Hey All, Just wondering if there is any way a USB 3.0 port could be converted from one of the available ports on the UDOO Quad. Be it SATA, Ethernet, a combination of the USB 2.0 ports and ethernet, an arduino shield, etc. I've done some digging around the internet to see if there are any Ethernet converted USB 3.0 ports but the only things that come up are in the reverse order, where someone already has a usb 3.0 port and is converting it to ethernet. I understand USB 3.0 is faster than ethernet so making a conversion in the opposing way would make little sense but still I am curious if there are any known members who may have gotten access to this. What would you suggest to have access to a USB 3.0 port on this board?
There's no suitable place to interface an USB 3.0 controller. None of the bus signals exposed on Arduino headers are nearly "fast" enough. The i.MX6 CPU has an on-chip PCI-Express-1x controller which would have been ideal, but unfortunately that isn't brought out to a connector on the Udoo. There might not have been much speed benefit over USB 2.0 anyway, considering that i.MX6 internal bus limitations cap the Gigabit Ethernet port at about 450Mb/s of throughput. PCIe might have been similarly hampered. If you're wanting USB 3.0 for additional hard drives, consider using an external SATA Port Multiplier on the single SATA port. I haven't tried one myself, but those apparently are supported. You'll need to recompile your kernel to build in the necessary driver, though.
