Support for the SK-AM62 using the process described below has been integrated into the development branch for v2025 and thus will be available from v2025 and onwards.

Required Items

You should have at least:

  • 1 TI SK-AM62 device
  • 1 USB-C Power adaptor
  • 1 USB to Micro-USB cable
  • 1 MicroSD card
  • 1 Network cable (optional)

SK-AM62 Board Setup

The generic Apertis ARM 64-bit image files do not contain a bootloader in order to remain as board agnostic as possible. We will utilise these by installing the bootloader in the onboard eMMC’s hardware boot partition and configuring to board to boot from it. The bootloader will scan for bootable installs on both the MicroSD card and eMMC at boot, allowing either to be used.

Attach Serial

The serial console is provided by an onboard serial to USB controller.

  1. Attach the Micro-USB cable to the Micro-USB port labeled UART.

  2. Connect USB serial to host.

  3. Connect terminal emulator on your host.

    Depending on USB serial and operational system you are using the name of UART may differ, as well as the terminal emulator. The parameters for your terminal emulator should be 115200/8-N-1.

    For Linux-based systems it is usually ttyUSB0 and you may use minicom or screen to connect to serial:

    minicom -b 115200 -o -D /dev/ttyUSB0
    

    or

    screen /dev/ttyUSB0 115200
    

Cable connections to board

Setting Jumpers for SD Card Boot

Configure the jumpers on the SK-AM62 to boot from the SD card as follows:

The jumpers are not in a logical order and are understood to vary with board revisions. Please refer to the documentation for revision of your board.

Jumper State
B0 On
B1 On
B2 Off
B3 Off
B4 Off
B5 Off
B6 On
B7 On
B8 Off
B9 On
B10 On
B11 Off
B12 Off
B13 Off
B14 Off
B15 Off

On the E3 revision of the board this will be as shown here:

State of jumpers for SD Card boot

Apertis Installation

Installing Bootloader

  1. Download and write the SK-AM62 U-Boot installer (called uboot-<version>-installer-am62-sk.img.gz) to the MicroSD card and insert into the MicroSD card slot.
  2. Connect the USB-C power adaptor to the USB port labled TYPE-C PWR to power up the SK-AM62.
  3. Once installation of U-Boot on the SK-AM62 has completed, the following message will be displayed:
    +-------------------------------------------------------------------+
    |                  U-Boot installation complete                     |
    |                                                                   |
    | Please remove the SD Card, set the boot jumpers to boot from eMMC |
    |               and power cycle the board to continue               |
    +-------------------------------------------------------------------+
    
  4. Power off the board and remove the MicroSD card.

Setting Jumpers for eMMC HW Boot Partition Boot

Switch the jumpers on the SK-AM62 to boot from the eMMC HW boot partition:

The jumpers are not in a logical order and are understood to vary with board revisions. Please refer to the documentation for revision of your board.

Jumper State
B0 On
B1 On
B2 Off
B3 On
B4 Off
B5 Off
B6 On
B7 On
B8 Off
B9 Off
B10 On
B11 Off
B12 Off
B13 Off
B14 Off
B15 Off

On the E3 revision of the board this will be as shown here:

State of jumpers for eMMC hardware boot partition boot

Installing Rootfs

When configured as described above, the SK-AM62 can utilise the generic ARM 64-bit images such as listed on the download page.

  1. Download the required image and write to the MicroSD card.
  2. Insert the card into the MicroSD card slot and power up the board.

If you wish to boot the OS from the eMMC:

  1. Boot as described above from the MicroSD card.

  2. If the image contains the bmaptool utility and the device has an external network connection, the image can be directly installed onto the eMMC using this tool, for example loading the v2023 OSTree fixedfunction image onto the eMMC can be performed with the following command:

    $ sudo bmaptool copy https://images.apertis.org/release/v2023/v2023.4/arm64/fixedfunction/apertis_ostree_v2023-fixedfunction-arm64-uboot_v2023.4.img.gz /dev/mmcblk0
    

    There are other options if bmaptool is not present and/or an external network connection is not possible:

    • If the image has an external connection bmaptool can be installed with the following commands:
      $ sudo sed -i 's/^deb .* target$/& development/' /etc/apt/sources.list
      $ sudo apt update
      ...
      $ sudo apt install bmap-tools
      
    • If the image has bmaptool installed, but no external network connection instead, copy the required image to the running system using scp and run:
      $ sudo bmaptool copy apertis_ostree_v2023-fixedfunction-arm64-uboot_v2023.3.img.gz /dev/mmcblk0
      
    • If the image doesn’t have bmap tool installed and it’s not desirable to install it, upload the required image to the running system using scp and use dd instead:
      $ sudo dd if=apertis_ostree_v2023-fixedfunction-arm64-uboot_v2023.4.img.gz of=/dev/mmcblk0
      
  3. Power down the board and remove the MicroSD card

  4. The SK-AM62 should now be able to be powered back up with Apertis running from the eMMC.