Ethernut 5

The second 32 bit board of our Open Source Hardware family is based on an ARM9 CPU. Beside Nut/OS it is capable of running Linux.

Hardware Revisions

The board revision is printed in copper on the back side of the board.

Ethernut 5.0 Rev-F
The initial revision was published in Mai 2011.

Features

CPU

The AT91SAM9XE was the first ARM9 CPU offered by Atmel, which has embedded Flash memory. Compared to the AT91R40008 CPU used on Ethernut 3, the AT91SAM9 provides a large number of peripherals.

USB 2.0 full speed device and host port
10/100 Base-T Ethernet port
Image sensor interface
10-bit A/D converter
MultiMedia/SD-Card interface
Four USARTs plus one UART
Two serial peripheral interfaces (SPI)
Two two-wire interfaces (I²C)
Synchronous serial controller (I²S)
Two universal 16-bit timer/counter
Periodic interval, real-time and watchdog timers

Memory

In addition to 512 kByte Flash and 32 kByte SRAM that are embedded in the CPU, the board contains 128 MBytes SDRAM, 1 GBytes NAND Flash and 4 MBytes serial DataFlash.

Additionally, a MultiMediaCard/SD-Card socket and an USB host connector is available to connect external memory cards or sticks.

Ethernet

SMSC's LAN8710I with Auto-MDIX support is used on Ethernut 5.0 for 10/100 Mbit Ethernet connectivity.

Expandability

Like all Ethernuts, this board offers a 64-pin expansion port for attaching external custom hardware.

Although featuring a completely different CPU, all care has been taken to maintain compatibility with previous Ethernut boards for external hardware. Special functions like the memory bus, a secondary USART or the I2C and SPI busses are still located at the same expansion port pins. Note however, that technology was switched from 5V to 3.3V and that the pins are not 5V tolerant.

Power Supply

Flexible power supply had been a feature of all Ethernut boards, but Ethernut offers more than any of them. You can alternatively use:

External 7V - 24V unregulated DC power supply with barrel connector
Mini-USB cable
IEEE 802.3af compatible Power Over Ethernet

An ATmega168 on the back side of the board is used as a power management controller.

Software Support

Nut/OS 4.9
This tiny OS with TCP/IP stack has a ready-to-use configuration for Ethernut 5.

Linux
A board support package (BSP) contains the Ångström distribution.

Bootloader
A first stage boot loader loads U-Boot from serial flash.

U-Boot Environment
Learn how to customize the Ethernut 5 boot loader.

Ethernut 5 Source Code Debugging
explains how to setup Eclipse and OpenOCD to allow source code debugging of Nut/OS applications running on Ethernut 5.

OpenOCD Configuration for Ethernut 5
explains in detail, how to configure OpenOCD for Ethernut 5. While most developers will typically use the ready-to-run configuration files included in the Turtelizer package, it may be sometimes required to go deeper.