The TS-7500 features a Cavium SOC with a 250MHz Arm922T™ CPU and a 5000 LUT Lattice FPGA. With 64MB RAM, a bootable 4MB on-board flash, and a microSD card slot, the TS-7500 is a powerful and flexible embedded solution. External devices can connect to the TS-7500 via Ethernet, USB host, USB device, or I2C ports as well as DIO, UARTs, and SPI which are implemented in the standard FPGA load. The 44 pin downward-facing general-purpose header makes it easy to interface the TS-7500 with a baseboard of your own design. Using just under 400mA at 5V, a TS-7500 driven product can be fully powered by a USB device cable.

Does your application require custom real-time logic such as non-standard bus interfaces, PWM outputs, quadrature decoding, pulse timing, or digital counters? embeddedTS can integrate that functionality into a custom TS-7500 FPGA configuration for an elegant and affordable solution.

The TS-7500 development kit includes the TS-ENC750 enclosure with the TS-752 baseboard. The TS-752 baseboard demonstrates the power of the TS-7500, implementing Relays, RS-232, RS-485, Power over Ethernet, and signal protection for DIO.

The standard TS-7500 FPGA configuration implements the following features:

• MicroSD card access
• Up to 8 UARTs (XUARTs*)
• SPI
• Watchdog timer
• Up to 33 DIO lines
• 1 CAN Bus Option (available as an FPGA bitstream)

* embeddedTS XUART core is an extended UART core supporting 7, 8, 9, or 10 bits per character, Tx and Rx FIFOs 256+ characters deep, and accurate measurement of idle and busy times. These ports support advanced protocols such as DMX/RDM. There is also one serial port in the CPU for a total of 9 serial ports.

The TS-7500 SBC boots to Linux 2.6 from either an SD card or on-board flash using the proprietary TS-BOOTROM bootup firmware residing in ROM memory. The 4MB on-board flash is enough to store a bootable kernel image and a initial ramdisk image. Storage memory can be expanded through the SD card socket. A bootable SD card must contain a Linux kernel image, an initial ramdisk image, and a valid Linux root filesystem. The fast Linux bootup solution was optimized for speed and includes kernel, initrd, and filesystem (Busybox) tweaks. Since this board boots to an initrd (initial ram disk) with a read-only mounted filesystem, it is possible to have something other than a shell prompt running after bootup by editing the /linuxrc shell script on the initrd. Additional TS-7500 software features include:

• Boots Linux 2.6 out-of-the-box in less than 3 seconds (to a shell prompt).
• SD card pre-installed with standard Debian Linux distribution (Lenny oabi).
• Un-brickable design ensures 100% recoverability from SD card in case of on-board flash erasure.
• Startup Linux mini-root scripts allow flexible root and backup filesystem selection (SD, NFS, USB flash) as well as software field upgrade support.

Linux OS and Debian Support

embeddedTS TS-7500 Arm®-based Single Board Computers (SBC) are compatible with a wide range of Operating Systems (OS's). The Linux choice is highly recommended and our products are totally integrated with the open-source vision. The boards ship with Linux 2.6 kernel running out-of-the-box. There is no proprietary source code in the kernel since all the hardware specific functionalities are handled by user-space utilities. The Linux kernel includes driver support for on-board hardware, enabling quick time to market for end-users' applications. Examples and source codes are also available for downloading.

The compact initial ramdisk filesystem is based on Busybox and uClibc and is improved for performance and flexibility. Specific Linux scripts and utilities that handle the TS-7500 functions are included. In addition, the full Debian binaries and services are available from the initial ramdisk after mounting the SD card.

The TS-7500 SBCs are configured to load the Debian Linux OS from the SD card during bootup time. The full featured Debian Linux (version Lenny oabi) distribution includes a complete GNU C/C++ embedded development environment installed. In addition, Apache Web Server, FTP, SSH, Telnet and Samba network services are available with C/PHP/Perl for embedded CGI development.

CAN Bus Support in User Space

The TS-7500 utilizes an SJA1000C-compatible FPGA core out of the box complete with documentation and sample code. The sample code provides a simple utility to send/receive CAN packets and perform useful and common functions with the CAN bus from userspace. Additionally, this sample code includes network CAN service and can be automatically started on TS-7500 bootup which makes the writing of CAN enabled applications even simpler and furthermore allows for the possibility of development in languages other than C (Java, Python, etc..) and on systems other than the local Linux SBC (Linux/x86, Windows, etc..)

Please contact embeddedTS for further information regarding Operating System and software support for this product.