Status of the 96Boards Poplar?

Products Support Poplar Board
#1

Hi, (I am putting ---- in the urls because your site doesn’t let me post more than two links…)

I have recently started investigating this poplar board (Hi3798?)

20200415_110810
20200415_1108101728×2304 1.26 MB

I was reading
https------://github.com/96boards-poplar/Documentation/blob/master/debian/debian_build_instructions.md

They reference a linaro site that no longer exists.

I found http------://snapshots.linaro.org/96boards/ but in here I am unsure which “board” is mine? I know mine is a HiKey based SoC, but I don’t know if its hikey or hikey960.

I am planning to do a bringup on this board using https------://buildroot.org/. This seems like the best way to enable developers to quickly get going with an embedded project, since it’s easier to customise than a Debian distribution for me. My goal is to get GStreamer running here with v4l2 stateless decoders.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

#2

You should look at the documentation: Documentation for Poplar - 96Boards
Especially build-from-source which should give you instruction to build the kernel.
I personally don’t know about status of hardware video decoding support on this board.

#3

I have read the documentation (I liked it in my question). I’m asking how do I know know if I am hikey or hikey960? I see nothing printed on my board.

Out of interest, as someone new to embedded systems, how normal is it for a development board to come with no community infrastructure in either Yocto or Buildroot? Do professionals typically do this manual stuff for their boards and not need these projects so much?

This board looks very impressive for video decode.

#4

hikey and hikey960 are different boards, AFAIU there is no public prebuild snapshot for tocoding poplar board, this is why you may have to build the software yourself. Also, you may want to contact the vendor (Tocoding) to ask if they have available software for the board (android, Linux…).

That mainly depends on how much effort the vendor wants and can allocate for the board. Some boards are more ‘community friendly’ (CE boards) than others because they have good upstream support (Linux kernel, Yocto…) and available resources/documentation. Some are more ‘b2b’ oriented (EE boards), with good support, but you need to discuss or engage with the vendor. The forum should give you a good idea of the community’s popularity of each board.

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