ISEE working on IGEPv5 board with OMAP5

Our partner ISEE is famous for their IGEPv2 board that we use in our embedded Linux course. This board is both powerful (running at 1 GHz) and featureful (on-board WiFi and Bluetooth, many connectors and expansion capabilities).

The good news is that ISEE has started to develop a new IGEPv5 board, which will be based on the new OMAP5 processor from Texas Instruments. This processor features in particular 2 ARM Cortex A15 cores running at up to 2 GHz, DDR3 RAM support, USB3, full HD 3D recording, and supporting 4 displays and cameras at the same time. Can you imagine what systems you could create with such a CPU?

If you are interested in such a board, it is still time for you to give them your inputs and expectations.

What should a perfect OMAP5 board be like? Don’t hesitate to leave your comments on this blog post. Be sure that ISEE will pay attention to them.

Author: Michael Opdenacker

Michael Opdenacker is the founder of Bootlin, and was its CEO until 2021. He is best known for all the free embedded Linux and kernel training materials that he created together with Thomas Petazzoni. He is always looking for ways to increase performance, reduce size and boot time, and to maximize Linux' world domination. More details...

10 thoughts on “ISEE working on IGEPv5 board with OMAP5”

  1. I’d love a board that would go into a standard ATX box. Also plenty (4-6) of SATA ports would be awesome. Think cheap, low-power almost silent server.

    1. The OMAP CPUs, targeting mobile devices, don’t have any SATA controller, unfortunately. Therefore, it wouldn’t really make sense to include a SATA port on the board itself. You have USB3, though. You could use USB to SATA dongles.

  2. It seems OMAP5430 and OMAP5432 both have a SATA 2.0 controller. So plenty of SATA ports might not be possible, but one should be.

    At least 2 upcoming OMAP 5 modules include one SATA interface.

  3. Dual core A15@2GHz sounds good.
    On a development board I would like to see:
    1) Serial output for bootloader and kernel debugging
    2) HDMI (female mini HDMI socket)
    3) Please include a USB hub chip and give us at least 3 x standard USB ports.
    4) Wifi b/g/n on board with an antenna socket. Please use a tried and tested WiFi chip with proper Linux support e.g. Realtek or Ralink.
    5) USB Bluetooth on board, again using a tried and tested solution (Cambridge).
    6) Ethernet on board, if possible Gigabit, if not, 10/100Mbps. Asix chips have good driver support.
    7) One microSD card slot.
    8) 8GB NAND.
    9) 2GB (not 1GB!) DDR3 RAM.
    10) A well-supported Power Controller chip (e.g. TPS65910 or AXP series)
    11) 5 GPIO-driven on-board LEDS (different colors) + connector for additional GPIO and AD/DA
    12) Well supported tried and tested audio codec + stereo headphone socket.
    13) Optical audio output.
    14) IR input and output.
    15) 5V/2A standard power socket.
    16) If required, add a small heatsink on top of the SoC.
    17) Proper documentation freely available (no stupid NDA’s!)
    18) Proper Linux kernel source code.
    19) Proper bootloader source code.
    20) Proper GPU and VPU source code (kernel and libraries).

    Give me all of the above and you’ll immediately get:
    – Android 4.2 with market and games compatibility.
    – Ubuntu Quantal 12.10 armhf and a proper development system.
    – 3D hardware accelerated graphics support in Android and Linux.
    – Hardware accelerated 1080p video playback in Android and Linux.

  4. I would prefer following

    1) RTC
    2) On-Board Flash
    3) RAM more than 2GB
    4) LVDS
    5) BIOS concept, Multi boot option.

    and more…

  5. Hello,

    Apart from the basic elements, internal or external to the SoC (eMMC, USB OTG, ethernet, wifi, bluetooth, i2c, spi, serial) that add value to mobile computing, i would like my next board to have:

    – A small array of LEDs/pushbuttons (4 or 5) or enough GPIO to give the same functionality

    – Dual ethernet (if possible gigabit) than would make expirementing, using the board as a gateway, with networks. A low power-high performance router/firewall/file server would come handy for a lot of people. (i’ve got ate least 3 usb external disks sitting around)

    – Accelerometers/Gyros/Pressure/Temperature or any kind of sensors (like in the Snowball) would make the board valuable for hobbyists and obviously for universities for courses of embedded systems. Only that with a powerfull SoC like this, development could take place on the target directly. This is really handy as you don’t need a whole course to teach stuff on setting up nfs kernel/filesystem you can start development from day 1.

    – Finally, as it is popular now it could be used as a media center but in order to take this a step further having all the 4 display outputs described in the post would make it usefull for the companies working on publicity screens that seem to be everywhere now. (Quick example: an average real estate agency has four screens easy in their front window)

    A combination of these features would make the board stand out from competition, especially if (like in igepv2) it has a small size and thus is deployable and not just a dev board that sits on a desk

    thank you

  6. What would power consumption be like when you have such a beast running at 2GHz and 100% CPU load?

    > supporting 4 displays

    Then maybe add two HDMI connectors for multi display?
    Oh and if no SATA then at least add a fullsize SD Card slot alongside the microsd one for storage.

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