Has anyone played with a SheevaPlug or variant (TonidoPlug, for example)?
Arm CPU, USB and network connectivity, running Ubuntu-derivative on 512MB built in flash (with 512MB RAM), all in a "plug" design.
Looks like they can be had in the UK (ie with UK plug) for just over £60 but with £30 shipping (and 2-3 week delay) from the US. I think I will probably get one to play with, so I don't know if anyone else wants to combine shipping.
But first off I'd like to know if anyone has played with one already. Obviously with it being Arm based there won't be many binary packes to install on it but the obvious suspects should cross-compile OK I would think. The obvious question is whether 512MB on-device storage is enough to achieve anything useful, but then I have relatively low aspirations anyway!
On 12/02/10 11:25, Mark Rogers wrote:
Has anyone played with a SheevaPlug or variant (TonidoPlug, for example)?
A link might have been helpful:
http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/p-25-sheevaplug-dev-kit-uk.aspx
Funny, Me and Adam were talking about these at the pub meet last night.
512MB is plenty for an embedded application and I note there are SDIO and GPIO ports so adding more flash via a SD card should be fairly trivial.
I have used foxboards for several embedded linux projects and they only have 8MB of Flash and 32MB of Ram, although I have just generally popped an SD card on a few of the gpio pins and used a kernel module that does SD cards over GPIO if I have needed more...it's slow (even more so on a 100mhz processor) but it's handy for logging etc.
On 12/02/10 13:19, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
Funny, Me and Adam were talking about these at the pub meet last night.
512MB is plenty for an embedded application and I note there are SDIO and GPIO ports so adding more flash via a SD card should be fairly trivial.
512MB ought to be enough, I just wasn't sure how much a fairly "standard" distro like the included Ubuntu variant takes up by being filled with "rubbish".
I found someone on eBay selling them new from stock for reasonable prices, who also has a webshop: http://www.newit.co.uk/store/
Only problem I have now is there are too many choices!
On Fri, 12 Feb 2010 15:07:37 +0000 Mark Rogers mark@quarella.co.uk allegedly wrote:
On 12/02/10 13:19, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
Funny, Me and Adam were talking about these at the pub meet last night.
512MB is plenty for an embedded application and I note there are SDIO and GPIO ports so adding more flash via a SD card should be fairly trivial.
512MB ought to be enough, I just wasn't sure how much a fairly "standard" distro like the included Ubuntu variant takes up by being filled with "rubbish".
I found someone on eBay selling them new from stock for reasonable prices, who also has a webshop: http://www.newit.co.uk/store/
Only problem I have now is there are too many choices!
I've got one. I bought it from Newit and it was delivered within two days of order. I bought the base model for £89.00. This has ubuntu pre-installed in flash, but I chose to install debian (lenny) onto an SDHC card and boot from that. I also have a 500 Gig USB disk attached for store (the beast is my local apt-mirror for both ubuntu and debian).
I bought it to replace one of my NSLU2 slugs (which I have run for a while now). The slugs are great, but the plug is orders of magnitude faster. I will probably buy more - at that price, why wouldn't you?
I went the lenny route because you don't need to replace the ubuntu installed in flash if you follow Martin's instructions at:
http://www.cyrius.com/debian/kirkwood/sheevaplug/unpack.html
Note that my plug had uboot 3.4.16 installed and any version lower than 3.4.19 doesn't properly support either USB devices or booting from SD cards. Don't make the mistake I did of installing the latest version of uboot (3.4.27) - it doesn't work and you end up with boot failures with the message "Verifying Checksum ... Bad Data CRC". There isn't actually anything wrong with Martin's tarfile, the problem is in the uboot. Installing 3.4.19 (as various fora recommend) fixes the problem.
The really nice thing about playing about with the plug compared to the NSLU2s is the availability of the serial console over the mini-usb connection.
Get one, have fun, and be amazed at what you can do for 89 quid. I mean, serously, I was running Sun SPARC servers in the early 90s which compare badly with the plug.
Mic ---------------------------------------------------------------------
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On 12/02/10 20:51, mick wrote:
Get one, have fun, and be amazed at what you can do for 89 quid. I mean, serously, I was running Sun SPARC servers in the early 90s which compare badly with the plug.
Thanks for the clear recommendation!
The application I am playing with primarily involves shuffling data from a serial port (via a USB to RS232 or 485 converter) to a remote server over a VPN. So I need the box to be able to establish a VPN connection on startup (and re-establish it if it drops), and to allow me to run some simple scripts to link data coming to/from the server to the USB serial port. Biggest issue I might have would be the USB/Serial - what chance of getting drivers to work?
What script languages are already available as binaries that run on the box? Python, Perl, PHP, etc? (I'll probably need to put a web interface on the box as well but I know it can do that.)
I honestly have no idea how much of what I know I could do in Linux on an Intel platform is transferable to the ARM in practice. I know binaries won't work but I don't know how easily applications will cross-compile in practice.
On Mon, 15 Feb 2010 10:12:15 +0000 Mark Rogers mark@quarella.co.uk allegedly wrote:
The application I am playing with primarily involves shuffling data from a serial port (via a USB to RS232 or 485 converter) to a remote server over a VPN. So I need the box to be able to establish a VPN connection on startup (and re-establish it if it drops), and to allow me to run some simple scripts to link data coming to/from the server to the USB serial port. Biggest issue I might have would be the USB/Serial - what chance of getting drivers to work?
Pretty good I'd say. The USB serial port on the plug works fine out of the box. But I haven't tried plugging in a USB serial converter to the plug because I've had no reason to do so, so I can't comment from experience.
What script languages are already available as binaries that run on the box? Python, Perl, PHP, etc? (I'll probably need to put a web interface on the box as well but I know it can do that.)
All of those and more.
I honestly have no idea how much of what I know I could do in Linux on an Intel platform is transferable to the ARM in practice. I know binaries won't work but I don't know how easily applications will cross-compile in practice.
I'd be surprised if you needed to do much cross compilation of your own. In my experience (a couple of years of running NSLU2s) most of the mainstream software you would expect to use on intel is available in the debian ARM repository. Take a look at http://www.debian.org/ports/arm/ for a list of supported architectures and pointers to packages and documentation.
The sheevaplug (being a new(ish) kid on the block) has a much smaller fan base than the NSU2, but if you want a feel for the range of applications being run on debian on ARM, take a look at the NSLU2 site at:
http://www.nslu2-linux.org/wiki/Info/WhatPeopleAreReallyUsingTheirSlugsFor
and at:
http://www.nslu2-linux.org/wiki/HowTo/HomePage
and of course Martin Michlmayr's site at http://www.cyrius.com/debian/
The debian ARM mailing list (and of course the archive) at debian-arm@lists.debian.org is also a fantastically helpful resource (and the mailing list participants are also very helpful).
Mick
---------------------------------------------------------------------
The text file for RFC 854 contains exactly 854 lines. Do you think there is any cosmic significance in this?
Douglas E Comer - Internetworking with TCP/IP Volume 1
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Mark Rogers wrote:
The application I am playing with primarily involves shuffling data from a serial port (via a USB to RS232 or 485 converter) to a remote server over a VPN. So I need the box to be able to establish a VPN connection on startup (and re-establish it if it drops), and to allow me to run some simple scripts to link data coming to/from the server to the USB serial port. Biggest issue I might have would be the USB/Serial - what chance of getting drivers to work?
What script languages are already available as binaries that run on the box? Python, Perl, PHP, etc? (I'll probably need to put a web interface on the box as well but I know it can do that.)
I honestly have no idea how much of what I know I could do in Linux on an Intel platform is transferable to the ARM in practice. I know binaries won't work but I don't know how easily applications will cross-compile in practice.
I've done something similar to your serial project on the foxboard from acmesystems (that uses an axis etrax cpu rather than an arm) In my case it was making a serial diagnostics port available over GPRS. I found the few bits of software I needed were trivial to recompile for the etrax so should present no problem on an ARM
As Mick said. ARM is a well supported arch on Debian and in fact I think it is a requirement for debian stable packages that they are available for all supported architectures. Things like kernel modules for usb-serial converters should be also straightforward as ARM is a well supported kernel target so the only things that would give you trouble is stuff that relies on some binary blob that isn't just firmware (like say the nvidia drivers)
One thing I did which I think is quite a handy thing to do is I built my development environment for the Fox inside a virtual machine. That way if you need to hand off the project later on you can easily supply the compete toolchain used for building the system without worry that it is missing some critical dependency.
One thing you also need to watch is that some serial devices have problems with the inherent latency introduced with a USB-serial converter. So I would try a direct connection to the device via such a converter first before deciding on a platform that doesn't have real serial ports available.
On Fri, 2010-02-12 at 11:25 +0000, Mark Rogers wrote:
Has anyone played with a SheevaPlug or variant (TonidoPlug, for example)?
Arm CPU, USB and network connectivity, running Ubuntu-derivative on 512MB built in flash (with 512MB RAM), all in a "plug" design.
Interesting. I believe this is based on the Marvell Kirkwood SOC which includes the ARM processor, the same as the NAS I bought a couple of weeks back (a QNAP TS-419P).
Many of the devices run kernel 2.6.22 because, I think, Marvell produced a fork with some specific code for the Kirkwood. More recently support for the Kirkwood had been integrated into the kernel mainline and my NAS is now running 2.6.30.6.
Looks like they can be had in the UK (ie with UK plug) for just over £60 but with £30 shipping (and 2-3 week delay) from the US. I think I will probably get one to play with, so I don't know if anyone else wants to combine shipping.
Excluding the shipping that is around what my first ZX81 cost so given the ZX81 would have been bought in 1981 "in real terms" it is rather less.
But first off I'd like to know if anyone has played with one already. Obviously with it being Arm based there won't be many binary packes to install on it but the obvious suspects should cross-compile OK I would think. The obvious question is whether 512MB on-device storage is enough to achieve anything useful, but then I have relatively low aspirations anyway!
I did look round the Debian website but I can't see any mention of how many of the Debian packages are built for ARM. There are bound to be some that don't build on ARM but I would hope most would.
I have also been meaning to investigate the possibility of cross compiling for my NAS but I haven't had the time so far. If you beat me to it then please let us know what you had to install/build.
Regards, Steve.
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Mark Rogers -
mick -
Steve Fosdick -
Wayne Stallwood