Embedded Environment with EPICS Support for Control Applications

System on a chip (SoC) is widely used in embedded environment. Current generation SoC commercial products with small footprint and low-cost have powerful in CPU performance and rich interface solution to support many control applications. To deal with some embedded control applications, the "Banana Pi" which is a card-size single-board computer and runs Linux-based operation system has been adopted as the EPICS IOC to implement several applications. The efforts for implementing are summarized in this paper. INTRODUCTION Using a circuit board to implement functions as a computer is called SBC (single-board computer) [1]. Its applications cover in telecommunications, industrial control, blade and high density servers, and lately laptops and mini-PCs, etc. Thanks to latest generation SoC technology, putting all major functionality into an integrated chip, educational used credit-card size SBC [2] likes the Raspberry Pi (RPi) and BeagleBone Black (BBB) are highly successful products. The Banana Pi (BPi) is the latest product of such category with powerful CPU, low power consumption SBC indeed, and the area of circuit board is only as credit card size. The Banana Pi which design idea is similar to the RPistyle SBC, and it is a fork of the RPi project using different components while maintain compatibility as much as possible. Moreover the Banana Pi is added the functions of SATA interface, infrared transmission, microphone, USB-OTG ports, power button, reset button, etc. Then the BPi has 26-pin/40-pin GPIO which is compatible with the RPi. The A20/31 SoC as CPU/GPU, 1GB DDR3 memory and Gigabit Ethernet connection are applied on the Banana Pi. The hardware specification of Banana Pi is shown as Table 1 [3-4]. Linux-based OS can be worked well on the Banana Pi. Table 1: Hardware specification of the Banana Pi