Radxa Rock Pro / Lite Development Boards are Now Open Source Hardware

Many projects claim to be “open source hardware” (OSHW) after they’ve released the schematics in PDF format, and source code. But the definition of OSHW has a few more requirements, which is practise means you’ve got to release schematics and PCB layout in the native format, not only in PDF, as well as the gerber files, and the bills of materials. Open Source Hardware can also truly be useful, if you can source the components. and for example, Broadcom BCM2835 processor might be impossible to procure, especially in small quantities, and that makes the Raspberry Pi unsuitable as an open source hardware platform. Existing companies / associations dedicated to OSHW include Arduino, Beagleboard.org, Olimex, etc.., and today Radxa has joined the club by releasing all hardware designs files for Rockchip RK3188 based Radxa Rock Pro and Lite development boards (2014 version) under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. This could be the very first Chinese company to do so, at least for ARM development boards.

Radxa_Rock_Schematics

You can get the hardware design files on Radxa’s oshw repository in github. Let’s see what’s they’ve released:

  1. Schematics in Orcad 16.5 and PDF formats
  2. PCB layout (.dsn) to be open with PADS 9.5
  3. Manufacturing files including the Gerber files, Bill of material (BOM), components placement, etc…
  4. Mechanical drawings in DXF format

It looks good to me, did they forget anything?

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18 Comments
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leandro
leandro
9 years ago

Congratulations to Tom Cubie.

onebir
onebir
9 years ago

Yep – huge kudos to Cubie 师傅!

Tom Cubie
9 years ago

@cnx-soft i think you missed this, full TRM of rk3188 and others.

http://rockchip.fr/

It’s been in the wild for some time 🙂

newbie
newbie
9 years ago

what it exactly means? It will be easy to develop drivers for linux for example?

Im looking for arm htpc but on linux with optical audio (so raspberry is out of game) with hw accel.
but there are many topics about hw acceleration on arms, can anybody explain it ? Or if you have an url, i will look at it.

passante
passante
9 years ago

Congratulation to radxa team!

newbie
newbie
9 years ago

Thanks. It was helpful

For my question… There are two types of hw accell, right?
VPU and GPU, so i would like to have an htpc, which can be able to support GPU accel in ubuntu, for example.
And have support for video acceleration in xbmc.
Armada Mach 8 looks great, but…
There isnt 1gbit lan and unclear support of CEC.

Werewolfc
Werewolfc
9 years ago

@newbie
As far as i know…. VPU is used when playing video files for “hardware video decoding”. GPU is used for 2/3D games and so.
I’ve read that VPU/GPU hw acceleration exist mostly on Android. For Linux i’ve read that there is some GPU acceleration (for Malli i think) but none VPU hw acceleration (only software) – the Wandboard comunity made an image that have some experimental os image.
I’m also interested in a good htpc with GPU/VPU hw accel. running LINUX.

Werewolfc
Werewolfc
9 years ago

@Werewolfc
the Wandboard comunity made an image that have some experimental … VPU hw decoding capabilities.

xxiao
xxiao
9 years ago

what about the software, the kernel etc, is rockchip supporting open source officially these days?

werewolfc
werewolfc
9 years ago


The only i.mx6 dev board/mini pc that i know off is Wandboard, and it’s not stable yet. Can you give me some example of boards that have gpu/vpu hw acceleration for linux (ubuntu, arch or something else with a desktop except xbmc linux) ?

newbie
newbie
9 years ago

@werewolfc

+1 Same question. Please

Peter
Peter
9 years ago
newbie
newbie
9 years ago

@Peter

such a shame, there isnt support of spidf audio output. (maybe external module, but it sucks)

hoangdinh86
hoangdinh86
9 years ago

Maybe Odroid-XU3 with powerful CPU/GPU fastest eMMC and USB 3.0 but lack of wifi

Khadas VIM4 SBC