In-Circuit ICnova A20
| In-Circuit ICnova A20 | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Manufacturer | In-Circuit GmbH |
| Dimensions | 29mm x 68mm (SO-DIMM) |
| Release Date | October 2014 |
| Website | Device Product/Wiki Page |
| Specifications | |
| SoC | A20 @ 1Ghz |
| DRAM | 512MiB DDR3 @ 384MHz |
| NAND | 4GiB originally, but this is no longer available in 2024. |
| Power | DC 5V @ 2A |
| Features | |
| Video | HDMI (Type A - full) |
| Audio | 3.5mm headphone plug, 3.5mm microphone plug, HDMI |
| Network | 10/100Mbps Ethernet (Realtek RTL8201CP) |
| Storage | µSD, SATA |
| USB | 2 USB2.0 Host, 1 USB2.0 OTG |
| Headers | UART, JTAG, LVDS, GPIO, ... |
The In-Circuit ICnova A20, also labelled "SoMPi", is a SO-DIMM sized System-On-Module which usually comes with the ADB4006 daughterboard sold by the same company.
In-Circuit and open source software
On their website, In-Circuit used to claim that they had a Board-Support-Package available, and that they were available for "linux driver development and adaptation", but no such code was available from their website or wiki for the longest time. The device itself came shipped with a totally unaltered cubieboard2 cubiez image.
After buying the hardware, Luc Verhaegen contacted in-circuit GmbH with a request for the u-boot and linux kernel source code on 20150919. And again on 20150922. A buildroot tarball was provided on 20150929.
In their documentation, In-circuit GmbH stated "Combining the power and software-ease of community proven embedded boards like: +Banana-Pi, Cubie, OlinuXino and PCDUINO3". The provided buildroot tarball clearly used our sunxi-3.4 kernel, our classic sunxi u-boot, sunxi-tools, sunxi-mali and sunxi-cedarx, so this "community proven" thing is clearly very uni-directional. It is not clear why In-Circuit chose this mode of cooperation with the sunxi community, but it left a rather bad taste in the mouth.
Support for this board was only added to the kernel in may 2023, and to u-boot in november 2023. 9 years after this hardware was released. These commits are likely more a personal project of Ludwig Kormann, an employee of In-Circuit GmbH, rather than company policy. Ludwig then went and removed the historically accurate and still very relevant information from 2015, from this wiki on the 29th of january of 2024.
All in all, In-Circuit GmbH does not feel like a serious "linux driver development and adaptation" partner. If you really want to build an embedded device around an Allwinner A20 based SOM, take a look at Olimex A20-SOM instead, or get one of the other Community devices.
Identification
The SO-DIMM System-On-Module has absolutely no discernable markings on it.
On the ADB4006 daughterboard, below where the SOM sits, it reads:
SoMPi
On the back of the ADB4006 daughterboard PCB, the following is silkscreened:
IN-CIRCUIT ENGINEERING AS A PASSION ICnova ADB4006 Application Development Board for SoMPi design and copyright by In-Circuit GmbH www.in-circuit.de
Sunxi support
Current status
Fully upstreamed.
DTSes and u-boot config were upstreamed in may and november 2023 respectively. Due to the rather advanced support for the A20 by the open source community, no further work was required by an in-circuit employee about 9 years after the release of this hardware. So much for "linux driver development and adaptation".
Manual build
You can build things for yourself by following our Manual build howto and by choosing from the configurations available below.
U-Boot
Sunxi/Legacy U-Boot
Use the INCIRCUIT_ICNOVA_A20 build target.
Mainline U-Boot
Use the icnova-a20-adb4006_defconfig build target.
Linux Kernel
Sunxi/Legacy Kernel
Use the in-circuit_icnova_a20_on_adb4006.fex file.
Mainline kernel
Use the sun7i-a20-icnova-a20-adb4006.dtb device-tree binary.
Buildroot
Use the icnova-a20-adb4006_defconfig build target.
Tips, Tricks, Caveats
FEL mode
The 'Boot' button triggers FEL mode.
Adding a serial port
On the top side of the ADB4006 baseboard, there is a nicely marked UART0 connector. Just attached some leads according to our UART howto.
There are further headers with UART2/5/6/7 on the board, but they are unpopulated.
Pictures
SOM
ADB4006 Baseboard
Also known as
In-Circuit sometimes calls it SomPi but even the domain sompi.de has long expired (status 20150924).
See also
Manufacturer images
- The manufacturer mentioned Cubieboard2 images, but of course did not link to these directly. Beware though, Cubieboard2 and this device are of course not 100% compatible (even though In-Circuit claimed otherwise).
- After several requests over more than a week in september 2015, a link to this buildroot tarball was provided.