There is a system console port in all of ODROID series to monitor the low-level information of target system.
This is very useful and important tool for platform software development.

The system console port uses UART(Universal asynchronous receiver/transmitter) of CPU for communication between your host PC and target board.
Protocol is 115200bps / no-parity / 8bit / 1-stop-bit / No-flowcontrol as usual.
You can use any tty terminal software such puTTY, minicom or hyperTerminal in your host PC.

The UART of CPU has simple 2 signals Tx and Rx with a ground level for communication.
Please note most of new comming mobile processors have 1.8V of IO voltage to minimize power consumption.

In traditional design, there should be a RS-232C level converter MAX232 or MAX3232 or MAX3218 on board.
Addtionally your Host PC must have a RS-232C port.
Note that all of modern PC / Laptop have no built-in RS-232C port you have to buy a USB-RS232 converter.
So this solution is expensive, uncomfortable and bigger footprint.


Fortunately, there are many IC makers have introduced USB-UART bridge ICs.

To meet the low voltage interface specification. we chose the CP2104 USB-UART bridge IC from the Silicon Labs.
You can find the datasheet of CP2104 from this link.
http://www.silabs.com/products/interface/usbtouart/Pages/usb-to-uart-bridge.aspx
CP2104 has internal oscillator, LDO, Tx/Rx indicating LED drivers and 1.8Volt IO with reasonable price in 4mmx4mm package.

ODROID-Q,ODROID-X,ODROID-X2,ODROID-U2

ODROID-X and ODROID-Q production has started this week. We will start the shipment from next week. Please refer to the below for the shipment schedule. 

ODROID-X,ODROID-Q

A lot of people inquired about the performance of ARM Cortex A9 1.4Ghz Quad-core.

So we decided to show it with high definition video play ability.
Even the Exynos contains hardwired MPEG4/H.264/WMV decoder inside, we tried pure software driven media decoder.

We've tested several different 720p(HD) and 1080p(Ful-HD) video clips with MX player on ODROID-X which has Android 4.0.4.
MX player is one of the best video player in Google Play(Android Market) which is based on the famous FFMPEG media decoder.
They support Multi-core decoding with ARMv7 NEON SIMD feature. It means they utilize the 4 cores in parallel to decode video.

Most of clips could play well with ARMv7 NEON + Multi-core enabled FFMPEG codec library. It is really amazing.
The quad-core can decode Full-HD video even in a small ARM embedded board.
Seek and Sub-title functions are also working well.

Note that most clips contains H.264 video and we could use the hardware accelerated codec too in Android.
But, we performed this test without the hardware accelerator.

Please look into this video.



BTW, we have two issues.
1. Software driven video decoding makes a lot of heat due to heavy computing.
We may need to add a small heatsinks. We will measure the temperature more carefully.

2. 1080p contents in SDHC card doesn't play well due to limited data transfer rate.
720p contents in SDHC are not a problem.
The eMMC storage has no problem because it is fast enough.


So we need more investigation the HW and SW codecs as well as burden of flash strorage access time.




ODROID-X,ODROID-Q

Hardkernel has just announced new development boards ODROID-Q and ODROID-X which are powered by Samsung Exynos-4412 1.4Ghz processor.

ODROID-Q    Slim, Light, Mobile and Smart soluntion for professional developers.
First shipping will be end of July.


ODROID-X    Affordable and attractive platform with 6-ports USB 2.0 host !
First shipping will be end of July.




Here is a simple benchmarking result of ODROID-Q with Exynos-4412. We used the Quadrant app.
It is much faster than OMAP/Tegra/Snapdragon series. How amazing! 




We made interesting videos of ODROID-Q and ODROID-X for the developers.
If you want to enjoy the powerful quad-core processor, dive deep into ODROID!











ODROID-Q,ODROID-X