WL18xx First Time Getting Started Guide (IMX6SL)

Hardware

• i.MX Solo lite EVK board (imx6sl-evk): See This Link

i.MX IMX6SLEVK board

• TI WiLink™ WL18xx WLAN SDIO/BT UART adapter Board: wl18xxcom82sdmmc Adapter kit

WiLink™ WL18xx SDIO Board

• TI -  WL1835MOD COM8 Kit ,* or TI WL1837MOD COM8 Kit

WL1835MOD COM8 Kit

WL1837MOD COM8 Kit

• SD Card (2GB minimum)
• 5V Power supply
• microUSB cable

Preparing the Environment

Configure your Host PC - Serial Terminal

In order to communicate with the IMX6SLEVK board and run the WLAN/BT demos, a serial port terminal program must be installed on your host PC. For Windows, you could use Teraterm or PuTTY. For Linux, we recommend Minicom.
Open PC's serial port terminal program and use the following settings:

Baud rate: 115200
Data : 8 bit
Parity: None
Stop: 1 bit
Flow control: none
Transmit delay msec/char: 1
Transmit delay msec/line: 1

Setup your IMX6SLEVK board

This section will walk you through setting-up your IMX6SLEVK board for use with the WiLink8 Demos:

• Plug the WL18xx SDIO Board into the SD3 port of the IMX6SLEVK board
  

   Important Note: 7 lines should be connected between the wl18xxcom82sdmmc adapter board jumpers and SD1 port of the IMX6SLEVK following the table:
                   BT UART interface (TX,RX,RTS,CTS) - 4 Yellow wires 
                   WL IRQ line - White wire
 

Top connection wireup

                   BT/WL enable lines - Blue/Green wire respectfully 

Bottom connection wireup

                   Detailed connection scheme

IMX6SLEVK SD1 port to wl18xxcom82sdmmc connection scheme

   The adapter board comes with default jumpers assembly to work with a host [wl18xxcom82sdmmc User guide] .

• Plug the WL18xxMOD COM8 Kit into the WL18xx SDIO Board.
• Insert the SD card loaded with the latest image to the SD2 port of the IMX6SLEVK board.
• Plug the USB cable into your host PC and plug it to the IMX6SLEVK board USB port J26.
• Plug the 5V Power supply into the IMX6SLEVK board power jack J6and power on the EVM using PWR switch SW14.

Building Everything From Sources

To build and integrate the WiLink8 related software components into your own file system, you need to start by getting the official imx linux kernel source. The kernel source code is available at the following git:

git.freescale.com/git/cgit.cgi/imx/linux-2.6-imx.git

fetching and building the imx kernel source code

1. create a working directory on you linux host

2. clone the git to this location

3. Checkout the release tag (currently rel_imx_3.10.53_1.1.0_ga)

mkdir ~/imx
cd ~/imx
git clone http://git.freescale.com/git/cgit.cgi/imx/linux-2.6-imx.git
git checkout rel_imx_3.10.53_1.1.0_ga

Patching the kernel for WiLink8 build

The WiLink8 drivers are built out of tree using the build script provided here. These scripts now also provide the option to apply all the patched required to the i.Mx kernel to add WiLink8 Wifi and Bluetooth as well as patching the device tree files for the EVK and SABRE boards to enable them. So initial step is to download the script (step 1 on link) and then modify setup-env for your configuration (step 2). They key item here is to add KERNEL_VARIANT to setup-env in order to get the script to patch the rel_imx_3.10.53_1.1.0_ga release.

...
export KERNEL_VARIANT=imx-3.10.53
...

Next step is to apply the required patches to the kernel

./build_wl18xx.sh patch_kernel

Now the kernel can be built with these patches applied as follows from inside the kernel source directory:

ARCH=arm CROSS_COMPILE=arm-linux-gnueabihf- make imx_v7_defconfig
ARCH=arm CROSS_COMPILE=arm-linux-gnueabihf- make zImage modules dtbs

Installing build artifacts into the file system

Assuming your sdcard has two partions (boot and rootfs) and is mounted at /media/boot and /media/rootfs the following commands can be used to install all build artifacts into your sdcard:

• from the kernel source directory run the following command to install the kernel modules into your file system

ARCH=arm CROSS_COMPILE=arm-linux-gnueabihf- make modules_install INSTALL_MOD_PATH=/media/rootfs

• copy the zImage and .dtb file for the IMX6SLEVK board to your boot partition

cp arch/arm/boot/zImage /media/boot
cp arch arm/boot/dts/imxsl-evk.dtb /media/boot

Building WiLink8 related artifacts

Now the kernel has been built the next stage is to do a full build of the WiLink8 related components using the build script. This is done by following step 3 (download code) and step 4 (build drivers) from WL18xx System Build Scripts page.

Installing WiLink8 build artifacts into the rootfs partition of your sdcard

Once a full ./build_wl18xx.sh has been completed, a tar file containing all build artifacts is created inside the outputs directory inside the build-utilites directory. This tar file is called fs_skeleton.tbz2
extract the content of this tar file on top of your rootfs sdcard partition. See the following example:

cd /media/rootfs
sudo tar xf ~/build-utilities/outputs/fs_skeleton.tbz2
depmod -a

Required Connection for HW Integration design

NOTE The connection is based on i.MX Solo lite EVK board with PCIMX6L8DVN10AA device)

Following pin to pin connections are required in order to integrate smoothly WL8 Ti module with IMXSL device.

IMXSL Line name	IMXSL pin	WL8 module pin	WL8 Line name
SD1_DAT7	A19	51	HCI UART CTS
SD1_DAT6	A20	50	HCI UART RTS
SD1_DAT5	A21	52	HCI UART TX
SD1_DAT4	A22	53	HCI UART RX
SD1_DAT3	B22	41	BT EN
SD1_DAT2	C22	40	WL EN
SD1_DAT1	A23	14	WL IRQ
SD3_DAT3	AD12	13	WL SDIO D3
SD3_DAT2	AC12	12	WL SDIO D2
SD3_DAT1	AD11	11	WL SDIO D1
SD3_DAT0	AC11	10	WL SDIO D0
SD3_CLK	AB11	8	WL SDIO CLK
SD3_CMD	AA11	6	WL SDIO CMD

Running the Demos

Boot the Board

To boot the board, simply apply power to the board by plugging in the 5V Power Supply. If the USB cable is plugged in and the serial port is configured correctly, you should see the output on your serial terminal(will take 1-2 min to load). You will see the board reach u-boot, and then automatically boot into the Linux kernel.

When prompted for a login, use root.

Demo Guide

The demos for both BT & WLAN is available on the main WL18xx page