Smart Home control panel based on SoC Cirrus Logic EP9307

Customer

Incyma - a Swiss start-up company engaged in Smart Home automation solutions.

Objective

To develop design, prototype and software for multi-purpose control panel with large LCD color display and vast list supported interfaces. The device should be portable and easy-to-use.

Basic requirements to the design:

• Comfortably placed in a hand (hand use)
• User-friendly interface
• Ethernet connected and ability to be inserted in a charging dock station

Basic requirements to the hardware functionality of the prototyping board:

• Ethernet 10/100Mbit
• USB host
• Wi-Fi 802.11b/g
• LCD resolution 800õ480
• Touch screen
• Luminance sensor
• Presence capacitive sensor
• CIR (Consumer Infra-Red) port
• Loudspeaker audio output
• Microphone input
• Keyboard and LEDs
• Circuit power supply should be realized either from an independent supply source 12V or POE (Power-Over-Ethernet technology), or lithium-ion batteries
• Lithium-ion batteries charging circuit integrated on the board

Solution

Device Design

Our designers developed device sketches, in which, according to requirements, they thought over device’s design and ergonomics features, its architecture and placement of principal elements.

Hardware platform

The board for a smart home multimedia control panel is developed on the basis of SoC Cirrus Logic EP9307. It is provided with SDRAM of 32M x 16bit and Flash 8M x 16bit. National Semiconductor DP83848 was used as PHY Ethernet interface. OEM WiFi module of the standard 802.11b/g based on Marvell 88W8385 chipset is used to implement Wi-Fi functionality. The USB host interface is implemented into the board to connect USB drives and other USB-slave devices.

A color graphic TFT LCD Hitachi TX18D16VM1CBA with touch screen (LCD resolution 800x480) is intended to display visual information. Microphone audio signals, outgoing messages or music are digitized and transmitted to loudspeakers by the use of audio codec AD1981BJSTZ, which is connected to the AC`97 processor interface.

The keyboard (using the processor interface 8x8 Keypad Scanner), LED indication of operating modes and LED keyboard illumination were implemented on the development board. DBGU serial port is intended for the board debugging.

The circuit board includes:

• Luminance sensor on the basis of TSL2550T chip
• Presence detector on the basis of T113-ISG Qprox chip
• CIR (Consumer Infra-Red) receiver and transmitter

The board power supply could be carried out in three ways: either through the Wall adapter 12V, or through the PoE (Power-over-Ethernet), or through Li-ion batteries. The on-board charging for Li-ion batteries from the Wall adapter 12V or by the Power-over-Ethernet is also provided.

Software platform

The board support package (BSP) is developed on the basis of the initial loader U-Boot and the Poky Linux operating system for ARM processor, that is based on GNU libc full-function system library. The standard stable version of the kernel OS Linux 2.6.20 with modifications, delivered by Cirrus Logic company, is used as an embedded operating system.

The initial bootloader U-Boot with SDRAM, NOR Flash, Ethernet MAC support is adapted for device successful start-up.

As a result of the developing process the drivers for the power management that are used by different functional modules of the device and the driver for the presence sensor are developed. The changes to the keyboard driver of a kernel are made during the adaptation stage. The graphic server X is changed in order to support the touch screen device and LCD display. The frame buffer support driver is adapted for working with Hitachi TFT LCD display.

Benefits

• Support of most European, Eastern-European, Asian languages, including Bi-directional text
• Possibility to automatically update the firmware remotely, unnoticed by user
• Increased performance of the device
• Possibility to control the device remotely from Windows OS

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