Ideas wanted on ARM9 SoC

[blueskull]

I've recently came across an AllWinner SoC, F1C200S, which is a 450MHz/600MHz (@1.1V, OC to 900MHz@1.2V) ARM9 SoC with 64MB of DDR RAM integrate in package, so it's basically a full ARM9 module on its own.

It has only 88 pins, and among them power, audio codec, composite video codec, USB, boot ROM, SD card, boot console UART and LCD interface w/ resistive touch took 79 pins, so only 9 pins are available for connecting peripherals.

The best I can do is to bring out one I2C, one SPI/UART and one I2S. If I try, I can bring out one more SPI and UART, at the cost of boot ROM (for SD-less boot) and boot console. After that, there's zero expandability.

What can I do with this interesting chip? An HMI? Or what? I was thinking of using Linux's superb networking capability to make it some sort of IoT gateway or at least data aggregator, but then it doesn't have WiFi nor Ethernet MAC, so I will have to connect an ESP8089 or USB NIC to get network, and then I will lose either SPI ROM or SD card or USB due to pin conflict.

I can try to hook it up to an ESP32, but then the actual gateway would be the ESP32, and the ARM9 will be sitting there doing nothing. After all, I don't want to waste time writing a proper SPI NIC driver on both chips, nor do I think the lame 115.2k (limited by ARM9's UART controller) AT modem interface is going to do anything meaningful.

I just can't see how can I make use of it, but it is indeed an interesting little chip, perfect for HMI, but really not anything more for anything else.

What's your opinion on this thing, and how do you think I can make use of it?

[taemun]

I think you've hit the nail on the head - HMI seems like the best application, if limited to 1280x720. You might be able to use an ESP32-S2 over USB - although I'm not sure on the state of software support for it from Linux. I don't know whether it can act like an ESP8089 style NIC.

[Lowku]

Hi Sir

I saw your post from 2020,

Just curious if you ended up using the F1C200s for anything or got any ideas from the post or subsequent research?

I want to design a small SBC that has internet either Ethernet or WiFI and potential HDMI to control a very basic Kiosks UI and send some data to a server.