gumstix

Pleco Phase01 completed

tuomas

I started playing with microcontrollers in 2005 and, if not at the very start, at least very quickly I decided to aim to have some sort of remote controlled Linux device with controllable camera with digital wireless communication. Now, 6 years later, I have completed my first phase :)

Couple of photos of the earlier devices are shown in the project page.

After several planning iterations and code rewrites I ended up using Qt both on the remote controlled Gumstix and on the GUI controller. I decided that trying to optimize everything from the memory and CPU consumption to the network bandwidth just isn’t worth the time spent in implementing it. The most CPU intensive task is the video encoding to H263 and that’s done in the DSP. I’m running MeeGo on the Gumstix and it provides e.g. the GStreamer plugins for the DSP.

Using Qt framework with self made simple protocol over UDP I got the Phase01 code implemented quite quickly compared to my previous efforts. The protocol allows low priority packets (like periodic statistics and video stream) to be lost and guarantees the passing of high priority packets (control commands etc.). Also only the latest control command of each type is retransmitted, i.e. an old packet is not retransmitted if a new overriding command has already been given.

The controller GUI shows the states the slave sends, like motor speeds, WLAN signal strength, CPU load average and some protocol statistics like round trip time and the number of retransmissions.

Currently the motors are controlled using the a,s,d,w keys in 10% steps and the camera is controlled dragging the mouse left button pressed on top of the video window.

Here’s a video (direct link) of the Phase01. You need HTML5 video capable browser with Ogg Theora/Vorbis codecs.

2.6.25 and BT working on Gumstix

tuomas

I finally got the Bluetooth working with my Gumstix running 2.6.25 and my linux setup. My patches are against two weeks old kernel but hopefully apply to current HEAD too. The patches include my kernel config: gumstix-verdex-bt.config too.

I had to configure the BT hardware using pxaregs and /prog/gpio in my startup scripts (copied from some OE image):


echo -n "Starting 32kHz clock..."
/usr/sbin/pxaregs OSCC_OON 1
while /usr/sbin/pxaregs OSCC_OOK | tail -n 1 | grep -q -v 1;do
echo -n '.'
sleep 1
done
echo "Settled"

/sbin/modprobe gumstix_bluetooth
/sbin/modprobe proc_gpio

echo "AF3 out" > /proc/gpio/GPIO9

echo "AF1 in" > /proc/gpio/GPIO42
echo "AF2 out" > /proc/gpio/GPIO43
echo "AF1 in" > /proc/gpio/GPIO44
echo "AF2 out" > /proc/gpio/GPIO45

I also had to patch my hciattach from bluez-utils 3.29. Those patches are here.

UBIFS and Gumstix

tuomas

I wanted try something other than JFFS2 as the rootfs and decided to go with UBIFS. Thanks to GIT’s brilliance I had no trouble pulling the UBIFS kernel patches from their tree to mine.

It seems that the UBIFS hasn’t had many NOR flash users before me and it needed some fixes. Artem Bityutskiy was extremely helpful in fixing the deficiencies and helping me out. After a few debug rounds I now have UBIFS root on my Gumstix.

I created the UBIFS image with the following commands:


sudo mkfs.ubifs --compr=zlib -r /tmp/rootfs -m 1 -e 130944 -c 120 -o ubifs.img
ubinize -o ubi.img -m 1 -p 128KiB -v ubinize.cfg

With this ubinize.cfg:


[ubifs]
mode=ubi
image=ubifs.img
vol_id=0
vol_size=13MiB
vol_type=dynamic
vol_name=rootfs
vol_alignment=1
vol_flags=autoresize

Note that I have reserved 2MiB for the kernel partition.

I had to add one extra parameter to the kernel args to specify what MTD partition I wanted to use:

console=ttyS0,115200n8 root=ubi0:rootfs rootfstype=ubifs reboot=cold,hard ubi.mtd=1

Now my Gumstix boots with simplified kernel to busybox shell in roughly 4.2 seconds (counted from the bootm command in U-Boot).

2.6.25 running on Gumstix

tuomas

I had to add a new category after all: gumstix. The embedded word has too broad a meaning.

Updating the kernel wasn’t such a big thing after all, even for a kernel n00b like me. I git cloned the vanilla tree from kernel.org and patched the generic (and one bluetooth) Gumstix patches from OE: arch-config.patch, board-init.patch, header.patch, mach-types-fix.patch, modular-init-bluetooth.patch, tsc2003-config.diff, tsc2003.c, and uImage-in-own-partition.patch. Most of them applied fine, I just had to manually apply simple Makefile patches and change pxa_init_irq call to pxa27x_init_irq.

I don’t know if it really works, but at least it booted:


root@gumstix-custom-verdex:~$ uname -a
Linux gumstix-custom-verdex 2.6.25-rc8-00151-gdc41023 #2 Fri Apr 4 23:43:25 EEST 2008 armv5tel unknown

Gumstix

tuomas

It’s time to create a new category in my projects blog: embedded.

I got interested in microcontrollers some years ago and wrote something simple for 16F88 with assembler. Then I connected it to an old IPAQ using a serial connection. But the IPAQ isn’t a very good development platform so now I decided to buy a gumstix.

Gumstix Verdex

It’s 400Mhz verdex mainboard with 64M RAM and 16M flash. And a bluetooth. The mainboard is the smaller board upside down in the picture. The bigger board is a expansion board including 3x rs232, power plug, a USB mini-B connector and a bunch of GPIO lines.

The bootloader is U-Boot and the Linux distribution is based on OpenEmbedded. U-Boot is nice as I’m somewhat familiar with it but the OE I’m going to replace with something else.

I just booted it up to see how it looks inside:


cat /proc/cpuinfo
Processor : XScale-PXA270 rev 7 (v5l)
BogoMIPS : 415.33
Features : swp half thumb fastmult edsp iwmmxt
CPU implementer : 0x69
CPU architecture: 5TE
CPU variant : 0x0
CPU part : 0x411
CPU revision : 7
Hardware : The Gumstix Platform

Maybe the first thing would be to configure the kernel to support only those features included in my hardware setup.