Quickstart

If you have just purchased a phyCORE-i.MX7 Development Kit, this Quickstart guide will help you boot your development kit into Linux and establish a serial console session with it.

Serial Connection

Basic Evaluation Requirements

Host system requirements are minimal for basic serial communication, and for the purposes of this Quickstart any modern computer could be used (Windows or Linux Host Machines).

Tip

This Quickstart will leverage pre-built software images in order to boot and communicate with the phyCORE-i.MX7 Development Kit. In order to re-build or introduce changes to the phyCORE-i.MX7‘s Linux Board Support Package (BSP) a Linux Host Machine is required. A common and viable approach to satisfying this requirement is to install a Linux Virtual Machine onto a Windows computer. Further information such as the recommended Linux Distribution, RAM allocation and free disk space can be found in the Build the BSP guide.

Check the Board Configuration

The phyCORE-i.MX7 Development Kit should have been pre-configured during PHYTEC’s manufacturing process, but we will double check it together as an exercise:

  • Taking care to avoid Electrostatic Discharge (ESD), press firmly down on the edges of the SOM to ensure that it is fully seated onto the Development Kit carrier board’s mating connectors. If evaluating multiple SOM configurations, this will be an important step to perform when swapping between SOMs.

  • Ensure that an SD Card is inserted into the Development Kit’s SD Card slot. This SD Card was prepared with a pre-built software image and will boot your phyCORE-i.MX7 Development Kit into Linux.

    Tip

    The SD Card Booting Essentials guide explains how to re-create the bootable SD Card in the event that it is missing, corrupted or outdated.

  • Check that the Boot Switch Bank S1 is set to boot the phyCORE-i.MX7 Development Kit from the SD Card:

SD Boot Settings

SD Card Boot Switch phyBOARD-i.MX7 Close-up of Boot Switch

Serial Communication Setup

  • Using the provided micro-USB Serial Cable, connect the X6 USB Debug Port on the PEB-D-RPI Expansion Board of the phyCORE-i.MX7 Development Kit to an available USB port on your Host Machine. Next, connect an Ethernet cable from X8 on the development kit carrier board to a network switch that is connected to a DHCP-enabled network.

Windows 10 Instructions

Serial Connection

Once the phyCORE-i.MX7 Development Kit is connected to your Windows Host Machine, you will need to determine the COM port in which the Linux serial console will be active on.

  • Open your Windows Device Manager and expand the “Ports (COM & LPT)” section.

Windows Device Manager

  • You should see two COM Ports provided by the phyCORE-i.MX7 Development Kit’s FTDI USB to UART Bridge. You will need the lower COM Port Number in the following steps in order to establish serial communication with Linux running on the target hardware.

    • The phyCORE-i.MX7 Development Kit configures two COM Ports; one for Linux running in the MAIN domain (Cortex-A7 compute cluster) of the i.MX7Dual processor, and the other for the MCU domain (reserved for the real-time co-processors).

  • Download and open the terminal emulator of your preference. There are many options freely available, such as PuTTY and TeraTerm.

Tip

This guide will use TeraTerm. The User Interface of your terminal emulator will look slightly different depending on which you decide to use, but serial port settings will generally look the same in all terminal emulators.

  • Create a New Connection using your preferred terminal emulator:

Open a New Terminal Session

  • When prompted to configure the connection, specify the connection type as “Serial” and select the COM Port number found in the previous steps.

  • Further setup of your serial connection is usually necessary in TeraTerm. Access the “Serial Port” settings in the “Setup” tab.

Setup Serial Port

  • Configure the connection for 115200 Baud, 8 bit data, no parity bits, 1 stop bit and no flow control.

Terminal Settings

  • Once you have an empty terminal session, your host system is effectively listening for console data over the COM port you selected. The documentation for the phyCORE-i.MX7 (outlined throughout this wiki) will generally refer to this serial session as the “Target (Linux)” console, as opposed to your Linux Host’s console.

Linux Instructions

Once the phyCORE-i.MX7 Development Kit is connected to your Linux Host Machine, the Development Kit’s FTDI USB to UART Bridge will come up as two devices; /dev/ttyUSB0 and /dev/ttyUSB1.

  • Open the serial connection with minicom (which you may need to install first).

host:~$ sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install minicom
host:~$ minicom -D /dev/ttyUSB0 -b 115200

  • Alternative command ‘screen’ may also be used.

host:~$ sudo apt-get install screen
host:~$ screen /dev/ttyUSB0 115200

Note

If you have more than 1x USB serial device connected (this could be a second Development Kit, for example), you will have to determine which /dev/tty* device is specific to your target hardware (otherwise, you may connect to the wrong serial device). Some techniques for determining this include:

  • Use dmesg to see which device connected most recently (dmesg will output all kernel messages and tail just limits this to the last 10 lines).

    host:~$ sudo dmesg | tail

    Scan the output for your serial device and you will see the specific device enumerator (/dev/tty*) that the kernel assigned to the device.

  • Alternatively, use the following command to output all serial devices detected by the kernel at once:

    host:~$ ls -l /dev/serial/by-id

    The output will show which /dev/tty* device enumerator got assigned to each serial device and this has the added benefit of displaying some driver information associated with each device’s serial port. This can be helpful in determining which /dev/tty* file corresponds to which physical piece of hardware.

Power the Board

Using the included 5V/1.5A power supply, provide power to the phyCORE-i.MX7 Development Kit’s X15 Power Connector. The system will automatically boot once power is supplied and you should begin to see activity on the serial console. At the conclusion of the boot log, you should be presented with a Linux login prompt.

Expected Output

 ____   _   _ __   __ _____  _____   ____
|  _ \ | | | |\ \ / /|_   _|| ____| / ___|
| |_) || |_| | \ V /   | |  |  _|  | |
|  __/ |  _  |  | |    | |  | |___ | |___
|_|    |_| |_|  |_|    |_|  |_____| \____|

    _     __  __  ____   _      ___  ____   _   _ __   __
   / \   |  \/  ||  _ \ | |    |_ _||  _ \ | | | |\ \ / /
  / _ \  | |\/| || |_) || |     | | | |_) || |_| | \ V /
 / ___ \ | |  | ||  __/ | |___  | | |  __/ |  _  |  | |
/_/   \_\|_|  |_||_|    |_____||___||_|    |_| |_|  |_|

ampliPHY XWayland (Phytec XWayland Distribution) BSP-Yocto-NXP-i.MX7-PD23.1.1 phyboard-zeta-imx7d-1 ttymxc0

phyboard-zeta-imx7d-1 login:

Login using “root” (no password is required).

Tip

You may find that commands and text in the terminal wrap over themselves if they extend too far on a single line in your terminal window. To improve usability and to prevent text from wrapping over itself use the following command once you have your window sized to your liking:

phyboard-zeta-imx7d-1:~# shopt -s checkwinsize && resize

Safe Shutdown

Before removing power from the Development Kit, it is recommend to initiate a safe shutdown whenever possible. This will help to avoid issues such as filesystem corruption, which can prevent the hardware from booting up properly the next time it is needed.

  • To initiate a shutdown run the following command:

phyboard-zeta-imx7d-1:~# poweroff

  • Once you see the “reboot: Power down” message it is safe to remove the power supply from the Development Kit.

Expected Output
[  115.208115] systemd-shutdown[1]: Powering off.
[  115.278661] reboot: Power down

Note

For technical support, please visit PHYTEC’s Support Portal!