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Cubieboard2 A20

Former Member

Arrived in the post today..

 

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I also got a prototype board to make getting at the GPIO pins a bit easier

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Physically it's a bit bigger than the BBB

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In the box you get a usb to minature barrel connector power lead and a combined sata + power lead that's only really suitable for 2.5" drives due to the lack of 12v

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It comes with a version of Android pre-installed on it's 4G nand flash that allows you to have something up and running a few minutes after opening the box.

 

You can't really do a lot with the Android image, so I quickly replaced it with one of the debian images from cubieboard.org

 

Not sure if it's just down to the A20 being fairly new and the drivers not having caught up yet or what, but the display resolution seems to be fixed at 1280x720 which my 20" 1600x1200 monitor really doesn't seem to like. So initial start up was somewhat frustrating. The cubieboard logo flashes on the screen for a second or two and then the screen blanks.  Connecting it to a 1920x1080 gives better results, but seems to have a large overscan by default in linux text modes.

 

As you'll see in the photos, I've soldered on some relatively heavy power leads, partly due to some concern that the rather flimsy power lead was causing the display problems due to low-ish voltage and partly to make it easier to do some current measurements.

 

With nothing connected, current peaks at around 360mA during boot and then settles to ~200mA when idle. This is reasonably impressive considering it's running the performance cpu governor and so isn't benefiting from power savings in the way the BBB does.

 

Connecting ethernet raises the idle current to ~250mA

 

Adding a CPU intensive task adds approx 100mA per core, peaking at around 460mA

 

With a 500Gb 2.5" drive plugged in and active it's possible to get up to about 1A if you're stressing everything simultaneously.

 

 

First impressions are that that it's a decent board. A better, or at least more common, power connector would have been appreciated as it initially left me no option but to connect to a PC's usb port that likely wasn't capable of supplying the 5v @ 2A that's silkscreened on the board.

 

The debian image I'm using feels a little sluggish, but that's fairly normal. I'll reserve further judgement until I get something installed with a bit less baggage.

 

One slightly disappointing piece is that there's no way to supply power apart from the barrel connector, or soldering on a connector to some unpopulated pads directly below it.  Other boards (RPi, BBB) can have power supplied via their GPIO connectors, but it doesn't seem so simple here.

 

Price wise, I was about 80 GBP delivered. So we're obviously not in RPi / BBB territory, but it does sit in a reasonable place between the BBB and Sabre-Lite.  You get dual-core, 1GB ram and SATA on top of the BBB, while being 2 cores, gigabit network and PCIe short on the Sabre-Lite. The Sabre-Lite arriving at around 155 GBP makes the Cubieboard an interesting compromise.  As the A20 uses an A7 series core which is feature compatible with A15, it also gives an easy path to future upgrades.

  • That looks very appealing.  As you say, it's not in Pi price territory, but currently no other SATA-endowed board is either.  Olimex are going to kick off that awesome trend with their LIME board, but that's for another day.

     

    More and more boards are featuring onboard flash storage nowadays, so it might be useful to measure its low-level performance.  Unlike the card-dependent performance of SD and micro-SD drives and highly variable off-board storage, this would be a nicely fixed property of the board and not often affected by kernel upgrades.

  • in reply to morgaine

    Yes, I think the A10/A20 with sata can be interesting. It seems the CB3 / Cubietruck is also going to have gigabit network.

     

    An Olimex LIME style board with gigabit network at a lower price point would certainly be interesting. Not sure the A10 does gigabit, but I'm sure there would be a market for an A20 LIME too.

     

    I suppose it's also worth pointing out a potential downside for networking on the allwinner chips now.  Both the A10 & A20 use the same device, seemingly it may be mostly based on the Davicom DM9000. There seems to be some issues with the driver though. http://linux-sunxi.org/EMAC

    There does seem to be some work going on in this area http://lwn.net/Articles/543217/ but as ever lack of documentation seems to be at least part of the issue.

  • in reply to Former Member

    selsinork wrote:

     

    I suppose it's also worth pointing out a potential downside for networking on the allwinner chips now.  Both the A10 & A20 use the same device, seemingly it may be mostly based on the Davicom DM9000. There seems to be some issues with the driver though. http://linux-sunxi.org/EMAC

    There does seem to be some work going on in this area http://lwn.net/Articles/543217/ but as ever lack of documentation seems to be at least part of the issue.

    Well spotted!  We'll have to keep an eye open for reports about that.

     

    With A10/A20, i.MX6 and Pi (because of USB) all having throughput issues in the area of networking, perhaps we should start measuring Ethernet throughput on our boards as well.  Nothing is perfect, and despite AM3359 having native on-SoC MAC, we won't really know how good the BBB implementation is until we measure it.

  • I like the prototype board.  Assuming the arrays are 0.1" pitch, it looks like there's just enough room for DIP-style FPGA modules such as the XULA boards from XESS.

     

    I'd be interested in hearing how well the Cubieboard2 performs as a desktop.

  • in reply to johnbeetem

    yes, the prototyping board is all 0.1" apart from the 2mm headers for the cubie itself.

     

    I'd imagine it'll be ok as a desktop,  only seems to be one A20 desktop image so far, I'll maybe give it a try, but if it has the same screen resolution issue as the android install I'm not really going to be able to give it much of a try since I need to steal time on a different screen to get around that.

  • in reply to morgaine

    Morgaine Dinova wrote:

     

    With A10/A20, i.MX6 and Pi (because of USB) all having throughput issues in the area of networking, perhaps we should start measuring Ethernet throughput on our boards as well.

    Ok, so in the simplistic test scenarios.. I just pulled a 600MB file from another machine with wget:

     

    1970-01-01 03:38:05 (9.99 MB/s) - `deleteme.iso' saved [623075328/623075328]

     

    seems ok given it's only a 100Mb network connection.  testing the other direction will have to wait, this debian rootfs is quite minimal so I'll have to install some stuff before I can do much more.

  • in reply to Former Member

    New thread -- "SBC Network Throughput". image

     

    Hopefully there will be less variability by using the same well reputed test utility at both ends.

  • Any further updates on Cubieboard2 performance (excluding networking which we've already examined) or its features or community support or anything else of interest?  Is the SATA working properly?

     

    If I understand it correctly, S/PDIF output is available only on a Cubieboard2 header as TTL, but I'd like to get that converted and socketed in the usual coaxial or optical form.  I have a big x86 machine currently acting as my digital audio gateway delivering audio notifications from the computer room, and I'd like to have that function served by a frugal ARM board instead.

     

    What a pity that the Wandboard never appeared in the UK, as it provides optical S/PDIF output directly.

  • in reply to morgaine

    Morgaine Dinova wrote:

     

    Any further updates on Cubieboard2

    Not really, I've not had a lot of time to spend on it just yet.

     

    What has appeared is that it's locking up randomly, mostly overnight, but can take up to 3-4 days to do so.  I've been trying to work out why, but it's slow going.  Nothing helpful in the logs or any output to the serial console when it happens.  I've gradually been taking bits of software out of the Debian image I'm using, trying to eliminate possible causes, but no luck so far.

    Despite the Debian image, the kernel they're using for it is built for Android, so I don't yet know if it's a case of missing a bit of android userspace that's supposed to be doing something, or whether it's a hardware problem.

    A couple of thing I have left to try are to boot the Android image from NAND and see if that has the same problem, and to build my own kernel that has enough features in it to hopefully get some debugging info.

     

    There seems to be a community that spans most of the Allwinner based boards centered around http://sunxi.org/ you'll find Olimex stuff there too. Havent dug too deeply yet, mostly looking for resources on building a new kernel. A20 stuff seems a bit scarce so far, there's much more A10 info available.

     

    Looking at the schematics, spdif does go to one of the expansion headers, but it looks like there a resistor (R132) that may not be installed. Unfortunately most of the components don't have any refdes on the silk screen, so finding it will be fun.

  • in reply to Former Member

    This is exactly what I’ve been looking for!

     

    I want to build a device that runs Android, with LCD + touch screen, and enough grunt to run a V4L2 kernel with the STK1160/EasyCap driver (which has been in the mainline kernel since 3.7, I believe) to give me video over USB.  Longer term, I also need to extend this to run more than one instance of the STK1160 driver (for dual and maybe quad camera feeds) and utilise the available I/O.  I want fairly good video quality (at least 720p, 30fps) and the ability to record the video/audio to an MPEG file onto mass storage, so I guess I’m also going to need to build a Kernel with ffmpeg (or libav, or whatever it’s called now)?

     

    My SBC of choice has so far boiled down to the BBB and the ODroid-U2, but looking at it's specs, the Cubieboard2 could be a winner, at least on paper.

     

    The BBB is good for having a big developer community and small price, and the availability of cheap add-ons, like the LCD+touch and a ton of I/O goodies.  The thing that concerns me is - as far as I can make out – the processor may not have enough power to run the V4L2 and ffmpeg at the required rate.  Not many dev’s seem to be using the BBB for video capture in this way (which is a clue in itself!), so I can find very little info about it, but as far as I can tell, it may not be fast enough.  There’s also not much about how easy or hard it would be to get Android onto it.

     

    Then there’s the Odroid-U2.  This is the cheapest of the Hardkernel devices, but costs a fair bit more than the BBB, though is still just within my target budget.  The small size is excellent and the fast quad-core processor looks to be easily up to the job of A/V capture from USB.  On the downside, the ‘community’ is that much smaller and I’d need to add more hardware in order to get a LCD touch screen on board, and yet more hardware to get at the I/O.  This starts to push the price up a fair bit, not to mention the fact that the parts are only available to buy from Hardkernel direct (no distribution network), which puts shipping costs on the high side.  It’s not already rooted, so I’d need to do that before I could make a proper start, making it a steep learning curve (at least for me).  The X/2 addresses some of those issues, but it costs a lot more and is starting to look quite big with all that on-board connectivity!

     

    So, enter the new Cubieboard2, looking like it would be the happy medium I need:  It has all the I/O brought out to a couple of headers, including connections for an LCD and a touch interface (I think, though I’m not sure if this is resistive or capacitive), plus, I read somewhere that it has 4 CVBS inputs!  It comes with Android 4.2.2 and there seems to be a fair bit of info on the Cubieboard Wiki links on how to build custom kernels for it, for use with Android.  Being a 1GHz dual-core processor, I think there should be enough power to do all the processing I need, and the SATA interface is the icing on the cake for me – easy access to HUGE bulk storage!

     

    I’m a bit new to Linux and Kernel building in particular, so I’d be interested in the views of the other contributors here on my choice of SBC, or if I’m totally barking up the wrong tree!

     

    Bit of a long post this one, but does anybody agree that Cubieboard2 is the way to go for my project?  Do my assumptions stack up, or am I likely to be heading down a blind alley with the Cubieboard2?

     

    Any comments would be most welcome!

     

     

    Message was edited by: Douglas Ponsford