ODROID-N2L with 4GByte RAM

• Description

The low-cost variant of our most popular and powerful ARM SBC ODROID-N2+. 

This project was actually initiated at the request of several B2B customers. They were satisfied with the performance and convenience of the highly versatile N2+. However, they wanted to embed a relatively compact, cost-effective, simple, and still high-performance SBC into their system.

Therefore, we made it!

• Smaller and neater form factor: 69 x 56mm 
• Small size allows for mounting inside a variety of small devices
• Suitable for various standalone embedded system which don’t require Ethernet connectivity
• Suitable for building robots, drones, arcade consoles, human-machine-interface devices, and many other applications
• Faster and lower power consumption LPDDR4 RAM
• Lightweight
• Low cost

While the letter ‘L’ does not refer to any specific word, it has various meanings such as Little, Leaf, Lynx, Lovely, Lumen, LPDDR and Light. We removed some features which were available on the N2+ to reduce the material cost and to minimize the PCB form factor. Ethernet, RTC, SPI-Flash, OTG port, Analog audio output, IR receiver, three USB 3.0 ports and the large heatsink frame were removed. 

Block diagram

If you need wireless connectivity, consider using a USB adapter like our WiFi Module 5BK.

Performance

We replaced the DDR4 RAM chips with a single LPDDR4 chip to minimize the PCB form factor and reduce power consumption. As a bonus, around 20% higher DRAM interface clock frequency is an obvious and important improvement. We could find 10% to 20% of increased system performance compared to the original N2+ in various benchmark test results.

The GPU benchmark glmark2-es2 also showed about 10% of increased performance which is  very similar to the improvement of the memory bandwidth (MBW) test.

Power consumption

The N2L power consumption is obviously lower than ODROID-N2+ thanks to the less power demanding LPDDR4 memory and the removal of some components.

We used our SmartPower3 (see https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/smartpower-iii/) to test and measure the ODROID-N2L power consumption while performing specific activities.

Thermal characteristics

The stock cooling fan must always rotate to avoid thermal throttling when running a very heavy computing load with an overclocked 2.4Ghz CPU clock frequency.

If your system design doesn’t allow moving parts such as a cooling fan, you will need to replace it with a passive heatsink. In this scenario, you may need to limit the maximum CPU frequency to lower than 2Ghz if the working ambient temperature is high and computing load is very heavy.

Since the heat dissipation characteristics are somewhat diminished, the maximum clock frequency of the CPU may be slightly lowered and will need to be taken into consideration according to the purpose.

OS images and CAUTION

Because the DRAM chip was changed from DDR4 to LPDDR4, the existing OS image for N2/N2+ will NOT boot on N2L.

It is necessary to modify the boot loader files at a minimum.

Currently, the following OS images for N2L have been prepared.

• Android 9.0 64bit and 32bit images
• Ubuntu 22.04 Mate / Minimal with Kernel 4.9
• Ubuntu 22.04 Desktop with Kernel 5.15 and upstream
• EmuELEC (TBD)

Board details

Specification

Demo videos

<1> Ubuntu Gnome Desktop 22.04 + Kernel 6.0 + Panfrost + Vulkan API (4GB model)

<2> Kiosk Frontend package + Chromium WebGL demo (2GB model)

WIKI

https://wiki.odroid.com/odroid-n2l

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