NameCheap and SOPA

I'm now a fan (and customer) of NameCheap (that's an affiliate link, if you're interested in supporting Bradford Embedded).

NameCheap is running a special today on any domain transfers. Use the coupon code "SOPAsucks" (without the quotes) and transfers are only $6.99, plus NameCheap will donate $1 to the EFF for every transfer! Transfers include 1 year of renewal.

The target appears to be GoDaddy, who were supporting SOPA. I dislike GoDaddy (hence, no link) as well, but I had that opinion long before SOPA came about. NameCheap has been a fairly popular topic over on HN recently. That's where I heard about them. If you use the coupon code and my affiliate link, I don't get any money but that's OK (I encourage you to use the coupon! SOPA does suck, and supporting the EFF is way more important than supporting me).

NameCheap's also running a special where if you register a new domain (in at least .com and .net, and possibly others), you get the .org domain registration for free. No coupons required. The affiliate link should still pay me if you use this deal, and you won't pay a higher price because of it.

I've transferred my domains to NameCheap from Dyn. I liked Dyn, I have nothing against them, but NameCheap lives up to their name, they're cheaper, and I like supporting the EFF and companies who take stands.

A short while ago, I removed ads from my blog. I'm still against ads, even though this post may sound like one. It is, but only because I'm a very happy customer, wanted to share my experience, and if it can net me a few bucks, all the better. I'm also in a transparent mood today ;)

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Set The World On Fire

I like FAKEGRIMLOCK. You should get in on the KickStarter. I also like Seth Godin.

Put the two together:

If you want to set the world on fire, first, you must burn!
If you're not setting the world on fire, your house is burning. Do something about it, NOW!

I like these analogies for business.

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BeagleBone Debian Squeeze armel Multistrap Config

For those interested, here's my current Debian Squeeze armel multistrap configuration file that I'm using to build a Debian file system for my BeagleBones:



It's going to be a little rails server :)

EDIT: You'll probably want to use the backports version of multistrap if you want to verify package signatures and you have fakeroot installed. There's no support for this in the standard Squeeze multistrap version.

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BeagleBone Boot Time

Apparently a lot of people want to know things about BeagleBone boot time...
Let me know if this is covering it or if you'd like more info. Most of my work is with CLFS and Debian.

I'm seeing about 8.5 seconds from kernel start to login prompt with a rather pared down Debian Sqeueze armel configuration and Linux 3.1. Add about two seconds for SPL, u-boot, and kernel decompression. Then add on the boot delay countdown (3 seconds in my case). That gets us to about 13.5 seconds to boot.

Let's be conservative and say 15 seconds. Completely respectable. Not a 1 second boot, but that's not my goal, anything under a minute is pretty good in my book.

To give you a sense of what I'm starting at boot time for services, here's some output:

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BeagleBone Booting Debian Squeeze!

I've got my BeagleBone booting Debian 6 Squeeze!
(The real Squeeze, not Emdebian)

I've used the u-boot and kernel sources (with only a few tiny modifications from the am335x_evm_defconfig) from the Arago project git repos. I'm using multistrap and qemu-static to build and configure Debian on my amd64 host, then copying over the files to the microSD card.

I'll be sure to post more info on steps in the near future. The partitioning and formatting of the microSD card is the first step.

Click through the jump to see output in a Gist.

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Format an SD Card with 8 MiB Aligned Partitions

SD cards generally have 2, 4, or 8 MiB (MiB = 1024 * 1024 bytes) erase blocks and 8 KiB write pages. Because of this, your partitions on an SD card should be aligned so that they begin and end at the edges of the erase blocks. This, of course, assumes the SD card isn't doing address translation and sticking data where ever it wants (which the low priced ones probably aren't, the high priced ones might be). So take this with a grain of salt :)

If you want to create a microSD card for use with the BeagleBone that uses partitions aligned to 8MiB bounds, you can use the below script. It's adapted from the eLinux.org Panda U-Boot instructions. It assumes you are using a microSD card that shows up as an mmc device where partitions are named /dev/mmcblk0p1 (and not a SCSI device, like some USB based SD readers do, where partitions are named /dev/sdb1). You'll destroy all data on the microSD card and you'll end up with a 64MiB FAT partition and the rest of the device as an ext3 partition.



Copy your MLO and u-boot.img onto the FAT partition and boot it up! The BeagleBone will boot this partition mapping, even though its different from TI's recommendations. I'm using the SPL and u-boot from the Arago repo.

I'd like to build in support for determining the partition type (mmc versus SCSI) automatically, but that's not done yet. My HP 8560w has a built in SD card reader that shows up as an mmc device.

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ROC The Day!

If you live near Rochester, NY, or if you know someone who does, please take a few minutes to visit ROCtheday.org and donate to one of our local not for profits. This is a one day (today!) only fundraising event for a huge number of Rochester groups.

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SanDisk iNAND

I stumbled upon SanDisk's iNAND products today while doing some searching about SD cards. The iNAND idea looks very appealing to me compared to raw flash from a board design perspective. Since iNAND looks just like a MMC device, you can hook up to it with a 4 or 8 bit data bus and your total useful pin count can stay around 11 pins, not counting power, ground, and decoupling caps for internally derived voltages. In terms of keeping pin count down, that's awesome!

Then, looking what appears to have been a leaked preliminary data sheet for an older version of the current iNAND devices, the speed is pretty good, and internally there's 512 byte pages, wear leveling, TRIM support, and a host of other features required in demanding storage applications (like industrial or smart phones).

I assume the controller internals are very similar to those found in SanDisk's high end SD cards, and so using iNAND may not give much of a performance difference. But in some cases, a removable SD card is a liability and soldered down memory would be preferred, such as if people might steal it or in environments with high vibration.

The only drawback I see is with the lack of removability. Either SanDisk needs to program your desired initial data into the iNAND at time of purchase, or you need a fixture to interface the iNAND on your own manufacturing line and engineering work bench. Not a big deal if you have the resources and design the board it mounts to correctly. And then if you create a situation where the board is unbootable (I'm looking at you, in the field software upgrades), you'll need either the fixture or a JTAG device, just like raw flash.

I don't know the costs associated with each iNAND family but I do have a request into SanDisk sales to get more info and data sheets. Not sure I'll be able to share that data, but if I am, I will.

UPDATE 20111208 1:45pm - After more research, the iNAND family of devices are a type of eMMC device. Basically it's MMC but in a soldered down package, usually BGA. Another handy bit is when developing hardware that will eventually use eMMC, you can lay down the footprint for both the eMMC device and a normal microSD card connector and only populate the one you wish to use (eMMC in production, microSD in development).

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BeagleBone Hardware Desire - USB & FTDI Power Independence

Now that I've got my BeagleBone, I'm still not happy :)

I'd like to be able to plug the USB cable into my host PC but not have the board power up. Since the USB cable is now also the serial cable, I'd like to have a few seconds after plugging the USB cable to get my serial port terminal up and running so I can watch the x-loader and u-boot data from a cold boot. Based on my read through the schematics, this isn't possible by just removing a resistor or a simple hack. I could probably cut some traces and solder up some jumpers, but it will look messy and I'm not sure it's worth the time, yet.

It would be nice to have the option of the micro USB connector's power only going to the USB hub and FTDI chip. That way, when USB is plugged to the host PC, the serial port can be set up before the ARM core boots. Then when DC power is applied to the 5V input, the ARM core and all other circuits would be powered and boot would occur. This would be behavior similar to how the BeagleBoard and BeagleBoard-xM work with their "real" serial ports. I could connect my serial term before boot.

I realize I can just push the rest button to get a glimpse of the x-loader and u-boot messages, but that's not what I want. The things I'm going to be building on my BeagleBone will have a rather quick boot (although nothing like the 1 second stuff) and while doing development, I'd like to be able to see the messages scroll. It's also not always a good idea to hit the hard reset button once Linux has mounted the file systems and started services (ext3/4 have journaling but it's still not a good thing to do often).

I'm not sure of the official procedure for requesting hardware changes for the BeagleBoards, but I'll probably stop by the Google Group and post this request there, as well.

EDIT 20111208 6:40am: I sent in a message to the BeagleBoard Google Group yesterday describing this.

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BeagleBones Arrived!

2 BeagleBones were delivered by the friendly people at FedEx this morning!

I've got one of them booted up with the provided microSD card that came already inserted into the Bone. Oddly, there's another microSD card that was included in a separate packaging inside the BeagleBone box. I'm not yet sure what the difference is or why 2 were included, but both Bones came this way.

FedEx also delivered a pair of new SanDisk Mobile Ultra 8GB microSD cards this morning. I've run flashbench on them and mailed in my results. These look like pretty nice cards for Linux given my understanding.

Next up is building x-loader, u-boot, a kernel, and an Emdebian image for a Bone.

EDIT 20111201 4:30pm: On my machine, the FTDI serial port driver wasn't working without some help and being that I'm an engineer, I didn't read the directions :)
There's good info on making sure your virtual serial port is working on the BeagleBone info page.

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