Banana Pro is a Go running PiAware

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So I picked up a new Banana Pro from Ebay last week. Quick feature list:

  • Soc: Allwinner® A20(sun 7i)
  • CPU: ARM® Cortex™-A7 Dual-Core1GHz (ARM v7 instruction set)
  • GPU” Mali400MP2 Complies with OpenGL ES 2.0/1.1 (hardware acceleration support
  • SDRAM: 1GB DDR3 (shared with GPU)
  • Power: 5V @ 2A via MicroUSB (DC in Only) and/or MicroUSB (OTG)
  • PMU:AXP209
  • Low-level perpherials
  • 40 Pins Header
  • 28×GPIO, some of which can be used for specific functions including UART, I2C, SPI, PWM, CAN, I2S, SPDIF, LRADC, ADC, LINE-IN,FM-IN,HP-IN.
  • On board Network10/100/1000Mbps ethernet (Realtek RTL8211E/D)
  • Onboard Wifi Module: WiFi 802.11 b/g/n

All Seems Stable on Lemaker’s Lubuntu image with:

​root@lemaker:~# lsb_release -a No LSB modules are available. Distributor ID: Ubuntu Description: Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS Release: 14.04 Codename: trusty

Instructions below assume you have previously flashed a MicroSD card with the lubuntu image from Lemaker, booted, and connected to your Banana Pro device with SSH, and have a solid understanding of linux/debian cli/console configuration. The PiAware project pretty much handles everything else for you.

A quick and (very) dirty interfaces template you can edit and use (tested only under lemaker’s lubuntu image!)

/etc/network/interfaces:

# interfaces(5) file used by ifup(8) and ifdown(8)
# Include files from /etc/network/interfaces.d:
source-directory /etc/network/interfaces.d
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

# wireless network interface
auto wlan3
iface wlan3 inet dhcp
wpa-ssid "your_AP_SSID"
wpa-psk "your_wifi_passwd"
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway [your gw ip]
dns-nameservers 8.8.8.8

#Original config, left for reference
#allow-hotplug wlan3
#iface wlan3 inet manual
#wpa-roam /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf

Notes:

IMPORTANT: Install raspi-copy-and-fills BEFORE building piaware (resolves missing raspbian packages lubuntu is missing, link below, use latest available)

wget http://archive.raspberrypi.org/debian/pool/main/r/raspi-copies-and-fills/raspi-copies-and-fills_0.4-1_armhf.deb

Then: 

 dpkg -i raspi-copies-and-fills/raspi-copies-and-fills_0.4-1_armhf.deb
  • Then download and follow piaware install from here: http://flightaware.com/adsb/piaware/install (choose the ‘PiAware for Dump1090’ Tab for instruction on the remainder of the install process)
  • Plug in your ads-b antenna to your ads-b dongle, plug to your Banana Pro
  • Reboot the device, for good measure.
  • Once rebooted, browse to your http://YourBananaProIPaddress:8080 and enjoy MOAR PLANES with the Banana pro’s beefier CPU (click to enlarge):

Enjoy!

Screenshot - 01222015 - 02:53:45 PM

Microcontroller Hobby Updates

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This isn’t as much of a useful blog post as a checklist and link list of some fun I have this last month or two with Raspberry Pi’s, and the cubietruck. The Radxa Rock just got a big update; there are still some issues with stable audio codecs but I plan on deploying it as an XBMC server shortly.

However at this very  moment I’m listening to Music Box, a RasPi driven application and webserver that turns your Pi into a dedicated media streaming jukebox, quality limited only the quality of speakers you hook up to the pi. Visit the Project here.

Screenshot from 2014-06-28 00:08:02

 

Over on the “Humidipy” where I take outdoor humidity/temp readings from my patio, I’ve set up a Powerswitch Tail 2. Not an app mind you, but a power adapter with a wiring interface that will allow you to control with the Raspberry Pi. I used a tutorial designed for controlling a lamp, published over on Tobi Lehman’s blog.  In lieu of a lamp, I’m powering a fountain pump from a solar-fed deep cycle battery to water my patio container garden. The how-to was designed as a lamp timer, but is simple, effective, and works perfectly for my needs. If you’re trying to power something that requires something more demanding like a pump, consider the powerswitch tail 2, available over at Adafruit. I had previously used an outdoor  Christmas light timer, but the apparent standby power it drew off my solar battery was becoming noticeable on cloudy days when the solar panels couldn’t replenish the battery sufficiently.

So far, over 3 days on just the powerwitch tail, and the battery charge levels are a bit more reliable.

Elsewhere, my  solar bird cam Pi has apparently stablized… I swapped a slightly larger 12v UPS battery,  switched to an Ralink 5370 wifi dongle, and am seeing much better  uptime on the cam:

pi@raspberrypi ~ $ uptime
03:19:39 up 3 days, 8:14, 1 user, load average: 0.16, 0.05, 0.06

Until I got the power issues ironed out I wasn’t going to set Motion up, but at this point I consider it mostly stable, in the next few days I’ll give it a go.

And I set up a new cubietruck, plugged to a usb 3.0 10 port hub. Some of the RTL dongles have been fussy while hubbed together on the Pi – I felt like dedicating a cubietruck to RTLSDR projects was worth a shot. So far so good, I just need a more robust antenna for some of the dongles but so far dump1090 is back up and behaving itself:

Screenshot - 06272014 - 11:47:52 PM

The RTLSDR dongles have some potential to drive my SDR-IQ via web interface, but I don’t have that stable just yet, so I’m sticking with the SDR-Widget project for now. Those of you that would like to listen occasionally to my radio when it’s up on the Cubietruck, check out glSDR for Android or the windows version of the QtRadio app over at the GHPSDR wiki.

That’s it for now, more when I get off my duff and actually COMPLETE some projects…. :D