Getting Started with the i.MX 8XLite Evaluation Kit Board | NXP Semiconductors

Getting Started with the i.MX 8XLite Evaluation Kit Board

Last Modified: May 3, 2023Supports i.MX 8XLite Evaluation Kit

1. Out of the Box

The following section describes the steps to boot the i.MX 8XLite EVK.

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      Development kit contains:

      • i.MX 8XLite EVK board for smart devices
      • USB cable (micro-B to standard-A)
      • Cable -Assembly, USB 2.0 Type-A male, USB Type-C male, shielded, 1m
      • 12 V/8.3 A universal power supply
      • Wi-fi M.2 module
      • 16 GB SD card with bootable operating system demonstration image

      1.1 Get Familiar With the Board

      1.2 Insert the SD Card (J6)

      The kit includes an SD card with a pre-built NXP Linux binary demo image. Without modifying the binary inside the SD card, booting from this SD card provides a default system with certain features for building other applications on top of Linux. The software is described in the following sections.

      1.3 Connect USB Debug Cable

      Connect the micro-B end of the supplied USB cable into Debug UART port J19. Connect the other end of the cable to a host computer.

      If you are not sure about how to use a terminal application, try one of the following tutorials depending on the operating system of the host machine: Minicom Tutorial, Tera Term Tutorial, PuTTY Tutorial.

      1.4 Connect Power Supply

      Connect the power supply cable to the power connector (J1).

      The processor starts executing from the on-chip ROM code. With the default boot switch setup, the code reads the fuses to define the media where it is expected to have a bootable image. After it finds a bootable image, the U-Boot execution should begin automatically.

      Information is printed in the serial console for the Arm® Cortex®-A35. If you do not stop the U-Boot process, it continues to boot the kernel.

      2. Get Software

      2.1 Embedded Linux®

      This section is applicable ONLY if attempting to load a Linux operating system on the board.

      The i.MX Linux board support package (BSP) is a collection of binary files, source code and support files that are used to boot an Embedded Linux image on a specific i.MX development platform.

      Current releases of Linux binary demo files can be found on the i.MX Linux download page. Additional documentation is available in the i.MX Linux documentation bundle under the Linux sections of the i.MX Software and Development Tool.

      2.2 Overview

      Before the Linux OS kernel can boot on an i.MX board, the Linux kernel is loaded to a boot device (SD card, eMMC and so on) and the boot switches are set to boot that device.

      There are various ways to download the Linux BSP image for different boards and boot devices.

      For this getting started guide, only a few methods to transfer the Linux BSP image to an SD card are listed. Experienced Linux developers can explore other options.

      2.3 Download an NXP Linux BSP Pre-built Image

      The latest pre-built images for the i.MX 8XLite EVK are available on the Linux download page under the most current version on Linux.

      The pre-built NXP Linux binary demo image provides a typical system and basic set of features for using and evaluating the processor. Without modifying the system, the users can evaluate hardware interfaces, test SoC features, and run user space applications.

      When more flexibility is desired, an SD card can be loaded with individual components (boot loader, kernel, dtb file, and rootfs file) one-by-one or the .sdcard image is loaded and the individual parts are overwritten with the specific components.

      3. Configure Software

      3.1 MCUXpresso SDK

      The MCUXpresso Software Development Kit (MCUXpresso SDK) provides comprehensive software source code to be executed in the i.MX 8DualXlite M4 core.

      If you do not wish to enable the Arm® Cortex®-M4 on i.MX 8DualXLite at this moment you can skip this section.

      3.2 Overview

      The MCUXpresso SDK is designed for the development of embedded applications for Arm Cortex-M4 standalone or collaborative use with the A cores. Along with the peripheral drivers, the MCUXpresso SDK provides an extensive and rich set of example applications covering everything from basic peripheral use case examples to demo applications. The MCUXpresso SDK also contains RTOS kernels, and device stack, and various other middleware to support rapid development.

      Depending on the OS used in the host machine, the way to build and deploy the demos can vary. Choose an option below for detailed instructions: