hi - quick question about the Apalis TK1. The datasheet has 10 UARTs available, of which six are provided by the K20 - and also says “Please note that these six UART interfaces are not supported by the standard Linux BSP”.
is there a BSP that supports them yet - just looked in the dowloads section, and the release notes for the TK1 download dont seem to mention the K20 - or a timescale ?
Thanks!
Currently there is no plan to support K20 UARTs in Linux. To use them you’ll need to write custom firmware for the K20 MCU.
do you have any partners that can help with that sort of work? The “!0 Uarts” in the datasheet is a key reason for looking at the TK1 module for us, as a client project requires > 7 Uarts. At the moment that will be delivered using multiple modules, but a datasheet saying ten obviously got attention! 
thanks
The problem is that it would require rather high amount of work: Extend the K20 MCU firmware, extend the protocol between MCU<-> Linux, write a tty/serial driver on Linux… That said, it is doable, just probably not the most economical solution.
Since you need to have a custom carrier board anyway, there are easier/cheaper options to build a system supporting 10 UART’s, e.g. by using a USB Hub plus USB based FTDI’s, since FTDI chips are supported by default and USB is a discoverable bus, this approach would not need any software changes. Or using the parallel bus (available on some of our modules) plus parallel bus capable serial chips (16550 or such).
We have a partner network, there are several partners which could support you in either of this two approaches:
