About Kylin

Kylin board is a develop board based on Rockchip RK3036. RK3036 is a low power, high performance processor solution for IOT, OTT BOX, and other digital multimedia applications, and integrates dual-core Cortex-A7, with separate NEON coprocessor and 128KB L2 Cache.
Many embedded powerful hardware engines provide optimized performance for high-end application. RK3036 supports almost full-format 1080P H.264 decoder and H.265 decoder, high-quality JPEG decoder and special image preprocessor and postprocessor. Embedded 3D GPU makes RK3036 completely compatible with OpenGL ES1.1 and 2.0, OpenVG1.1 etc.
RK3036 has high-performance external memory interface (DDR3/DDR3L) capable of sustaining demanding memory bandwidths, also provides a complete set of peripheral interface to support very flexible applications.

CPU RK3036G Dual-core ARM Cortex-A7
Memory 512Mb DDR3
Onboard Storage 16GB eMMC
Audio On-board Audio Codec-ALC5616
I/Os 70 X GPIOs, 4 X PWM, 2 X UART, 3 X I2C, 1 X SPI , 1 X I2S 3.3V I/O
Wi-Fi On-board WIFI+BT-AP6212 802.11b/g/n
Bluetooth On-board WIFI+BT-AP6212 BT/BLE 4.0
External Storage SD slot
USB Ports 1 USB host, 1 USB OTG
Console Port On board FT232RL on micro USB
Power 5V (MicroUSB)
Size 74 mm x 98 mm
Graphics* on board HDMI(not support by Brillo)
Additional Features Powered by MicroUSB port
1 x Ethernet connector
1 x HDMI
2 x interface connectors(30pin)
1 x 3.5mm headphone & Mic connector
5 x pushbutton switches
2 x indicator LEDs
4 x Function button

Hardware interfaces

Kylin board is a reference design of RK3036 SoC targeted at IOT/OTT solutions, including almost all functions of RK3036 chip such as HDMI, USB(OTG & Host), Ethernet, GPIO, codec, WIFI, Bluetooth, SD card.

Here is a brief introduce about these interfaces on Kylin as the image shown on right side.

Kylin-interfaces.jpg

Buttons

  • Reset Key, button to reset system.
  • Maskrom Key, button to enter Maskrom mode for loader/uboot flashing.
  • Fastboot Key, button to enter Fastboot mode for images downloading.
  • Recovery Key, button to enter Recovery mode.

USB ports

Kylin contains three mini-USB ports for Power Supply(5V/1.5A), UART2 Debugging, and OTG(On-The-Go) connectors, and one Stander-A plug for USB host connector.

UART2 is the default debug serial port, whose pins are mux with SDMMC0. When the SD card is not inserted(SDMMC_DET is in high level), these pins are switched into UART2 mode, otherwise into SDMMC0 mode.
So please note that SD card and UART2 are not compossible on Kylin board, unplugging SD card before ‘minicom’(or ‘cu’ etc.) connecting to /dev/ttyUSB*.

Connectors and Switches

kylin-cn2.jpg
kylin-cn4.jpg

For function extension, there are two connectors(CN2 and CN4) and five switches(or jumpers), S2/S3/S4/S5/S7, on Kylin board.

As describe in these two images below, CN2 and CN4 extend SPI/UART/I2C/I2S/GPIO/SPDIF/PWM functions, and VOUT[1-5] controlled by PMIC output V/A from 0.8~3.4V/150-300mA.

Note that some pins are controlled by switches, some are not and always enabled.

Switches only enable pins of connectors, which means they do not cut off any on board connection. For example, S3 switch can enable the 11/13/15/17/19/21 pins of CN4 acted as I2S function by connecting to SoC RK3036 I2S that shared with on board codec(RT5616). So you have to disabled RT5616 first before debugging external codec.
The details of switches and on board functions,

  • S2 controls pins of CN2 conflict on board HDMI
  • S4 controls pins of CN2 conflict on board SDMMC0
  • S5 controls pins of CN2
  • S3 controls pins of CN4 conflict on board Codec/RT5616
  • S7 controls pins of CN4, selecting on board UART_BT when S7 is on, CN4 UART when S7 is off
  • Connector CN2
    • GPIO GPIO1_* enabled when switch S2 and/or S4 is on, GPIO2_A3 always enalbed
    • SPDIF always enabled
    • SPI enabled when S5 is on
    • multiplexing of PWM/I2C as RK3036 designed, and selected by pinctrl sub-system
  • Connector CN4
    • I2S enabled when S3 is on
    • On board UART_BT enabled when S3 is on, UART on CN4 enabled when S3 is off
    • VOUT always enabled