The TS-4800 is a TS-SOCKET macrocontroller board based on the NXP i.MX515 Arm® Cortex®-A8 core running at 800MHz. The TS-4800 features 10/100 Ethernet, high speed USB host and device (OTG), microSD card, and 256MB XNAND drive.

Hardware Description

The TS-4800 is a low profile, credit card sized TS-SOCKET macrocontroller module which features an 800MHz Arm® Cortex®-A8-based NXP SOC and a 5K or 8K LUT Lattice XP2 FPGA. With 256MB RAM and a bootable 256MB on-board flash drive with industrial grade SLC XNAND technology, the TS-4800 is a powerful and extremely reliable embedded solution. External devices can connect to the TS-4800 via Ethernet, USB host, USB device, I2C, SPI, UARTs, or GPIO. Additionally, an external 16-bit address/data bus can be implemented through the use of 21 DIO pins. The two 100 pin downward-facing general-purpose headers make it easy to interface the TS-4800 with a standard TS-SOCKET baseboard or a baseboard of your own design.

With the powerful Cortex-A8 system on chip, 256MB RAM, and a single precision FPU, the TS-4800 is the most powerful computer offered by embeddedTS. With LCD and touchscreen support, the TS-4800 is an ideal engine for a touch panel computer such as the TS-TPC-8390.

Hardware features include:

• Ethernet MAC and PHY
• 1 USB host and 1 USB OTG
• Up to 6 UARTs (4 auto-485 capable)
• MicroSD card connector (or external full size SD)
• 256MB SLC XNAND storage
• LCD output with video playback acceleration
• FPGA touchscreen controller interface
• SPI
• CAN
• I2C
• I2S
• One-wire interface
• RTC*
• Up to 50+ DIO/GPIO**
• Temperature Sensor***
• Watchdog timer
• Hardware random number generator

TS-SOCKET Description

TS-SOCKET is an embedded computer standard designed and controlled by embeddedTS. It defines both a form factor and a connection pin-out and is based on two 100-pin low-profile connectors, allowing secure connection between a TS macrocontroller (CPU board) and a baseboard. Please refer to the TS-SOCKET Standard and Embedded Macrocontrollers resource for more information.

XNAND Technology

embeddedTS XNAND technology is an ultra reliable and industrial grade user-space device driver that uses Reed-Solomon codes, extra checksums, and a RAID-based technique to allow any Linux filesystem to be used with confidence on SLC NAND flash. Our TS-BOOTROM can also boot from XNAND for an ultra-reliable bootup. Please refer to the XNAND whitepaper for more information.

*External coin cell battery required.

** Depends on features used (I2C, I2S, SPI, UARTs, etc). If all features are used, many GPIO are still available.

***1/16 of degree Celsius resolution (and 1 degree absolute accuracy).

Software

The TS-4800 SBC boots to Linux 2.6.35 from either a microSD card or on-board XNAND drive. The 256MB on-board XNAND drive stores a bootable kernel image, initial ramdisk image, and a minimal version of Debian "Lenny" Linux. Non-volatile storage can be expanded through the microSD card socket. A bootable microSD card must contain a Linux kernel image, an initial ramdisk image and a valid Linux root filesystem. The fast Linux bootup solution was optimized for speed and includes kernel, initrd, and filesystem (Busybox) tweaks. Since this board boots to an initrd (initial ramdisk) with a read-only mounted filesystem, it is possible to have something other than a shell prompt running after bootup by editing the /linuxrc shell script on the initrd. Additional TS-4800 software features include:

• Boots Linux 2.6.35 out-of-the-box in less than 3 seconds (to a shell prompt).
• MicroSD software image with Debian Squeeze Linux distribution.
• Un-brickable design ensures 100% recoverability from microSD card in case of on-board XNAND drive erasure.
• Startup Linux mini-root scripts allow flexible root and backup filesystem selection (microSD, XNAND, NFS, USB flash), as well as software field upgrade support.

Linux OS and Debian Support

embeddedTS's TS-4800 Systems on Modules (SoM) are compatible with a wide range of Operating Systems (OS's). The Linux choice is highly recommended and our products are totally integrated with the open-source vision. The board ships with Linux 2.6.35 kernel running out-of-the-box. There is no proprietary source code in the kernel since all the hardware specific functionalities are handled by user-space utilities (such as spictl, nandctl, xuartctl, etc.). The Linux kernel includes driver support for on-board hardware, enabling quick time to market of end-users applications. Examples and source codes are also available for downloading.

The compact initial ramdisk filesystem is based on Busybox and uClibc and is improved for performance and flexibility. Specific Linux scripts and utilities that handle the TS-4800 functions are included. In addition, the full Debian binaries and services are available from the initial ramdisk after mounting the microSD card.

The TS-4800 TS-SOCKET macrocontrollers are configured to load Debian Squeeze Linux from the on-board XNAND drive or microSD card during boot up time. The on-board XNAND flash uses a minimal Debian Lenny Linux distribution that has been compacted to fit in the 256MB space and leave about 70MB free for the user and includes utilities such as apt-get for installing and removing programs. The microSD card uses a full featured Debian "Lenny" Linux distribution which includes a complete GNU C/C++ embedded development environment. In addition, Apache Web Server, FTP, SSH, Telnet, and Samba network services are available with C/PHP/Perl for embedded CGI development.

Please contact embeddedTS for further information regarding Operating System and software support for this product.