Astrial Bringup Guidelines

Introduction

This guide provides detailed instructions to use and program properly Astrial board.

Astrial is an electronic board with CM4 form factor (40mmx55mm) which exploits the potential of the i.mx8mp NXP microprocessor combined with Hailo AI accelerator.

This tutorial will go through the following steps:

• Step 1 - How to connect Astrial to the carrier board
• Step 2 - How to flash Astrial board

The official Raspberry CM4 IO board has been used as carrier board for this tutorial, but it's possible to use any carrier compatible with the CM4 form factor.

Software is strictly aligned to the Yocto distribution version kirkstone 5.15.71-2.2.0.

It is available on the official System Electronics github. For more details, please visit the website at the following link:

https://github.com/System-Electronics

Step 1 - How to connect Astrial to the carrier board

For the following step, Raspberry CM4 IO board has been used.

Plug Astrial board to the carrier through the two CM4 module connectors positioned on the top of the raspberry carrier board.

To guarantee the correct functioning of Hailo accelerator, a 5V supply must be provided through Astrial J3 connector. Raspberry Pi Header can be used for this purpose. For example, pin 2 and pin 6 are dedicated to 5V and GND respectively (see images).

Step 2 - How to prepare Astrial board for flashing

• Follow Step 1 to connect properly Astrial board to the Rasberry carrier.
• On Raspberry J2 connector, force nRPIBOOT (pin 2) to GND (pin 1) by using a jumper
• On Astrial board, verify that the configuration on dip switch SW1 is 0000
• Connect the USB cable to Raspberry J11 micro USB connector, then plug it to your PC.
• Power on the Raspberry board through J19 DC input. You can use a 12Vdc power supply with 2.1mm jack.

Step 3 - How to program eMMC

For a quick jumpstart of your system, you can download the prebuild image from the System Electronics sharepoint.

Click SysEle-Sharepoint to access the sharepoint and download the release you are looking for.

Unzip the file in the folder you want. Two files will be obtained:

• imx-boot-astrial-imx8mp-sd.bin-flash_evk
• system-astrial-image-astrial-imx8mp-20240301095121.rootfs.wic.zst (timestamp could be different)

DISCLAMER: prebuilt images are provided for testing purpose only, not intended for final production.

Linux Users

Open the terminal in the folder containing the two files described above.

From terminal, download the last uuu stable version (1.5.125):

wget https://github.com/nxp-imx/mfgtools/releases/download/uuu_1.5.125/uuu

And change the permissions:

chmod +x ./uuu

From terminal, run the following command to program the eMMC:

sudo ./uuu -b emmc_all imx-boot-astrial-imx8mp-sd.bin-flash_evk system-astrial-image-astrial-imx8mp-20240301095121.rootfs.wic

NOTE: replace the timestamp '20240301095121' with the proper one.

Windows Users

Download uuu.exe from https://github.com/nxp-imx/mfgtools/releases/tag/uuu_1.5.125

Copy uuu.exe into the folder containing the prebuild image

Open PowerShell or Command Prompt into your folder, then run the following command:

uuu.exe -b emmc_all imx-boot-astrial-imx8mp-sd.bin-flash_evk system-astrial-image-astrial-imx8mp-20240301095121.rootfs.wic

NOTE: replace the timestamp '20240301095121' with the proper one.

Conclusions

eMMC flashing will take several minutes depending from the size of the prebuild image (at least 5 minutes).

At the of the process, turn off the board by unplugging the supply cable and then unplug the micro USB cable.

To boot from eMMC remove the jumper from connector J2, then change the configuration of dip switch SW1 to 0001.