mini2440 First Impressions + Awesome Boston rainsnow!
The first 3/4 of my weekend was spent participating in Mystery Hunt, an annual puzzle-solving competition at MIT. We don't know where we placed yet, but my team, Death From Above, had an awesome time.
After recovering from the lack of sleep, I finally got to one of my other projects earlier tonight - setting up the mini2440 single-board-computer that I got from eBay a couple weeks ago. It's actually quite a shiny board - it has a 400 MHz ARM processor, Ethernet, USB, 128MB flash memory and 64MB RAM, and a 3.5" LCD. The best part is that they can be had for $85 on eBay or $110 domestically.
I started playing with it around 6 PM. It ships with an old version of Qtopia, as a demo of the hardware's capabilities. I quickly wiped that, intending to put Debian for armel on it, but I spent the next 10 hours trying to figure out how to do that. I finally gave up an hour ago, since I need to get to sleep, but I'll be trying again over the next few days. If anyone else finds this blog post and wants some pointers, here's what I eventually found as the most useful information:
The onboard bootloader is crap. You want to be using something much more capable, and most people seem to use u-boot. Here's a howto for how to set up u-boot on a mini2440.
There's also another set of u-boot instructions on Google Code. By combining the two, you should be able to get a working u-boot on your mini2440.
I haven't gotten here yet, but there's instructions for bootstrapping Debian Lenny for ARM.
Of course, this being Boston, the world wasn't done with me when I decided to go home around 4 AM. It seems while I was in W20, the sky exploded with snow and rain. If you've never experienced the beauty of rain and snow falling at the same time, let me try to explain. The snow blankets the ground, and then the rain falls on the snow. But the snow is already pretty wet, so it effectively impedes the rain from draining anywhere. So all ~level surfaces have a significant amount of standing water/slush on them - an inch or more. Facilities employees were out in force to clean up the snow so the water could drain. It's a little something I like to call "rainsnow".
After recovering from the lack of sleep, I finally got to one of my other projects earlier tonight - setting up the mini2440 single-board-computer that I got from eBay a couple weeks ago. It's actually quite a shiny board - it has a 400 MHz ARM processor, Ethernet, USB, 128MB flash memory and 64MB RAM, and a 3.5" LCD. The best part is that they can be had for $85 on eBay or $110 domestically.
I started playing with it around 6 PM. It ships with an old version of Qtopia, as a demo of the hardware's capabilities. I quickly wiped that, intending to put Debian for armel on it, but I spent the next 10 hours trying to figure out how to do that. I finally gave up an hour ago, since I need to get to sleep, but I'll be trying again over the next few days. If anyone else finds this blog post and wants some pointers, here's what I eventually found as the most useful information:
The onboard bootloader is crap. You want to be using something much more capable, and most people seem to use u-boot. Here's a howto for how to set up u-boot on a mini2440.
There's also another set of u-boot instructions on Google Code. By combining the two, you should be able to get a working u-boot on your mini2440.
I haven't gotten here yet, but there's instructions for bootstrapping Debian Lenny for ARM.
Of course, this being Boston, the world wasn't done with me when I decided to go home around 4 AM. It seems while I was in W20, the sky exploded with snow and rain. If you've never experienced the beauty of rain and snow falling at the same time, let me try to explain. The snow blankets the ground, and then the rain falls on the snow. But the snow is already pretty wet, so it effectively impedes the rain from draining anywhere. So all ~level surfaces have a significant amount of standing water/slush on them - an inch or more. Facilities employees were out in force to clean up the snow so the water could drain. It's a little something I like to call "rainsnow".