Winter's Fall » work

kontron pitx-sp

tallganglyguy — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 19:41:44 +0000

Well, my Kontron pITX-SP 1.6GHz board finally came. This is the souped up version of the 1.1GHz board that I evaluated in February. This version in addition to being clocked 500MHz faster also features a bootable microSD socket, and two SATA ports. Read on for more info about the board and getting debian up and running on it.

As is typical of everything in the embedded world getting an OS up on the board presented a few challenges. I knew that I wanted to run debian on the board, I just had to figure out how to get it installed on to the microSD card. I picked up a 4GB class 4 card for the purposes of loading the OS and evaluating the board. Since there was no optical disk drive connected that ruled out the typical route of burning a debian install image. I couldn’t find a USB flash drive that I could format that was of sufficient size to load the install image on to. That left me with the option of putting the install image on a CF card using a USB CF card reader. Then, I booted the system with this drive and everything worked as though it would have with a USB flash drive. The only downside was the slow speed of the older CF card.

The install appeared to be going great, I got everything setup and I was ready for a reboot. So, I rebooted the system and I got nothing. Well technically I got the word “grub” printed on the screen and that was it. Thinking I had dorked something up I re-installed again, double checking everything. Same result! So, I decided to disconnect the USB CF card reader and try to boot up that way. Now I got even less! Just a flashing cursor. This told me that GRUB had some how gotten dorked up. So, I rewrote the installer image to CF card and booted up in rescue mode. I mounted my /boot partition by issuing mount /dev/mmcblk0p1 /boot. I looked at /boot/grub/device.map and I saw my problem immediately. My device.map read:

(hd0)   /dev/sda
(hd1)   /dev/mmcblk0

It was thinking that /dev/sda was my first disk, and that mmcblk0 was my second. It installed the MBR on /dev/sda (which is what was screwing up my CF card after the install), but didn’t create a partition for /boot. Which is why I only got “GRUB” on my screen. So, I changed the device map to reflect the true state of my system, and re-did a grub-install specifying the device map. Rebooted the system and I got a grub menu as I expected but still couldn’t boot! The grub menu was still pointing to (hd1) for the kernel image. A quick edit of the boot parameters and I was booting.

After a bit of frustration everything is up and going. So, now it is time to get my packages installed and make sure I can run the embedded app on this board! I’ll post some more benchmarks at a later date. I am expecting good performance given what I saw with the 1.1GHz board.

slow updates

tallganglyguy — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 19:00:42 +0000

I’ve been slow at getting new photos uploaded for the last week. I’ve been fighting a bit of a deadline at work. The paper that I am working on with my boss at work is coming up and I’ve got to finish pounding out the data and code for it. So, that’s what I’m doing this weekend too. Hang in there, more photos to come this week. I promise.

the week is done

tallganglyguy — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 02:49:22 +0000

Well the week is almost over. We got both TITAN systems out of the shop today. Still can’t recreate the bug that we saw yesterday. Found a new bug today too! Yay bugs! I will post some pictures soon of … Continue reading →

northward bound

tallganglyguy — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 14:53:40 +0000

Well, my anual trip to Ottawa is now underway. Everything should go well this year and allow me to be back in the states on schedule. We have started receiving wedding gifts! Hooray! We can now start to use our … Continue reading →

More pictures

tallganglyguy — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 16:10:17 +0000

We managed to get a couple of flights in yesterday from our lines. Here are a few pictures.

You’ll never guess…

tallganglyguy — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 21:20:46 +0000

that it is raining in Seattle.

How did I miss this?

tallganglyguy — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 06:23:44 +0000

So, I was at the airport on Friday and some how managed to miss a huge-ass mountain! On Saturday I got this shot in of Mt. Rainer before it got shrouded in clouds.

First Seattle Picture

tallganglyguy — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 07:18:16 +0000

I’ve attached my first picture from the Seattle trip. It’s the tail off of a brand new Bell 210 helicopter at the Renton airport. There are only, and will only ever be, 4 Bell 210s in the world and I got to see one! It’s a gorgeous bird. This particular one is going to be delivered to the forestry service for fighting fires in south-central California. It was apparently 3 years late coming from the Bell plant. Without further delay here is the picture!