My Supplies Arrive: It's Early Christmas!

Last night, Amazon delivered my two, 4GB SD cards and the USB barrel connector. I took these in today and played with them.

I've blocked out noontimes to work on embedded Android, and got Mary Todd to reserve a room for it, so anyone who wants to come join me and work, too, can do it: a noontime, Android Hacking Society.

Yesterday, it was John Ware and I. Today, John had a prior commitment, but Steve Tarr wandered in.  Steve hadn't been able to sit in on the course, but he's the most serious embedded-systems guy on our team. Steve did the bulk of our kernel and boot-loader work, and is as comfortable with SBCs as I am uncomfortable.

I returned Jim Schilling's 4GB card, then burned one of my new SD cards, slipped it into the target, and booted it. Steve watched me with a jaundiced eye.  I said, "I'll just adb shell into it." He started to tell me why it wouldn't work, but I got a shell prompt before he could.

When I said Karim had told us that by using a power cable instead of powering it over the serial line it would run faster, he was dubious.

"Well, let's try it!"

First, I powered it up with the barrel-connector.

$ adb shell# cat /proc/cpuinfobogomips: 718.02

Then, I unplugged it and powered it back up with the USB-to-mini-USB serial cable.

$ adb shell# cat /proc/cpuinfobogomips: 498.89

Now, Tarr was interested.

We did a bunch of experiments, and it really is who gets plugged in first. For example, if I plug in the barrel connector, then plug in the serial cable, then unplug the barrel, it keeps running at 720MHz.

He fiddled around a bit with a few more boots and got it to give him a U-Boot prompt. He used

U-Boot# mmcinfo

to give him info about the card,

U-Boot# printenv

to show me the boot command, and

U-Boot# nand info

to look at the NAND.

Well, or try. "There's no NAND?" he asked, incredulously, and looked at the board again.

I explained that people kept bricking the models made with NANDs.

"Oh, you can't brick them. All you have to do is attach a JTAG and rescue it."

I reminded him who he was talking to. I could no more "attach a JTAG and rescue it" than bicycle to Alaska. I could, however, burn an SD card and boot this board. He'd seen me do it.

Next, I used VNC to show him the GUI. Now, he was hooked. Good. I'll need his help.

"How much are these?" he asked.

Like Alan, he cautioned me that I needed stand-offs -- little feet for my board to lift it off the table -- so I wandered over to the hardware lab and asked James if he had some I could use. He though he did, but couldn't find any so he made some.

Made some.

People who can just make whatever they need, without muss or fuss, like James, or my sister Jo, have talents I can't even imagine having.