phyCORE-i.MX7

When beginning to consider the phyCORE-i.MX7 System On Module (SOM) as a part of your system design, it can be a little difficult to know where to start. Here is a suggested workflow:

  • First, work through the Quickstart guide to become familiar with your development kit and to boot it for the first time. From there, you can head over to the Interface Guides to help you evaluate the available hardware interfaces the development kit provides. Depending on your system requirements, this might be all you need to begin scripting and developing the basic functionality of your system.

    • In most use-cases, PHYTEC’s development kit will not satisfy every design requirement, and thus a custom carrier board will usually need to be made that brings out all the SOM features you will uniquely require. For hardware documentation, checkout the Hardware Manual.

    • Schematics are controlled documents and these can be requested through PHYTEC’s Support Portal, where you are also invited to ask your technical questions!

  • The Booting Essentials section provides references for all development tasks related to booting the development kit. Check it out if you need to update your boot device with new software, or if you’d like to evaluate the various boot devices your development kit supports.

  • If you are ready to begin writing custom software applications for your hardware, checkout the Application Development section. This will include guides for setting up your development environment and guides for writing some basic software examples.

  • Eventually, you’ll start to identify limitations of the default Board Support Package (BSP) from PHYTEC; this could include missing drivers, missing userspace utilities, hardware interfaces not enabled by default, etc. The next step is to modify the BSP to satisfy those requirements. Head over to the Building the BSP section for guides relating to building the default BSP, as well as how to begin modifying it.

PHYTEC’s Linux BSPs are built using The Yocto Project. Yocto is a powerful toolset that allows OEMs to create custom, production-ready Linux Distributions for custom hardware. PHYTEC’s BSP is configured by default to support the phyCORE-i.MX7 development kit, but by using the tools provided by the open-source build system, software support for custom hardware can be easily integrated in a modular fashion.