Expansion

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A flexible interface is provided for expanding the functionality of the avionics system.

Two 60-pin high density board to board connectors are situated on the back of the PCB, allowing an expansion board to be piggy-backed onto the main board. 64-pins of FPGA IO are provided, enabling very high bandwidth digital communications, that could be used by, for example a Camera and dedicated frame buffer memory, or for connection to a logic-analyser for debugging. Alternately, the 64 IOs could be used as general purpose inputs or outputs, that might be used for adding more servo outputs, or for extra sensors (perhaps via a serial bus).

Also provided:

  • 8 low-speed 10-bit ADC channels (using the touch-screen ADC on Snapper).
  • a USB 1.1 full speed connection (could be used for a WiFi adapter or a web-camera).
  • Stereo audio in and out (could be used for some kind of software modem or for data acquisition).
  • 22 CPU GPIO pins that double as the LCD controller pins, allowing connection to a colour LCD panel (up to 800x600px, 16-bit per pixel), with touch screen support.

Physical Interface

  • Two Hirose DF12(3.0)-60DS-0.5V(80) connectors (same connectors as for Snapper) - 60 pins each.
  • Back of the main board, behind where Snapper sits.
  • Can use either connector independently, or both together if more pins are needed.

Signals Available

  • 22 CPU GPIO pins (alternate function is LCD controller pins).
  • 8 Snapper ADC inputs including touch screen controller inputs.
  • 64 Snapper FPGA pins.
  • USB Host/OTG 1.1 connection.
  • Audio (Stereo Line in, Line out).
  • MMC Memory Card (Recent PXA255 support for this has just been added to the arm-linux-kernel, see http://lwn.net/Articles/82769/).