User manual

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-LIME2 and A20-OLinuXino-LIME2-

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.

A20-OLinuXino-LIME2 looks similar to both A20-OLinuXino-LIME and to A10-OLinuXino-

LIME. The major differences between A20-OLinuXino-LIME2 and A20-OLinuXino-LIME are:

1. LIME2 has gigabit Ethernet (GbE), compared to the standard 100Mb Ethernet of the LIME.

2. LIME2 design provides double the RAM memory, compared to the LIME design (1024 vs 512).

3. Much better routing of DDR3 memory.

4. Increased the number of layers from 6 in LIME to 8 in LIME2.

5. Corrected pinout of the LCD connector.

6. The price tag

Due to the hardware differences listed above the Linux and Android distributions of the LIME2 and

LIME boards are not identical. Furthermore, some of the hardware extensions are not compatible

with both of the designs. For example, the A10-OLINUXINO-LIME-UEXT is not compatible

with A20-OLinuXino-LIME2 board.

1.4 Board version used in the manual

Revision B boards and resources were used while writing this document. It is possible that they are

outdated so it is always recommended to download the latest sources from the GitHub page of the

board (https://github.com/OLIMEX/OLINUXINO/tree/master/HARDWARE).

Some peripherals, documents or software may be suitable for both the A20-LIME2 and the A20-

LIME designs but it is generally advised to use resources for the specific board.

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