Building Portable Linux Devices: Never Been Easier, But Still Hard

November 30, 2018 by Jenny List 35 Comments

We live in a Golden Age of single-board computers. There was a time when a portable computer that was any good was a relatively rare and expensive device, certainly not something you could expect to replicate for yourself. A Psion, or later a Palm or perhaps a WinCE device would have been a lot more than an impulse purchase, and could not easily have been replicated using the components then available to the experimenter.

Thanks to spin-offs from technology developed for set-top boxes and mobile phones we can now buy any one of a pile of different boards that have almost equivalent power to a desktop computer. The experimenter can leverage that computing power to create their own small portables. Zerophone creator Arsenijs Picugins spoke about the tricky parts of designing a LInux portable at the recent Hackaday Superconference. You’ll find his talk below the break, which makes for a fascinating primer for those tempted to walk in his footsteps.

Minor Details of Portables are the Majority of the Build

In theory, it’s pretty easy to use one of these boards to make a portable computer. Take one of the smaller members of the Raspberry Pi or Beaglebone families, add a battery and a display, and away you go. But as always the devil is in the detail, and for a truly successful build there are a wealth of variables to attend to.

In his talk, Arsenijs takes us through the challenges of power supplies, connectors, and interfaces. In particular there is considerable challenge to running an SBC from a battery small enough to be portable, as efficiency concerns and the ability to easily recharge make for a critical set of choices. Then we learn of another pitfall, that of using USB as a default interface. Power loss in converting 5V to 3.3V that is inconsequential for a desktop computer is a battery-killer in a small device, so we’re pointed at the array of alternatives.

Zerophone screen menu [via @ZeroPhoneOSHW]

Screen Size is a Tricky Spec to Settle

If you’ve been tempted by one of those cheap Raspberry Pi touch screens, you’ll certainly understand that while a full desktop on a screen the size of a playing card looks cool, the reality is almost unusable. Your device will require a user interface that fits its form factor, which from his experience, Arsenijs suggests is best achieved through the medium of buttons rather than a touchscreen on smaller screens. There are a variety of UI and display libraries he introduces us to which make the whole process significantly easier.

Arsenijs’ Zerophone Raspberry Pi smartphone was a finalist in the 2017 Hackaday Prize, and remains an exemplary portable project from which many others can gain inspiration. We are privileged that he was able to bring his experience to speak at the Superconference, and his talk makes for a fascinating watch.

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Linux Fu: Controlling The Terminal

November 28, 2018 by Al Williams 17 Comments

A Linux terminal has a lot more features than the TeleType of yore. On a TeleType, text spews out and scrolls up and is gone forever. A real terminal can use escape characters to do navigate around and emulate most of what you like about GUIs. However, doing this at the lowest level is a chore and limits portability. Luckily, all the hard work has already been done.

First, there’s a large database of terminal capabilities available for you to use: terminfo. And in addition, there’s a high-level library called curses or ncurses that simplifies writing programs to control the terminal display. Digging deep into every nook and cranny of ncurses could take years. Instead, I’m going to talk about using a program that comes with ncurses to control the terminal, called tput. Using these two commands, you can figure out what kind of terminal you’re dealing with, and then manipulate it nearly to your heart’s content. Let’s get started!

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Linux As A Library: Unikernels Are Coming

November 18, 2018 by Al Williams 47 Comments

If you think about it, an operating system kernel is really just a very powerful shared library that offers services to many programs. Of course, it is a very powerful library, but still — its main purpose is to provide services to programs. Your program probably doesn’t use all of the myriad services the kernel provides. Even a typical system might not fully use all the things that are in a typical kernel. Red Hat has a new initiative to bring a technology called unikernels to the forefront. A unikernel is a single application linked with just enough of the kernel for it to execute. As you might expect, this can result in a smaller system and better security.

It can also lead to better performance. The unikernel doesn’t have to maintain devices and services that are not used. Also, the kernel and the application can run in the same privilege ring. That may seem like a security hole, but if you think about it, the only reason a regular kernel runs at a higher privilege is to protect itself from a malicious application modifying the kernel to do something bad to another application. In this case, there is no other application.

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New Part Day: A $6 Linux Computer You Might Be Able To Write Code For

November 12, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 81 Comments

The latest news from the world of cheap electronics is a single board computer running Linux. It costs six dollars, and you can buy it right now. You might even be able to compile code for it, too.

The C-Sky Linux development board is listed on Taobao as an ‘OrangePi NanoPi Raspberry Pi Linux Development Board” and despite some flagrant misappropriation of trademarks, this is indeed a computer running Linux, available for seven American dollars.

This board is based on a NationalChip GX6605S SoC, a unique chip with an ISA that isn’t ARM, x86, RISC-V, MIPS, or anything else that would be considered normal. The chip itself was designed for set-top boxes, but there are a surprising number of build tools that include buildroot, GCC and support for qemu. The company behind this chip is maintaining a kernel, and support for this chip has been added to the mainline kernel. Yes, unlike many other single board computers out there, you might actually be able to compile something for this chip.

The features for this board include 64 MB of DDR2 RAM, HDMI out (with a 1280 x 720 framebuffer, upscaled to 1080p, most likely), and a CPU running at just about 600 MHz. There are a few buttons connected to the GPIO pins, two USB host ports, a USB-TTL port for a serial console, and a few more pins for additional GPIOs. There does not appear to be any networking, and we have no idea what the onboard storage is.

If you want a challenge to get something compiled, this is the chip for you.

Linux Fu: Pimp Your Pipes

November 7, 2018 by Al Williams 17 Comments

One of the best things about working at the Linux (or similar OS) command line is the use of pipes. In simple terms, a pipe takes the output of one command and sends it to the input of another command. You can do a lot with a pipe, but sometimes it is hard to work out the right order for a set of pipes. A common trick is to attack it incrementally. That is, do one command and get it working with the right options and inputs. Then add another command until that works. Keep adding commands and tweaking until you get the final results.

That’s fine, but [akavel] wanted better and used Go to create “up” — an interactive viewer for pipelines.

Pipe Philosophy

Pipes can do a lot. They match in with the original Unix philosophy of making each tool do one thing really well. Pipe is really good at allowing Linux commands to talk to each other. If you want to learn all about pipes, have a look at the Linux Info project’s guide. They even talk about why MSDOS pipes were not really pipes at all. (One thing that write up doesn’t touch on is the named pipe. Do a “man fifo” if you want to learn more for now and perhaps that will be the subject of a future Linux Fu.)

This program — called up — continuously runs and reruns your pipeline as you make changes to the pipe. This way, every change you make is instantly reflected in the output. Here’s the video, here’s a quick video which shows off the interactive nature of up.

Installing

The GitHub page assumes you know how to install a go program. I tried doing a build but I didn’t have a few dependencies. Turns out the easy way to do it was to run this line:

go get -u github.com/akavel/up

This put the executable in ~/go/bin — which isn’t on my path. You can, of course, copy or link it to some directory that’s on your path or add that directory to your path. You could also set an alias, for example. Or, like I did in the video, just specify it every time.

Perfect?

This seems like a neat simple tool. What could be better? Well, I was a little sad that you can’t use emacs or vi edit keys on the pipeline, at least not as far as I could tell. This is exactly the kind of thing where you want to back up into the middle and change something. You can use the arrow keys, though, so that’s something. I also wished the scrollable window had a search feature like less.

Otherwise, though, there’s not much to dislike about the little tool. If writing a pipeline is like using a C compiler, up makes it more like writing an interactive Basic program.

The Linux Throwie: Powering A Linux Server With A 0.3W Solar Panel

November 2, 2018 by Sean Boyce 63 Comments

Have you ever had one of those moments, when you’re rummaging through your spare parts heap, and have a rather bizarre project idea that you can’t quite get out of your head? You know, the ones that have no clear use, but simply demand to be born, of glass and steel and silicon?

This time, the stubborn idea in question was sort of like a solar-rechargeable LED throwie, but instead of a blinking light, it has a fully cloud-accessible embedded Linux server in the form of a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+. Your choice of embedded Linux board should work — I just happen to have a lot of these due to a shipping error.

There were two main challenges here: First, it would have to combine the smallest practical combination of solar panel, power supply, and Li-ion cell that could run the Raspberry Pi. Second, we’ll need to remotely activate and access the Pi regardless of where it is, as well as be able to connect it to WiFi without direct physical access. In this article we’ll be dealing with the first set of problems — stay tuned for the rest.

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Linux Fu: Marker Is A Command Line Menu

October 24, 2018 by Al Williams 21 Comments

The command line. You either love it or hate it, but if you do anything with a Unix-like system you are going to have to use it eventually. You might find marker — a system billed as a “command palette for the terminal” — a useful program to install. We couldn’t decide if it was like command history on steroids or more of a bookmark system. In a way, it is a little of both.

Your history rolls off eventually and also contains a lot of small commands (although you can use the HISTIGNORE variable to ignore particular commands). With marker, you save specific commands and they stay saved. There are no extra commands nor do the ones you save ever roll off.

Of course, you could just make a shell script or an alias if that’s all there was to it. Marker lets you add a description to the command and then you can search through the commands and the descriptions using a fuzzy incremental search. In addition, you can put placeholders into your command lines that are easily replaced. There are some built-in commands to get you started and the same bookmarks will work in bash and zsh, if you use both.

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