This note explains how to set up the i.MX 8M SOM Starter Kit hardware.

As shipped by Emcraft, the kit includes the following hardware components:

1. i.MX 8M SOM module;
2. Development baseboard (IMX8M-SOM-BSB);
3. External 12V power supply;
4. WiFi/Bluetooth antenna;
5. Mini-USB cable for the serial console.

The Starter Kit provides the following hardware components and interfaces:

To power the kit up, connect the power supply unit to the J11 connector on the IMX8M-SOM-BSB baseboard. As soon as the power has been applied to the kit, the LED D5 should lit up, indicating that the board is up and running. Note that the USB console cable should be connected only after the board is powered up.

Note: On early IMX8M-SOM-BSB Revision 1A boards, the external 12V power section has certain hardware errata. Please use the power supply which comes with the kit. The rev.1A board may be damaged if powered up using other external 12V power connector.

On the PC host side, the U-Boot/Linux console is available via the J5 dual port UART/USB connector. The software installed on the IMX8M SOM configures the serial console for a 115.2 Kbs terminal.

On some Linux distributions, connecting to the dual port UART/USB device causes the Modem Manager package to try opening the TTY device and sending modem commands to it, thus occupying the port. To avoid this effect, the ModemManager package must be disabled on the host with the following command:

$ sudo mv /usr/share/dbus-1/system-services/org.freedesktop.ModemManager.service
/usr/share/dbus-1/system-services/org.freedesktop.ModemManager.service.disabled

On the Linux host, the dmesg command can be used to figure out the TTY devices corresponding to the two serial ports:

$ dmesg | tail
[495846.154337] cp210x 1-5.1.5:1.0: cp210x converter detected
[495846.216898] usb 1-5.1.5: reset full-speed USB device number 8 using ehci-pci
[495846.292179] usb 1-5.1.5: cp210x converter now attached to ttyUSB0
[495846.292643] usb 1-5.1.5: cp210x converter now attached to ttyUSB1

The U-Boot/Linux serial console is available on the second USB TTY device. For example:

$ picocom –l /dev/ttyUSB1 –b 115200

To get access to the serial console of the i.MX 8M from a Windows host, install the device driver for the CP2105 USB-UART chip.

If an HDMI terminal is desired for graphical applications, it could be connected to the HDMI connector J7. Connect a USB mouse to the USB connector J13.