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Reviews, tutorials and the latest news about embedded systems, IoT, open-source hardware, SBC's, microcontrollers, processors, and more 2.31 Inch Display Supplier
Youyeetoo X1 is an x86 single board computer (SBC) powered by an 11th Gen Intel Celeron N5105 quad-core Jasper Lake processor clocked up to 2.9GHz with 4GB to 16GB RAM and up to 256GB eMMC. The board comes with a variety of connectivity options such as M.2 M key and E key sockets for connecting Wi-Fi, 4G LTE or SSD modules, as well as MIPI DSI and HDMI interfaces for up to 4K resolution display, and I/Os such as UART, I2C, and SPI
Whether you are a maker, an IoT developer, or a system integrator, the Youyeetoo X1 SBC board can be integrated into various applications such as industrial automation, IoT gateways, robots, and others. Since the Youyeetoo X1 SBC is based on an x86 processor, there is no need to worry about operating system or application compatibility as would be the case on systems based on the Arm architecture, and in this review, we’ll use Ubuntu 22.04 for testing.
Youyeetoo sent a package with two boxes: one with the Youyeetoo X1 SBC and the other with YYT-MIPI7LCD 7-inch MIPI CSI touchscreen display with 1024 x 600 resolution. The board does come with an HDMI port, so the display is optional. This is what the Youyeetoo X1 SBC looks like.
The board comes with a large heatsink covering most of the board and an integrated cooling fan. We’ll see the cooling efficiency and performance of the board when we benchmark. Besides the usual gigabit Ethernet, HDMI, and USB ports, the X1 SBC also features several color-coded headers for I/Os.
The package also includes a Youyeetoo-branded 12V/3A power adapter as the company typically provides accessories under its own brand. As a side note, the Youyeetoo website provides decent documentation with a Wiki and community forums to help users.
Looking at the bottom of the board, we will find another 5 additional connectors with two M.2 sockets, both keyed M and E, an FPC connector for connecting a MIPI DSI display, another FPC connector to connect a SATA drive, and a 2-pin connector for a real-time clock and battery.
The 7-inch LCD comes with an FPC cable and features a GOODIX GT711 5-point capacitive touch controller.
We’ve already covered the X1 SBC specifications in the announcement post, but here they are again for reference:
We can enter the BIOS page to set various settings by connecting a USB keyboard and pressing the Delete key. The X1 relies on the familiar AMI BIOS, and when scrolling down, we can find more information system, notably the use of an Intel Celeron N5105 and 8GB RAM (8192 MB) at 2933 MT/s.
The “Boot” section allows us to define the boot order and select eMMC or SSD boot to easily run Windows and Linux separately.
Youyeetoo provides different BIOS/UEFI firmware depending on the use case. The default BIOS output to HDMI and voltage levels for I2C, GPIO, UART, SPI are set 3.3V. But since we want to use the provided MIPI DSI display, we’ll need to update the BIOS. In a nutshell, we’ll need to copy the UEFI firmware files to a USB flash drive, plug it into the USB port of the Youyeetoo X1 SBC board, wait for the update to complete, and then we can use the new BIOS version immediately.
The detailed steps can be described as follows:
We’ll test the M.2 Key-M 2280 socket on the Youyeetoo X1 SBC by installing a 500GB M.2 NVMe SSD (WD_BLACK SN770) and fastening it with a screw. We will now boot and enter the BIOS by pressing the Delete key and then navigating to the “Boot” page where we’ll find our SSD in the “Boot Option #1” section. But we will first choose the SanDisk USB flash drive as default since we want to install the Ubuntu 22.04 Linux operating system from the USB drive to the SSD we’ve just installed on the Youyeetoo X1 single board computer.
After restarting the system, a GNU GRUB window will appear and we’ll select “Try or install Ubuntu” from there to install Ubuntu 22.04 on the Youyeetoo X1 SBC’s M.2 SSD.
Installing Ubuntu 22.04 on the Youyeetoo X1 SBC board is basically the same as installing it on a normal computer contrary to Arm-based SBCs that generally require the user to flash OS image to a microSD card or other storage device. Here, we can freely choose to install the operating system without having to look for an image specific to the board or learn how to build an image from the source code. We went through the setup wizard to select the language, partition the drive, etc…
It went smoothly, and after the installation, we removed the USB drive to boot up the system with Ubuntu 22.04 installed on the M.2 NVMe SSD.
We did everything with the 7-inch display so far, and since it has a touchscreen function we can tap the screen to launch applications, navigate the web, play YouTube videos, and so on. The video below is a short demo showing how the touchscreen display works within the Ubuntu 22.04 desktop.
Let’s now run some benchmarks starting with Thomas Kaiser’s sbc-bench.sh:
The CPU temperature peaked at 74.0°C under load:
We’ll use the Phoronix test suite to run some other benchmarks, notably storage read and write speed using pts/iozone using a 2MB record size and a 512MB file. This resulted in an average read speed of 5523.01 MB/s and a write speed of 551.61 MB/s.
The 500GB WD_BLACK SN770 specifications list up to 5000MB/s sequential read performance and up to 4000MB/s sequential write performance. So the results are probably not correct on either side, with the read speed being too high, and the write speed being too low. So we repeated the test with iozone directly and the results were much different…
The sequential read speed reaches about 2.9 MB/s, and the sequential write speed goes up to around 2.8 MB/s, which looks closer to the capabilities of the board and WD_BLACK SSD.
We also tested GPU performance with the pts/gputest benchmark
China Lcm The Intel UHD Graphics in the Celeron N5095 delivered low-end 3G graphics performance, but this should be expected for an integrated GPU: