Toradex has licensed Altium’s online Geppetto embedded board prototyping and design tool for customers using its Arm-based, Linux supported Verdin and Colibri modules.

Gumstix, which was acquired by Altium, has long been known for its Geppetto Design-to-Order (D2O) custom board design service for customizing carrier boards based its own Linux-driven modules and those of partners such as Toradex. Now Altium has announced that Toradex has licensed Geppetto for in-house use.

Geppetto UI screen with Toradex environment
(click image to enlarge)

Geppetto is now available for use by Toradex customers looking to build customized carriers, starting with its Verdin and Colibri compute modules. Toradex users can now use the free, modular cloud-based design tool “embedded directly into the Toradex ecosystem” to create Geppetto-based carrier board designs “without the need to draw schematics and layout boards,” says Altium, a major PCB design firm. An optional manufacturing service can ship the board from 7-20 working days from design completion.

The new Altium-infused Geppetto provides capabilities including:

• Custom web-design tool — Simple drag and drop design platform to develop production-ready prototypes for IoT and AI applications
• Free design, BSP, and 3D model files on demand — On-demand generation of customers’ EagleCAD, .BRD and .SCH files plus instant pricing and customized device trees, datasheets and .STL models
• Altium Viewer — Viewer embedded in the Geppetto interface along with Altium Designer project files and high-quality PDF schematics
• Rapid manufacturing — Geppetto generated designs with automated PCB routing, BOM, fabs and assembly can be pretested, application ready, and fully assembled in 15 business days.

Verdin iMX8M Mini

Toradex’s container-enabled Torizon distribution will offer integration with the Geppetto service. Designed primarily for newcomers to embedded development, Torizon is based on open source Yocto code.

Toradex’s new Verdin form factor has a 69.6 x 35mm footprint that is close to the dimensions of Toradex’s earlier Colibri family but supports 260 I/O pins on its SODIMM connector compared to 200. Verdin has a more battery-friendly design with a wide 3.3 to 5V input range and low-power 1.8V I/Os.

Verdin Development Board
(click image to enlarge)

The first two Verdin modules are the Verdin iMX8M Mini and Verdin iMX8M Nano, built around NXP’s i.MX8M Mini and Nano processors, respectively. There is also a Verdin iMX8M Plus module on the way built around NXP’s similarly quad-core, Cortex-A53 based i.MX8M Plus, which includes a 2.3 TOPS NPU.

“We are thrilled Toradex is choosing to give their users the power of authorship and advanced design using Geppetto,” stated W. Gordon Kruberg, M.D., head of Modular Hardware, Altium, LLC. “Geppetto is democratizing the path for electronics design.”

 
Further information

Altium’s Geppetto appears to be available now to Toradex customers. More information may be found in Altium’s announcement. Registration is available for a free, Nov. 18 webinar on using Geppetto with Toradex modules here.