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 | John McLellan John McLellan is a hardware hacker, maker, and embedded systems guy with more than 10 years semiconductor experience at Freescale. |
Other than no, not really. At the point I wrote that I wasn't convinced the RIoT had a niche to call it's own.
What caused me to investigate further was the possibility of the BBB increasing in price to $75, while the RIoT was $73. That would have made it a complete no-brainer. Even if likely both are trumped by a future LIME2.
The Cortex-M gets a line in the specs that makes it look like a general purpose thing for you to use. It's not. It's dedicated to OpenSDA and is connected up specifically for that with little in the way of connections you'd really be able to use. Some info on OpenSDA http://cache.freescale.com/files/32bit/doc/user_guide/OPENSDAUG.pdf and at https://www.pemicro.com/opensda/
I really haven't dug too deeply into it, but following the instructions in the user guide suggests that the OpenSDA firmware probably isn't present and the RIoT user manual says the software doesn't implement it at this time.
Driver wise it's a bit of the usual mixup. Pick Android or the ancient linux BSP and theoretically you get better support, but this group is littered with posts about basic problems. Go for mainline 3.15-rc kernel and you probably don't get fully accelerated video capabilities, but you do get working video. As far as I can tell, the freescale folks have been doing a really good job of getting all of the drivers for i.MX6 into the mainline kernel, so all that's really needed is the devicetree to glue it all together. We now have a reasonably decent attempt at a devicetree and pretty much everything just works.
A couple of problems are the LCD8000-97C that e14 sells has a touch controller that doesn't have a mainline driver, but more importantly, if you apply the current fix for the ethernet interrupt errata then you'll sacrifice touch capability on that display regardless as the fix uses the same pin.
Still, there's a lot to like about it and although it doesn't stand out from the crowd, it has the distinct advantage of being available from your local e14 outlet, currently no BBB style supply issues. Although using the i.MX6 it comes with that US export restriction nonesense that we all love to hate - mcb1 will have more forms and black helicopters to hide from 
Software seems to be the letdown for most people right now. I was hoping to be able to have instructions posted for mainline u-boot and kernel builds, but some of the patches are taking longer than I'd hoped to appear and with the best will in the world, most people simply aren't ready to lift patches from some mailing list , resolve merge conflicts manually etc. Hopefully though, well soon get to a point where we can drop a generic Debian filesystem onto it and then it's on very similar ground to RPi, BBB, OLinuXino which makes the choices much more interesting since it's a starting point people coming from those backgrounds will be familiar with.
It took a while to build the LVDS cable. Despite the mini port can not drive 24bit panel but my 7" (800x480x18bits) works well side by side with the HDMI. The picture shows the Linux system running with recompiled BSP Kernel plus a rootfs system I am familiar with. Two 720p videos were played smoothly with sound. The backlight control is working. Touch screen need porting the driver which could be done and change the Interrupt line to avoid sharing it with the Ethernet interrupt but an extra wire to the J13. 4 USBs and Giga Ethernet are good things to have with this SBC. Thanks for all your contributions and Looking forward to follow your coming Mainline Kernel guide and try out the recent GPU update.
