OLIMEX© 2015
A20-OLinuXino-MICRO user's manual
1.2 Target market and purpose of the board
The boards from the OLinuXino family are easy to setup and powerful. It is possible to use them in
almost any application as a host board. They are suitable for embedded programming enthusiasts,
Linux and Android gadget fans (they can just use the board as a media center or fully functional
Linux-PC, for instance) and also professionals (since its low cost makes it very good solution for
application-orientated embedded systems). The main usage of the board is software embedded
development without the urge of understanding perfectly the hardware.
The strong points of the boards are the processor speed, the small form factor and the low price-to-
productivity ratio.
Customers have full access to the technical documentation of the board. The software is released
under General Purpose License and the board is considered open-hardware – all schematics and
board design files are available to the customer under the Creative Commons Attribution-
ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
1.3 Board variants
There are two major board variants named: A20-OLinuXino-MICRO and A20-OLinuXino-
MICRO-4GB. The 4GB version has a built-in NAND memory suitable for the storage of an
operating system without the need of a SD card. The 4GB version comes with already programmed
Android 4.2.2 image.
The other Olimex boards with close characteristics are the ones with A13 and A10 microcontrollers.
The A13 boards feature a generation older processor but since they have been longer on the market
they have better Linux and Android support. The A10 boards feature single (than A20) processor
core but they are more energy efficient making them better choices for handheld devices and
devices requiring power efficiency.
For projects and designs that require smaller form factor good alternatives to A20-OLinuXino-
MICRO are: A20-OLinuXino-LIME2, A20-OLinuXino-LIME and A20-SOM-EVB.
1.4 Board version used in the manual
Boards from revisions E and F were used while writing this document. It is possible that they are
outdated so it is always recommended to download the latest sources from the GitHub page of the
board.
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