SoM Carrier Open Hardware Assets

Products Support 96Boards SoM Carrier Board
#1

Hello,

First forum post, please correct if this is not the right category.

Maybe I wasn’t looking in the right places, but I couldn’t find any boilerplate CAD for designing a 96Boards SoM integration. So I’ve started posting some of my work here:

SoM Carrier Assets

The intention is to first make schematic and footprint symbols for Altium, then implement a basic reference design with a limited number of peripherals. After that other CAD packages might be considered for the same treatment, starting with KiCAD.

Please let me know if any of this is of value or if I am duplicating some other person’s work. PRs, issues, comments, and other contributions all welcome.

Thanks,
Robert Powers
Powers Consulting

#2

Sounds like a useful project.

I’m not aware of too many other projects in this area although you might like to introduce yourself to the mezzanine-community folks (https://github.com/96boards/mezzanine-community ). Their self description pre-dates the launch of the SoM specs so they might be interested in SoM carrier initiatives.

#3

I actually find this to be extremely interesting. Right now I’m using the CE spec as SoM/carrier, but it would be nice to gain some additional flexibility in the configuration.

However, I can’t jump into it until I see that the SoM spec is actually taking root. I’d like to see a wider variety of SoM’s available, especially something with high end Qualcomm SoC.

#4

Cool, glad to see some other people might find this useful or interesting. I’ll keep putting in time to make something of it.

I do agree that some uptake by other manufacturers would be a good thing to see. I did reach out to BeiQi in the hopes that they’d provide reference design files but haven’t heard back.

I’m guessing there has been some cross-consultation between Linaro/96Boards/BeiQi in making the spec and 2 initial SoMs + carrier board, so I’m a little surprised that a full set of carrier board CAD wasn’t pushed along with it. That seems a straightforward path to driving wider adoption anyway. I mean, clearly this work has already been done once…

#5

Hi PCRobert,
I am also interested in helping with this (KiCAD in particular). Did you ever hear back from BeiQi?

Cheers.