Inauspiciously but unsurprisingly, both the "Downloads" and "Documentation" tabs on the product page for this "open-source" board are empty.
Some of their other boards have PDF printouts of the Cadence OrCAD schematics, and even DXFs of the top and bottom layers of the board, but none have actual hardware source documents.
Their Github repositories contain little more than pre-built images for the boards.
Older boards do have CPU block diagrams and pinouts of the IO ports (which should be standardized, but it's nice to have them in one place) but there are no real datasheets for any of these CPUs.
Yes, they claim "Everything about Radxa SBCs is open" but I don't see it.
Ah, now I see how you'd customize one of these open-source products: Their "Services" page offers "Personalized PCB logo and customer SKU, and changes to pin-compatible materials, such as Wi-Fi speed or expanded operating temperature range" with no non-recurring engineering costs if your order is more than 500 pieces or $50,000" or you can call them for custom base-plate design or other mechanical changes to the layout.
I pre-ordered one of these mostly because it exposes dual 5 Gbps Ethernet and PCIe Gen 4... so the expansion capabilities and I/O are the best of any Arm system I've seen short of $1,500+ Ampere systems.
But the marketing bar graphs and lack of efficiency data, along with not (yet) seeing any of the board firmware (says it uses EDKII) makes me a little worried.
I've been burned buying new Radxa hardware in the past, without ever seeing software support materialize later (or half-implemented features that only work on one or two barely-maintained distros...).
But I would love to have another option for an efficient Arm board. Hopefully the efficiency is also close to M1 which is pretty amazing.
I really want to buy something like this but then you find out there is no mainline kernel support so you need to use their modified Ubuntu kernel and while not impossible you are on your own with anything custom, including firmware and boot code.
It's only open source before you populate it. After that it has a ton of closed-source chips on it. Including the ARM CPU that's the whole point of it existing in the first place.
LeifCarrotson ·1 days ago
Some of their other boards have PDF printouts of the Cadence OrCAD schematics, and even DXFs of the top and bottom layers of the board, but none have actual hardware source documents.
Their Github repositories contain little more than pre-built images for the boards.
Older boards do have CPU block diagrams and pinouts of the IO ports (which should be standardized, but it's nice to have them in one place) but there are no real datasheets for any of these CPUs.
Yes, they claim "Everything about Radxa SBCs is open" but I don't see it.
Ah, now I see how you'd customize one of these open-source products: Their "Services" page offers "Personalized PCB logo and customer SKU, and changes to pin-compatible materials, such as Wi-Fi speed or expanded operating temperature range" with no non-recurring engineering costs if your order is more than 500 pieces or $50,000" or you can call them for custom base-plate design or other mechanical changes to the layout.
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geerlingguy ·1 days ago
But the marketing bar graphs and lack of efficiency data, along with not (yet) seeing any of the board firmware (says it uses EDKII) makes me a little worried.
I've been burned buying new Radxa hardware in the past, without ever seeing software support materialize later (or half-implemented features that only work on one or two barely-maintained distros...).
But I would love to have another option for an efficient Arm board. Hopefully the efficiency is also close to M1 which is pretty amazing.
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irusensei ·1 days ago
Hizonner ·1 days ago
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mavhc ·1 days ago
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