Snapdragon 820 SOM compatibility with Dragonboard 820c

Products Support DragonBoard 820c
#1

Hi,
On Arraow’s 820C page, it lists the following SOMs as production ready:

  • eInfochips EIC-Q82-200
  • Intrinsyc QC-DBI00004

How compatible are these SOMs with Dragonboard 820c?
Can I use the same Kernel, root filesystem and meta-binaries with no (or minimum) changes to device tree on those SOMs, provided the peripherals I need are exposed?

I am mostly interested in/concerned about SPI, I2C and UART. I also need MIPI CSI, HDMI, SD card, etc. but those seem to be mostly the same on all SOMs.

Does anybody have first hand experiences?
Thanks,
tamo2

#2

Snapdragon based SOM are usually compatible with 96boards/Linaro kernel/images (DB410C/DB820C Debian, OE). The bootloader can be different but provided by the vendor. It can also request some device-tree customization depending board layout.

I suggest you to contact the SOM vendors and ask them directly.

#3

I suggest you to contact the SOM vendors and ask them directly.

OK that makes sense. Thank you.

If anybody has experienced issues with these SOMs, please send me a message.
Thanks!
tamo2

#4

Hi Tamo2,

I’m using ifc6601 and some minor change are required such as updating bootloader.
using this documentation
Also the partition scheme may be different so you will need to update the kernel cmdline.

At the moment I’m using the dts files of the db820c.

So don’t hesitate to try.
Ordering a db820c maybe interesting too to make report on this forum.
They are indeed pretty similar.

Julien

#5

Hi Julien,
Thanks for the info.

We have a few ifc6601s and also a db820c as a reference.
ifc6601 with their V1.0 release looks pretty compatible with db820c and it has been working very well. But now we need to configure one of the BLSPs as a SPI for our FPGA programming and things get a bit complicated because the exposed BLSPs on ifc6601 are not the same as db820c.
So I was wondering eInfochips or Intrinsyc might be a better fit for us.

#6

Evaluating Intrinsyc uSOM820 at the moment, but only have DB410c and HiKey 960 for reference.

If I’m not mistaken all 12 BLSP’s are exposed, although not on the stock carrier.

#7

Perhaps try contacting the support (or sales) team for the SoM manufacturers…

Whilst we do our best to help people here (especially when a problem can be reproduced on a Dragonboard) IMHPO[1] one of the factors that can influence SoM purchasing decisions is the support capability of the SoM manufacturer.

[1] Like IMHO but woth the added ‘P’ standing for very-strictly-Personal-and-nothing-to-do-with-my-employer

#8

In my experience with Intrinsyc up until now I have mostly learned that there basically is no free support apart from the very basics. This is fully understandable, but it is a little frustrating when the project you bought the SoM for got canned and you end up with zero budget for a support contract :).

The technical documentation is pretty good though. I looked up the GPIO function map again to check what I stated earlier. You have some BLSP’s freely available but other GPIO’s are mapped to alternate functions such as I2S. It’s quite a complex table which you’ll only get to see once you purchased a dev kit :wink:

#9

danielt, Genoil,
I agree, the support is very important.
InForce support has been good – they have a user forum and usually get answers for simple things for free. We have also used a payed service for driver work and got reasonable results.
We just got eInfoChips SOM. I had a high hope because eInfoChips is now a subsidiary of Arrow, but unfortunately their Linux release is old and most peripherals (USB, CSI, etc.) just don’t work.