[olimex]

looks interesting, but thanks. Cortex-A5 @500Mhz seems step-back after the A13 Cortex-A8 @1008Mhz
if we would do Freescale it will be iMX6 quad core Cortex-A9

[kpa]

I see this board more as an evolution of the olinuxino based on i.mx23. There is stil need for small, low cost, low power, aplication that do not need a quad cortex A9. The A5 is the perfect replacement for all application based on ARM9 or ARM11.

[stefan]

I also share the opinion of kpa about the evolution of many i.MX233-based devices like PLC, all kind of Internet-of-things, etc. The Vybrid is capable of direct-from-Flash code executing and wouldn't need SDRAM for Linux, the result is a cheaper, smaller and more reliable board.
Just my 2 cents...
Stefan

[farlane]

This would be the device to rule them all imho: A Linux HMI and (perhaps barebone) realtime control integrated into an industrial grade hardware platform.

I suspect this would be a huge success. At the least the people from the Olinuxino PLC thread should be cheering for such a product

Look at this baby for example:
http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/prod_summary.jsp?code=VF6xx&fsrch=1&sr=3

[kpa]

Yes exactly !

About the power, look at the success of the rasberry PI. The vybrid should be more powerfull even without counting the included M4. For all the real embedded and/or realtime application this would be the reference chip.

[farlane]

The VF6xx devices have been designed to replace at least the MPU and the MCU products on a system needing Rich HMI plus Real time control at the same time

I dont know about you guys, but i have been asked to build something like this more than once Just look at the applications where for example a Siemens HMI+PLC panel would be used. This would be that, but far better because you would have an open platform.

The only thing missing is the ease with wich you could implement a Profibus (DP) or EtherCAT bus which would also be accessable from the M4 core. The TI AM3352 does support that i think.

[farlane]

Phytec have announced their own community board based on their Vybrid SOM's, the Cosmic board. For those interested in a low-cost Freescale Vybrid based platform have a look at that:

http://www.phytec.com/products/single-board-computers/

Personally i think its a winner

[Mr.D]

looks very nice start price is also very interesting , but any idea what will be price of SOM itself later ...