UCM-iMX8M-Mini: Android: Running from SD card

Introduction

This article provides instructions needed to install the Android image on SD card using a Linux Host workstation. The image provides full boot system including U-Boot, Linux kernel, device driver modules and necessary filesystems.

Preparation steps

• Obtain a Linux PC workstation.
• Obtain a USB SD card reader and a micro-SD Card. Any commercially available micro-SD card of 8GB (or larger) may be used for the installation.
• Plug the USB SD card reader into the host PC. Insert the micro-SD card into the card reader. From now we assume the device name of the SD card on your Linux PC is /dev/sdX.
• Obtain the UCM-iMX8M-Mini Android image:

- Download the compressed UCM-iMX8M-Mini Android image from CompuLab website.

- Prepare the uSD card:

sudo dd if=/dev/zero bs=1M count=16 of=/dev/sdX

sudo partprobe /dev/sdx

- Deflate the image to the uSD card:

unzip -p ucm-imx8m-mini_android-8gb-image.zip | sudo dd bs=1M of=/dev/sdX

OR

- Build your own Android image from source

Boot from the SD-card

• Insert the prepared SD card into micro-SD socket P23
• Power on the board
• Press and hold SW6 (RESET) and SW7 (ALT_BOOT) buttons
• Release SW6 and then SW7

The system will boot into Android.