A newcomer asks about Riotboard HDMI...

Hello .

Well I got the HDMI to VGA cable today. (As mentioned above..)

Plugged it into the HDMI connector of the board and plugged a dell LCD monitor into the VGA end of the adapter...

Turned on the board and!!!!!

NOTHING!!!

I also tried plugging it into my laptop VGA socket. The laptop screen border changes but TIA... hmmm....

Anyone have any ideas or experience of what I can do?

(apart from spending hundreds of punds on something I don't have the moolah for at the moment...?)

Cheers,

Steve.

plugged a dell LCD monitor into the VGA end of the adapter

HDMI interfaces are highly supported but with vga connectors may not work.

apart from spending hundreds of pounds ...

serial console is nice and good if there is no display specfic work.

I mentioned the software setup here and hardware connection here.

Hope that helps for the moment.

There's a possible alternative - if you have another linux machine to work from.

I detailed here

http://www.element14.com/community/community/knode/single-board_computers/riotboard/blog/2014/05/16/riotboard-ubuntu-image-on-sd-card

how to put the ubuntu image onto an SD card. Doing that would mean you don't have to wipe android and replace it with linux on the eMMC. You can just change the boot switches to boot from SD and boot linux.

Unfortunately, you really do need a linux machine to be able to setup the card.

Didn´t think of that.

If there is already something done in Android that´s a good idea.

A virtual machine with Linux wouldn´t work, because you´d need direct access to the SD-Card through the reader.

My choice would be a live Linux system from CD/DVD/USB. Or a RIoTBoard with Linux and its SDCard slot.

OK! I've manaed to flash the image onto the board.

Using terminal again I get a scrawl of bootup data. A couple of things I am concerned about.

Should one of the LEDs be flashing? (the one nearest the power jack)..

I get this message...

modprobe: FATAL: Could not load /lib/modules/3.0.35-02871-ga35ffe3/modules.dep: No such file or directory

Anyone know What it means?

Also this:

ERROR: HDMI is not ready!

asoc: can't open platform imx-hdmi-soc-audio.0

So now I have "root@linaro-ubuntu-desktop:~#"

Where can I go from here?

Can I install Python? Or how do I go about starting the exciting journey of programming on the Riotboard??

(I did say I was a noob with some Android, Arduino & Microcontroller experience..   )

Cheers,

Steve.

oh, p.s. did I tell you I was interested in mainly Audio, synthesis and control..

That modprobe error means that the modules.dep file is missing.

That´s only a problem if you want to use some external hardware like USB-Wifi or similar.

The Linux Image isn´t the best and is rather old. That´s why selsinork put that much effort into creating patches for the mainline Kernel.

The HDMI Error is something I also get, when I don´t have a HDMI device connected. So I assume the HDMI to VGA adapter isn´t recognized.

When you´re on the console you´re now able to do everything you could do in ubuntu Linux. (Except start the GUI because you don´t have a picture...)

If you want to install python you could go like this.

(This is for python 3.3 for example)

sudo apt-get build-dep python3.2
sudo apt-get install build-essential libreadline-dev libncurses5-dev libssl1.0.0 tk8.5-dev zlib1g-dev liblzma-dev

wget http://python.org/ftp/python/3.3.0/Python-3.3.0.tgz

tar xvfz Python-3.3.0.tgz

cd Python-3.3.0
./configure --prefix=/opt/python3.3
make  
sudo make install

And to test if it´s really installed

/opt/python3.3/bin/python3

After that you can google for python tutorials. There is a lot of stuff for this.

I've just found out that Python 2.7 is installed already!   (i typed python and it started..)

There seems to be a heap of stuff in the distribution which I will thouroughly enjoy looking through...

Just one more tiny tiiiiny question??? 

Is it possible the peripherals (GPIO, USART, Audio etc...) can be programmed using Python?? Ir even a C/C++ extension?? Or will I have to write them ?? 

I haven't had any luck with the HDMI. After some digging around I found out about there existing a problem with the R-pi and HDMI to VGA converters due to there not being enough current..:   

http://creativityslashdesign.blogspot.it/2013/06/hdmi-current-booster-for-raspberrypi-by.html

is it possible it could be this??

If not I'll just have to get a monitor or save up for the LVDS monitor selsinork & tusharp suggested.

Thanks again again. I owe you guys a few pints.

Cheers,

Steve.

I can´t tell you much about the GPIO ports. I´m more of a software guy and don´t use them.

I don´t think that there´s already a python class or similar for this.

Here´s been a discussion about them. Don´t know if it´ll help you though.

GPIO Ports on RIoT Board

The HDMI problem could be because of the current. That´s why I suggested a converter with external power supply.

But no guarantee that it´s then working. I don´t have VGA devices anymore and couldn´t even test it...

Depends on the VM, some will let you do passthrough for a particular usb device.. So a usb SD card reader could be used.

GPIO can, theoretically, be programmed using any language you like. /sys/class/gpio being the starting point. However some folks had problems with that on the ubuntu image early on.  There's a thread around here somewhere where I tried to show how to decipher the gpios, but unfortunately used the addresses from the i.MX6 Quad instead of the Solo. The method works, you just need to use the right datasheet.

Unfortunately the setup in the default 3.0.35 kernel appears to be less than useful for using gpio.

Hopefully I'll get time to do another blog post or two soon that will finish off setting up Debian, at which point things like gpios basically just work on the 3.15-rc* kernel. Even so, you will need some sort of linux machine in order to build all the pieces. Ideally I'll try to produce an image that can be easily written to an SD card so that people who don't have the confidence to do it themselves can just write the image and go..  Right now I don't have anywhere to host a large image, so how to make it available is still a problem

ERROR: HDMI is not ready!

doesn't sound particularly good.

asoc: can't open platform imx-hdmi-soc-audio.0

don't think I'd worry too much about that... native HDMI can do audio as part of the stream to something like an HDTV. but a DVI monitor doesn't do audio while the video format is essentially identical. So you're likely seeing a message that indicates the driver can't detect that the connected device has audio capabilities - which is probably ok for an HDMI-VGA converter

steven scutt wrote:

 

Should one of the LEDs be flashing? (the one nearest the power jack)..

possibly, it's usual to configure one of the leds as 'heartbeat' so that you can tell when the system is running,

modprobe: FATAL: Could not load /lib/modules/3.0.35-02871-ga35ffe3/modules.dep: No such file or directory

once you get logged in (as root), try running depmod -A and then rebooting. in theory that message should go away. maybe you need to do 'sudo depmod -A'

oh, p.s. did I tell you I was interested in mainly Audio, synthesis and control..

So android may not be the best idea for you right now, there's a known issue with audio playing slow on the current android image. works fine on the linux image though.

if you're not interested in accelerated video, then 3.15-rc* might be the way to go. The downside to 3.15-rc* is that you currently get simple framebuffer video with little or no hardware assist. So while you can get a working desktop it may feel sluggish.  There may be ways to get accelerated video working, but as yet nobody has done it for RIoTboard. We can likely borrow from work done with other i.MX6 based boards like Sabre-Lite and Wandboard though.

Ultimately we could do with a few people who are interested in different areas to spend the time on bringing all the pieces together - I'm not overly interested in video so ideally would leave that to someone else.. but may get round to it eventually if nobody else does.

steven scutt wrote:

 

Should one of the LEDs be flashing? (the one nearest the power jack)..

possibly, it's usual to configure one of the leds as 'heartbeat' so that you can tell when the system is running,

modprobe: FATAL: Could not load /lib/modules/3.0.35-02871-ga35ffe3/modules.dep: No such file or directory

once you get logged in (as root), try running depmod -A and then rebooting. in theory that message should go away. maybe you need to do 'sudo depmod -A'

oh, p.s. did I tell you I was interested in mainly Audio, synthesis and control..

So android may not be the best idea for you right now, there's a known issue with audio playing slow on the current android image. works fine on the linux image though.

if you're not interested in accelerated video, then 3.15-rc* might be the way to go. The downside to 3.15-rc* is that you currently get simple framebuffer video with little or no hardware assist. So while you can get a working desktop it may feel sluggish.  There may be ways to get accelerated video working, but as yet nobody has done it for RIoTboard. We can likely borrow from work done with other i.MX6 based boards like Sabre-Lite and Wandboard though.

Ultimately we could do with a few people who are interested in different areas to spend the time on bringing all the pieces together - I'm not overly interested in video so ideally would leave that to someone else.. but may get round to it eventually if nobody else does.

Heartbeat I remember that from StickOS. I have 2 Freescale DEMOJM boards that run Stickos from Rich Testardi.

I've had a look at the thread on GPIOs. Very very useful and good. I Managed to get a light to turn on and off using the "Echo" command.

Will have a look at the tome that is the data sheet and get to grips with the peripherals and audio.

.

good luck with the datasheet, it's not quite bedtime reading is it