linux

The BigTrak project had to be mobile, and that meant having a WiFi card attached. This looked simple on the face of it, a USB host socket on the board and a modern 32bit Linux kernel, however it became more complicated partly due to the lack of sources for the embedded system and partly because of my ambitions.

The BeagleBone is an ARM applications processing platform that runs Angstrom Linux and provides a lot of 3.3V I/O connections, for more background see my unboxing and getting started article. In the unboxing review I ran a bit of bundled java-script that flashed a light on and off, but there's much more to using I/O on this powerful processor. Like with most embeded controllers these days half the effort is in getting the right function selected and enabling the pin drivers. There are several steps and modes of operation which I'll go through separately. I'll discuss command line tools and python control here, but there is a pre-written javascript library called bonescript.js that comes pre-loaded on the board that provides an Arduino-like syntax and runs on the node.js javascript interpreter, I'm not going to discuss that here as it is under heavy development and has only very rudimentary features at the moment. I'd recommend having a look through the code if you have a BeagleBone, it's accessible from Cloud9 IDE on port 3000 via a web browser.

The new BeagleBone from Texas Instruments is here! Farnell sent me a review copy this week, and are taking orders. I've prepared a video intro about getting up and running with the new board which is really easy. A few of the highlights are in the review below.

For the impatient:

Download

I've been working on improvements to Dwarf for a while. Check out the github repo for detailed changes and current development release. This is a beta release, i.e. it NEEDS TESTING. I've used it a little for actual projects and seems to be working okay but it certainly hasn't been extensively tested.

The trickiest part of getting Dwarf installed and working, I think, is installing the pk2cmd program, and configuring permissions for the PICKit2 Programmer. This tutorial runs through exactly how I do it on an Ubuntu system, but it should be applicable to most modern Linux distros as there are no Ubuntu specific tools involved here.

DISCLAIMER: This stuff involves altering system files and settings. I am not responsible for things going wrong on your system even if you're following this guide.

I've had some code donated to the project, and wanted to make it a more dynamic update process so the code is now on github. If you're interested in the latest version, or want to help let me know. As always contact address is hairymnstr@gmail.com.

I had a day or two waiting for parts to arrive recently, and started tinkering with PIC programming in Linux. I was really pleased with how easy it was to program a PIC with my PICKit 2 programmer using the available command line tools, but what I wanted was an even easier GUI interface for it. So I wrote one.

Too lazy to type out the commands every time I wanted to do something to my project and with a couple of days spare before parts arrived, I decided that what I really needed was a little GUI to run the commands for me. I've used gpasm as my assembler (from GNU PIC Utilities) and the PK2CMD program hosted on the Microchip Website as the back end for this application.

Linux Outlaws is a highly recommended oggcast (like a pod cast but more free) with a "laid back feel". Discussion is usually fairly focused on Linux, Open Source and Free (as in freedom) software.