Board description
This embedded system with i.MX93 ARM® Cortex®-A55 core, real-time Cortex-M33 co-processor, and the industry’s first dedicated neural processing unit (NPU) ARM Ethos™-U65 was designed as a development platform for the iMX93 Industrial Module, which includes all of the layout and technologically intensive parts, thus when used as part of the final device, significantly reduces its time-to-market.
The kit features all of the essential high-speed interfaces such as eMMC NAND Flash, LP-DDR4 RAM, LVDS, USB together with many industrial must-haves including dual native CAN, dual Gigabit Ethernet, analog-digital converters (ADCs), and further supports numerous communication peripherals like WiFi, Bluetooth, or Audio - all of them soldered right on the iMX93 Industrial Computer on Module (COM).
The peripheral-rich iMX Development Baseboard was enhanced to present the functionality, connectivity and performance of the iMX93 Industrial COM, as well as of 2 other industrially-focused interchangeable COMs. It does not only provide flexible development environment, but offers numerous design features or connectivity options by its own.
URL: iMX93 Industrial Development Kit | VOIPAC TECHNOLOGIES s.r.o.
Wiki: iMX93 Industrial Development Kit | Wiki page
GitHub: iMX93 Industrial Development Kit | GitHub page
Test results
The Yocto Project releases in the table below have been tested by the Mender community. Please update it if you have tested this integration on other Yocto Project releases:
TODO: Update table below with Yocto Project versions tested & result. Sample data:
| Yocto Project | Build | Runtime |
|---|---|---|
| scarthgap (5.0) |  |
|
Build Means that the Yocto Project build using this Mender integration completes without errors and outputs images.
Runtime Means that Mender has been verified to work on the board. For U-Boot-based boards, the integration checklist has been verified.
Getting started
Prerequisites
- A supported Linux distribution and dependencies installed on your workstation/laptop as described in the Yocto Mega Manual
- NOTE. Instructions depend on which Yocto version you intend to use.
- Siemens kas tool installed.
Configuring the build
Setup Yocto environment
Clone repo
git clone https://github.com/voipac/yocto-imx-voipac.git
Checkout mender branch
cd yocto-imx-voipac
git checkout origin/imx93-mender
Configure Mender server URL (optional)
This section is not required for a successful build but images that are generated by default are only suitable for usage with the Mender client in Standalone deployments, due to lack of server configuration.
You can edit the kas/mender.yml file to provide your Mender server configuration, ensuring the generated images and Mender Artifacts are connecting to the Mender server that you are using. There should already be a commented section in the generated conf/local.conf file and you can simply uncomment the relevant configuration options and assign appropriate values to them.
Build for Hosted Mender:
# To get your tenant token:
# - log in to https://hosted.mender.io
# - click your email at the top right and then "My organization"
# - press the "COPY TO CLIPBOARD"
# - assign content of clipboard to MENDER_TENANT_TOKEN
#
MENDER_SERVER_URL = "https://hosted.mender.io"
MENDER_TENANT_TOKEN = "<copy token here>"
Building the image
You can now proceed with building an image:
build_image.sh
or if you want to use docker container for building run:
build_image_container.sh
Using the build output
After a successful build, the images and build artifacts are placed in tmp/deploy/images/imx93-voipac/.
The disk image (with .sdimg.zst suffix) is used to provision the device storage for devices without Mender running already. Please proceed to the official documentation on provisioning a new device for steps to do this.
On the other hand, if you already have Mender running on your device and want to deploy a rootfs update using this build, you should use the Mender Artifact files, which have .mender suffix. You can either deploy this Artifact in managed mode with the Mender server (upload it under Releases in the server UI) or by using the Mender client standalone mode.
Flashing instructions
For flashing to eMMC we need to use uuu utility which must be installed on your host computer (mfgtools. Also due issue with emmc boot we split flashing to 2 parts. First we use imx-boot without mender integration and the we replace imx-boot in eMMC with one with mender integration. All is prepared in convenient script imx93 mender flashing
Copy image + imx-boot to custom directory
cp yocto-imx-voipac/build/tmp/deploy/images/imx93-voipac/voipac-image-imx93-voipac.sdimg.zst yocto-imx-voipac/flashing
cp yocto-imx-voipac/build/tmp/deploy/images/imx93-voipac/imx-boot yocto-imx-voipac/flashing
# make copy of mender imx-boot
cd yocto-imx-voipac/flashing
cp -f imx-boot imx-boot-flash-mender
Prepare board to serial download mode
Setup S1 pin to Serial download mode and connect imx93 board to you PC using USB-C cable.
Run flashing script
./flash-mender.sh
After all is done you can unplugged USB-C and power on your board with mender integrated.
References
- The official Mender documentation explains how Mender works. This is simply a board-specific complement to the official documentation.