Free, open SBC design targets imaging, vision apps

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Oct. 12, 2005

An electronic engineering student in Brazil has published a design for a small SBC (single-board computer) that runs Linux. Flavio Ribeiro's SBC uses a 180MHz ARM processor, an Altera Cyclone FPGA, and a 3-megapixel Micron CMOS sensor. It targets machine vision, surveillance, and other imaging applications.

Ribeiro, a fifth-year electrical engineering student at the University of Sao Paulo's Polytechnic School of Engineering, says he designed the board as part of a senior project to create a digital camera.

Ribeiro says the design is completely open, and that software can be developed for it using completely open tools (except for tools used to program the FPGA). A web page devoted to the board includes schematics, layout diagrams, and even Gerber files (for PCB manufacturing), along with dmesg output showing Debian ARM Linux 3.1 booting up on the board.

Ribeiro's board, top and bottom
(Click either to enlarge)

Specifications include:

180 MHz ARM9 processor (Atmel AT91RM9200)
3 MPixel CMOS sensor (Micron MT9T001)
Altera Cyclone FPGA with 6000 LEs
2x16 MBytes of SDRAM (16MB for the ARM and 16MB for the FPGA)
16 Mbits of serial flash
1 10/100 Ethernet interface
1 high speed USB 2.0 interface
1 SPI interface
1 RS-232 interface

The software environment for Ribeiro's board includes a Linux kernel -- "preferably 2.6," he says -- patched for the AT91RM9200 processor. It also uses the U-Boot bootloader, along with a modified version of a bootloader created by Darrell Harmon, who also created an open SBC design.

Additionally, Ribeiro says he is willing to share his 200MB filesystem image, based on Debian 3.1. It boots from a USB flash key.

Additional details, photos, and diagrams can be found on the Instituto de Matematica e Estatistica da Universidade de Sao Paulo's website, here.

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