Group: Hardware/Computers/Laptops/Freeable laptops/Hercules eCAFE

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Revision as of 13:09, 6 January 2020 by GNUtoo (talk | contribs) (→‎UART)
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Introduction

Hercules made the following laptops with an I.MX51 ARM system on a chip:

  • eCAFE EX HD
  • eCAFE slim HD

Here are some more information on the hardware:

  • 512M of RAM
  • There is an USB OTG port
  • The device is capable of booting from an SD card

They ship with u-boot, and more recent u-boot versions have been maintained by the free software and open source communities. There is also a device tree available but it needs to be upstreamed in Linux.

Once that will be upstreamed, it will be possible to use them with only free software, with u-boot and Parabola, but it will still have some serious flaws as important features like the 3D acceleration and accelerated video decoding will still be missing.

Source code

Some patches for Linux (including the dts) and u-boot did exist as part of meta-teapot.

Hardware documentation

UART

There is an unpopulated connector for the serial port with UART1 being written under it.

There is an arrow on the left of the connector. Here's the pinout. 

> [?][TX?][][][RX][GND][GND][GND]

The MAX3232 that is nearby most probably provides the 5V voltage compatible with common USB serial port adapters.

Status:

  • RX works (115200 8N1 at boot => We can see u-boot logs)
  • TX unknown

TODO

  • Find a proper header for the Serial connector
  • Test the meta-teapot patches
  • Upstream the Linux dts
  • Upstream u-boot patches
  • Add support for that device in Parabola by also packaging u-boot for that device.
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