OLIMEX© 2015
A13-SOM user's manual
automatic sleep
It is recommended to always make a software “turn off” of the board. After that you can safely
remove the power supply. If you disconnect the power supply (either the USB or the power supply)
before turning off the board you may corrupt your SD card.
If your board has NAND memory you can corrupt the image located on the NAND memory.
2.5 Interacting with the board
The typical and recommended way of interacting with a stand-alone A13-SOM board is via a serial
cable connected to a personal computer. You would probably need a cable suitable for such a
connection due to the fact that most personal computers lack a serial port nowadays.
We distribute such a cable. Even if you already have such a cable or you decide to purchase it
elsewhere it is advisable to check this product page for a reference:
You need to connect the serial cable lines as follows: RX line to UART1-TX pin; TX line to
UART1-RX pin; GND to GND. The last pin of UART1 connector is named 3.3V and it can be used
to power the board, if you have other ways of power the board leave 3.3V pin unconnected! Be
careful to avoid the connection to the serial cable else there would be a short-circuit. Make sure that
the serial cable is connected to your personal computer and recognized properly after driver
installation.
Then open a terminal program on the serial (COM) port which the cable is associated with.
After everything else is set, you would need to power the board as explained in “2.3 Powering the
board”.
If the A13-SOM is attached to A13-SOM-WIFI in addition to the serial communication you might
also use one or more of the two additional mediums to interact with the board:
1. a compatible display via the LCD_CON connector
2. a remote computer using the WIFI-capabilities (probably via SSH connection)
Using the LCD_CON or the WIFI might require additional configurations. Furthermore, it is
possible to corrupt the output settings over those interfaces and, thus, lose the output. In such cases,
you can always use the serial cable USB-SERIAL-CABLE-F as a reliable way to establish
connection to the board.
2.6 Changing the default image resolution
Depending on the display or the screen you want to use with the A13-SOM, you might need to
apply software changes to the prebuilt Android or Linux image.
The typical A13-SOM user would not need to edit the files, however.
To ease the process of changing the resolution we have compiled a number of Android images for
the Android users (with hard-coded video output settings). Alternatively, for Debian Linux users, we
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