The TS-7558-BOX features a 250MHz Cavium Arm922T™ CPU and a 5000 LUT Lattice FPGA. With 64MB RAM and a bootable 256MB on-board flash drive with our new XNAND technology, the TS-7558-BOX is a powerful and extremely reliable industrial embedded solution. External devices can connect to the TS-7558-BOX via Ethernet, USB, RS-232, RS-485, or CAN. The TS-7558-BOX can be powered by PoE or by a DC power supply anywhere in the 5-30V range. An internal microSD slot allows for expanded storage.

The rugged screw-down terminals provide the following interfaces:

• 8 opto-isolated digital inputs (0-30V)
• 4 opto-isolated digital outputs (0-40V)
• 4 analog inputs (0-5V, 0-10V, 4-20mA)
• power supply input (5-30V)

The digital inputs can act as edge counters, quadrature decoders, ADC triggers, or simple inputs. The outputs can be used for PWMs. The TS-7558-BOX also provides an internal header with the following functionalities:

• Debug console
• DIO
• UARTs
• SPI
• I2C

Rugged Plastic Enclosure

Available with a DIN mount, the enclosure makes the TS-7558-BOX ready for immediate deployment. The enclosure label clearly identifies the pinouts on the rugged screw terminals.

XNAND Technology

embeddedTS XNAND technology is an ultra reliable and industrial grade user-space device driver that uses Reed-Solomon codes, extra checksums, and a RAID based technique to allow any Linux filesystem to be used with confidence on SLC NAND flash. Our TS-BOOTROM can also boot from XNAND for an ultra-reliable bootup. Please refer to the XNAND whitepaper for more information.

Open FPGA

The TS-7558-BOX FPGA programming is open-source. If the many features provided in the standard load don't meet the needs of your application, you can modify the FPGA logic or hire embeddedTS to do so for you.

Upon bootup, the default software automatically checks for an FPGA bitstream and loads it if it is present, overriding the default FPGA programming. To create your own bitstream, you need only the following resources:

• Lattice Diamond
• TS-75xx opencores source
• jed2vme utility

See here for more instructions on FPGA development.

Software

The TS-7558 SBC boots to Linux 2.6.24 from either a microSD card or on-board XNAND drive. The 256MB on-board XNAND Drive is enough to store a bootable kernel image, initial ramdisk image, and a minimal version of Debian "Lenny" Linux. Storage memory can be expanded through the microSD card socket. A bootable microSD card must contain a Linux kernel image, a 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-7558-BOX software features include:

• Boots Linux 2.6.24 out-of-the-box in less than 3 seconds (to a shell prompt).
• MicroSD card pre-installed with minimal Debian "Lenny" Linux distribution.
• Un-brickable design ensures 100% recoverability from microSD card in case of on-board XNAND drive erasure.
• Startup Linux mini-root scripts allow flexible root and backup filesystem selection (microSD, NFS, USB flash) as well as software field upgrade support.

Data Acquisition

The TS-7558-BOX ships with a full-featured, open source data acquisition driver utility called daqctl. This utility gives full control over a wide variety of TS-7558-BOX hardware features including ADC, PWMs, quadrature, counters, and timestamped glitch detection. The FPGA can easily be programmed to interrupt the CPU under a wide variety of external conditions. A data acquisition network service is also supported, allowing for software control on a remote system.

Linux OS and Debian Support

embeddedTS's TS-7558-BOX 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 2.6.24 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 of 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-7558-BOX functions are included. In addition, the full Debian binaries and services are available from the initial ramdisk after mounting the microSD card.

The TS-7558-BOX SBCs are configured to load Debian "Lenny" Linux from the on-board XNAND drive or microSD card during boot up time. The on-board XNAND drive uses a minimal Debian "Lenny" Linux distribution that has been compacted to fit in the 256MB space and leave about 70MB free for the user and includes utilities such as apt-get for installing and removing programs. The microSD card uses a full featured Debian "Lenny" Linux distribution which includes a complete GNU C/C++ embedded development environment. 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-7558-BOX 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-7558-BOX 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.