OLIMEX A20-OLX-LIME [6/49] Target market and purpose of the board

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 LIME boards are a special kind of OLinuXino boards – they are as small as possible while

maintaining a remarkable stand-alone functionality. The strong points of these 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-LIME and A20-OLinuXino-LIME-

4GB. The 4GB version has a built-in NAND memory that allows the storage of an operating system

without the need of a SD card. The 4GB version comes with already programmed Android image.

There is a more expensive board variant called A20-OLinuXino-LIME2 – it looks similar to A20-

OLinuXino-LIME but there are four major differences:

1. LIME2 has double the amount of DDR3 RAM memory (1GB vs 512MB)

2. LIME2 has a native GbE interface (1000BASE-T vs 100BASE-TX)

3. LIME2 has a different LCD_CON layout

4. LIME2 is more expensive

The A10-OLinuXino-LIME and A10-OLinuXino-LIME-4GB boards are almost identical to,

respectively, A20-OLinuXino-LIME and A20-OLinuXino-LIME-4GB with the only difference

being the processor mounted. This brings different processor speed and productivity. The A10 has a

single Cortex A8 core. The A20 has a dual-core Cortex A7. This makes the A20 boards more

powerful and suitable for heavier computational tasks, but more power-hungry. The processor swap

is possible since the A10 and A20 processors are pin-to-pin compatible.

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