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Quickstart

Inserting the SODIMM

See article: DDR

RevB and later boards have a laptop-style SODIMM slot - the procedure to insert the SODIMM is:

  1. Lean the SODIMM at a 45 degree angle, towards the SoC SODIMM first step
  2. Push the SODIMM down into the slot
  3. Push the SODIMM backwards (away from the SoC) until it is captured by the slot latches and is fully upright. SODIMM fully inserted

If you can see the gold contacts on the SODIMM then it has not been fully pushed down into the slot.

To release the SODIMM, push both the latches away from the card edge.

Before you plug in the power

See article: Power Connector

Ten64 has an 8-pin, 3.0mm pitch power connector with +12V pins as well as control pins for ATX power supplies (+5VSB, PS_ON, PGOOD etc). An ATX adaptor cable is available in the 'Mini-ITX' kit.

Please note: Ten64 only uses the 12V and +5VSB rails of ATX power supplies. Some older ATX power supplies will shut down if no load is present on either 3.3V or 5V rails.

By default, the board will always start when power is supplied. A future microcontroller update will allow the 'autostart' behaviour to be configured when the board is run from an ATX power supply.

ATX front panel pinout

The ATX front panel pins follow the standard layout - on recent ATX/ITX cases the front panel connector will plug straight in: ATX Front Panel pins board photo ATX Front Panel pins schematic

Note: Pin 10 (NC) is a 'key' pin - it is not on the board or connector.

DIP Switch and board LED

DIP switch and LEDs

DIP switch 1 (nearest LED) controls whether the board loads the boot firmware from the onboard QSPI flash or via SD card - the latter is useful when you need to "unbrick" from a bad TF/U-Boot version.

DIP switch 2 inhibits the RESET_REQ(uest) line from the SoC to the board controller, typically this is only used when doing low level board firmware development, e.g testing different RCW settings.

The LEDs below the DIP switch denotes the current board status - green for when the board is operational, red for failure or sleep/power off.

Reset button

Both the rear reset button (top button on I/O panel) and ATX reset need to be held down for at least five seconds before a reset is triggered. This is to prevent accidental resets. The reset behaviour will be configurable in a future microncontroller firmware release.

Serial console

A FTDI bridge on board provides a USB serial console on the USB-C port.

Settings are the typical 115200,8,N,1 with no flow control.

Tip: Every FTDI chip has a unique ID, under Linux you can add udev rules to provide a consistent name for each board you connect to.

The serial console UART is also available on the Control Header for raw, 3.3V level access.

SD/SIM tray

Note

Always remove power from the board when removing and inserting the SD/SIM tray.

There is protection circuitry on the board to ensure 'hotswaps' do not damage it, but to prevent any unintended side effects please power down first.

Ten64 has a 3-choose-2 SD/SIM tray, like some recent smartphones. You can have:

  • 1 SIM, 1 microSD card
  • 2 SIMs, 2nd SIM in microSD position

Support for two SIMs / the 2nd SIM position is dependent on the modem being used.

Recovery environment

On board the NAND flash is a "recovery" environment that provides tools necessary to partition disk drives, download disk images or chroot into an install. This can be accessed through the "Built-in recovery" menu option at boot or by typing run bootcmd_recovery in the U-Boot shell.

See the recovery firmware page for more details.

Realtime Clock (RTC)

Ten64 uses a supercapacitor to keep it's real time clock (RTC) - this avoids the waste associated with coin-cell batteries but the super capacitor will only hold time for 48-72 hours (given a Ten64 will typically be on 24/7/365 this is a worthwhile compromise).

Hence you should do an NTP sync when you first receive your board - ideally using the recovery environment.

Loading Linux distributions

Note

NEW! The recovery firmware now has a bare metal appliance store which can quickly download and write operating system images from the internet.

See the distributions page for details on "standard" Linux distributions (Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, openSuSE etc.).

You may also be interested in:

  • OpenWrt
  • μVirt - an OpenWrt based virtualization host designed to take advantage of the Ten64 hardware.

openSuSE works out of the box, while we have customized images for Debian and other distributions that do not currently have the correct drivers in their kernels.

Images can be loaded onto M.2/NVME SSD's, USB drives and SD cards - the bootloader will search in that order. See the FAQ section "Boot" for information on changing the boot order.

As the Ten64 boards are relatively new, we don't expect them to work with distribution installers until they adopt recent kernels (>=5.0).