VOXL 2 Mini Interfacing Questions

Doug Miller

Hello, regarding the VOXL 2 Mini:

Does J9 support Host Mode yet? Goal would be to utilize J3 for a Boson sensor and utilize this port for various other devices (possible hub -> mass storage, GbE adapter, and/or USB->HDMI adapter.
Do you have a cable available to use J3 as a SS interface, noting comments about missing capacitors on the Mini board and a need for a modified cable? Any guidance would be helpful, as it might present an alternative to question (1)
Any general guidance for connection of J3 to a USB hub, noting past forum comments related to challenges attempting this.
Recommendations to connect a small LCD display? First thought is a USB->HDMI adapter, but other suggestions or successes would be great to know.
Can you confirm maximum clock rate for SPI is 50MHz?
Any tricks to accessing HS UART functionality from Ubuntu environment, understanding this device is allocated to the Hexagon DSP?

Vinny

Hi @Doug-Miller
I can answer some questions for you:

YES, J9 USB-C now supports Host mode on this platform.
Sadly, no, net yet. That was a recent discovery and we have not had a chance to determine a clean work-around aside from incorporating the series caps on your target device. We do plan to make a spin of Voxl2 mini later in the year to fix this long-term. It's not an easy effort, so we cannot just jump into it quickly.
Not sure what you mean by "noting past forum comments" but if you design a simple Hub board, there are no tricks to interfacing it other than including the series caps on both TX and RX lines of the SS signals, and make sure to swap RX/TX to the hub since the notation "RX" is relative to our host. Here is a simple Schematic snippet to show you how we do it on our 5G modem (M0090) boards:
We've had success using small I2C/SPI based displays on our FlightCore products, but this is starting to venture into more of a SW topic for support using Voxl2. I do not have any good suggestions, but maybe someone else from the team might chime in.
The QRB5165 SPI ports are capable of 50MHz maximum. I'm not sure if SW has them setup for that.
Requires someone from SW to respond. I'll ping them internally to ask someone to respond. We've just undergone a forum server update, and some of our notifications are currently down, so not everyone sees all the posts at the moment.
Thanks for your patience.