NXP i.MX RT1060 EVK - board certification review

Written by kisvegabor on 

The i.MX RT1060 EVK uses the i.MX RT1060 crossover MCU, running at 600 MHz featuring NXP’s advanced implementation of the Arm® Cortex®-M7 core. The 1 MB on-chip RAM, GPU and many external memory make this board ideal for UI applications. Support for FreeRTOS™ available within the MCUXpresso SDK. The i.MX RT1060 EVK board is now supported by Arm® Mbed™ OS and Zephyr™ OS, both open-source embedded operating systems for developing the Internet of Things.

i.MX RT1060 EVK earned Standard LVGL board certification which means the users can be sure that it’s easy to use that board with LVGL and they can expect decent performance and quality.

Standard LVGL certificate for i.MX RT1060-EVK

Buy now

The i.MX RT1060 EVK board can be purchased directly from NXP or it’s distributors. See here.

Specification

Micorcontroller

Display

Connectivity

Others

Performance

Frame rate (FPS)

The MCU’s 600 MHz clock speed and it’s ARM Cortex-M7 architecture are abundantly enough for the 480x272 display to create state-of-the-art UIs with image transformations, animations, opacity, and a lot of assets. i.MX RT1060 has PXP GPU that has built-in LVGL support. It can be simply enabled in lv_conf.h.

The MCU is equipped with an LCD controller to drive the display directly. Multiple frame buffers can be added to the board’s external RAM and you can even add two to the MCU’s internal RAM. From the frame buffer(s) the MCU automatically sends the current frame to the display.

The LCD controller supports maximum 1366x768 resolution which is about 8 times larger than the board’s 480x272 display. The relation is not fully linear but if the UI has - for example - 50 FPS with 25% CPU usage on 480x272, it will have approximately 25 FPS with 100 % CPU usage on 1366x768.

The board reached 32 FPS on the LVGL’s certification benchmark. In the video you can see, that even the most complex transformations or scrolling the whole screen with all the animations were smooth. The benchmark used the display driver from the MCUXpresso’s SDK as it is.

The default LVGL example uses the QSPI flash of i.MX RT1060 EVK. The other i.MX boards (1050 and 1064) use the hyper flash which is much faster. That’s why this board performs a little bit worse.

The driver uses 2 frame buffers located in the external RAM. It’s not the fastest solution because accessing the external RAM takes more time, than accessing the internal RAM. Using a smaller draw buffer in internal RAM (where LVGL renders) and copying it to an external RAM framebuffer once is much faster. Or the 1MB SRAM can be enough the store 2 frame buffers directly.

Memory

The i.MX RT1060 chip has plenty of internal memory (1 MB RAM) and external memory (32 MB SDRAM and 2 types external flashes) as well. Let’s see what graphics configuration can work with these memories.

Only internal RAM

The 1 MB internal RAM can be used to store even 2 whole frame buffers: 480 x 272 x 16bit x 2 frame buffers = 510 kB. It’s amazing because framebuffers are usually stored in external SRAM which is much slower then the internal RAM. This way no need for other draw buffers for LVGL and LVGL can render directly to the inactive framebuffer.

Frame buffer(s) in external RAM

If more internal RAM is required or a larger screen is used, the large external RAM makes possible to store 2 frame buffers and handle VSYNC (swap the frame buffers at the moment when the display is not being refreshed). The draw buffers of LVGL still should be stored in internal RAM because:

  1. they are small and can fit easily into internal RAM
  2. they are read/written many times per pixel so it’s important to keep memory access fast

Storing assets

Images and fonts can be stored in 4 kinds of memories:

  1. Hyper flash: fast, non volatile, and large
  2. QSP flash: slower, non volatile, and middle sized
  3. SD card: the slowest but can have a huge size
  4. External RAM: fast, volatile, and middle sized. If there are performance issues due to the memory bandwidth it’s possible to load the assets from the SD card or external flash here during initialization.

Quality

Dispay

The display is built with TN technology so its viewing angle and color correctness are only average.

Viewing angles of the i.MX RT1060-EVK board's display

Touchpad

i.MX RT1060-EVK is built with a resistive touchpad. Therefore it recognizes touch with a pen or in gloves. On the other hand customers might get used to the capacitive touchpads that are found in smartphones.

Robustness

i.MX RT1060-EVK is a development board for evaluation and not designed to be added to an end-product. Although there are holes to mount the board but the display is not glued to the board.

For real life applications a secondary board might be required for sensors or other peripheries.

The schematic of the board is publicly available and it can be a good starting point to develop your custom board based on i.MX RT1060 EVK.

 

Development

You can start to work with i.MX RT1060 EVK in many IDEs including MCUXpresso, Keil or IAR.

MBedOS and Zephyr also supports this board. To get started with MBedOS and Zephyr you can use their default IDE or tools or you can use PlatformIO as well.

Of course, NXP’s MCUXpresso supports this board with plenty of ready-to-use examples and applications (including UI application with LVGL).

The board is equipped with programmer/debugger so all you need to do is connect the USB cable and hit the Run or Debug buttons. We have tested the board with MCUXpresso and the debug experiment was very smooth. The usual debug features of Eclipse were working well.

GUI Guider - a free UI Editor from NXP based on LVGL - also support the i.MX RT1060 EVK board. You only need to download and install GUI Guider, select the i.MX RT1060 EVK board, create your UI, and flash it to the board with a few clicks.

Conclusion

i.MX RT1060 EVK is built with the extremely powerful i.MX RT1060 MCU. The 600 MHz clock speed, the PXP GPU, and the plenty of internal memory makes it a perfect choice to create eye-catching user interfaces without any compromises.

Due to the many examples of MCUXpresso, the wide variety of development environments, and the publicly available schematic i.MX RT1060 EVK is an amazing product to get started with UI development.