Hi everyone,

Has anyone managed to get a sensor working with the at91sam9g45 / at91sam9m10 evaluation kit?

The Atmel ISI support code seems a little bit, ummm, experimental - you know, reading from write-only registers, that kind of thing - so I'd be very interested to hear your experience with this.

No prizes for guessing what I'm trying to do at the moment...

Cheers, ....Nick Pelling....

Hi Nick,

Did you manage to sort this out - we are just running up our G45EK (with an Aptina sensor on a small adaptor board) in advance of the custom board which is about 2 weeks away. We've confirmed that the sensor is working- so the hardware bugs are out - but code that works on the SAM9260 doesn't work on the the G45 to get an image. Any clues most appreciated.

Cheers,
Don (aka kiwi)

Hi Don,

Be aware that the at91sam9g45's peripheral bus speed isn't very fast. The figures I (eventually) got back from Atmel Technical Support were missing from the Table 46-17 that had been released up to that point: "I/O Characteristics, max I/O freq is 45MHz (3.3V domain) , 36MHz (1.8V domain)."

As a guide, I'd expect most modern SoCs to run their peripheral buses at around 70MHz-90MHz, so this is substantially slower than you might have been expecting too.

Note that this is the same for the at91sam9m10, the at91sam9g46 and the at91sam9m11.

My company needed a 54MHz peripheral bus for its security cameras (also based around an Aptina sensor), so had to drop the sam9g45 and look elsewhere, even though everything else about the chip worked fine for us. Which is a shame, but there you go.

Cheers, ....Nick Pelling.... // Nanodome

Hi Nick,

I'm about to attempt a similar development with both the G45 and M10 boards and yes I would agree ....experimental isn't the half of it.

Firstly you need to move to an earlier version of the Linux Kernel as 2.6.30 doesn't support ISI interfacing. I mentioned this to Atmel Support but a response was as usual misunderstood and ducked.

Atmel apparently removed this compoenet because of changes to various cameras command and control interfacing.... or some such nonsence ie C&C is over I2C. You also have to install a number of patches. The version of linux you move to is 2.6.26.

I'm about to try this once I'm able to display jpg files. Incidently have you achieved this yet as I'm unable to load images only png files.

Graham

Hi Graham,

To be honest, the reason I wanted to use the sam9g45 was that it was just about the best embedded chip I could still feasibly programme raw (i.e. without Linux). Unfortunately, because the performance of the peripheral bus was, let's say, a generation behind the rest of the SoC, we reluctantly had to drop it. Atmel's loss, I'm afraid.

Cheers, ....Nick Pelling.... // Nanodome