General newbie questions

Hi,

I posted these questions on the general contact page hoping for some response from sales but I got nothing. I’m hoping it will be picked up here by someone who can provide answers. Thanks in advance.

We are developing a new industrial control product line. For our control processors we are using Arm/Linux/.NET Core/C#/Visual Studio. We have a proof of concept running well on Raspberry Pi hardware. We are now about to start designing our custom hardware and are very interested in your Verdin family for the SoMs. I would very much appreciate you answering the following two questions:

  1. We will need full access to the GPIO, SPI, I2C, and PWM peripherals from the C# code. We are currently accessing these peripherals using the System.Device.Gpio library (latest pre-release version). Your web site does mention some support for .NET Core, but I cannot find any clear indication that these peripherals are fully supported using this or any other .NET library. Please can you give me a clear answer on this?

  2. Some of our devices are used in remote locations with intermittent power, and some of them need to log and store data on SD cards. Do your Verdin modules and your Linux distro have any sort of specific features to enable protection of the boot code and user disk memory to avoid problems with power cuts occurring during disk write operations?

Thank you for your time answering these questions.

Kind regards,
Peter Berry

Greetings @bcpberry!

Thanks for contacting us.

All peripherals supported by the System.Device.Gpio library should work just fine. I even consulted a colleague that works on Torizon development and is also a contributor to the .NET Core project and he can confirm all these peripherals should work on our boards.

We even have a Visual Studio Code extension tightly integrated with our modules to ease .NET Core development. You can find more about it here: https://developer.toradex.com/knowledge-base/net-core-development-and-debugging-on-torizon-using-visual-studio-code

Regarding your second question, the Verdin modules use eMMC Flash memory and our distros use ext4 partitions for that.
We’ve actually ran some power cut stress tests and the system should be safe against corruption.
Also, on Torizon, some key directories are mounted read-only to avoid such issues.

What may happen on the event of a power cut during a userspace write operation is that the particular file being written can become corrupted or not be written at all, but this is something that can be dealt programatically and does not affect the system boot at all.

Great answers. Thank you very much!

Glad to be of help! Please reach out if you have any further questions.