Moving to new host
A small update, I will unfortunately be moving to a new host within the upcoming weeks. I’ve been graciously hosted by http://www.haringstad.com for the last… many years and I am tremenduously grateful for the excellent help and services I’ve received from them. Unfortunately it looks like they are closing down, and hence I need to find a new home. I’ve found one at edis.at for now, we will see how that pans out. During this time there may be some disruptions to services on this webpage and my mail. I will try to keep this down however. For now, I’ve started setting up a server and preparing for the final move.
1 hour Raspberry pi camera controller
Kids really chew into your spare time. I got some time the other day to have some fun with a Raspberry pi, raspicam, Adafruit pwm servo driver, 2 servos, double sided tape, tape and cardboard. In 60 minutes I managed to make the “thing” in the video. OK, some stuff was pre-assembled :-).
Also, I’ve just finished setting the construction up running on Battery power. 2x zippy compact 3300mah 4s (14,4v nominal LiPo) in parallel via a 5v 5A bec powering both the servos and the Raspberry hardware. Running everything including servos for 4 hours , my measurement is that I’ve used less than 10% of the battery capacity.
The servos are currently controlled using up, down, left and right keys and the application is just a modified example from Adafruit. However, it should be very easy to integrate with either the mpu 9150 breakout unit I’ve also installed and make a simple gimbal of sorts.
But first I’m planning to test integrating the code with the opencv haar object recognition stuff I did during the Christmas holidays, for example track clementines.
More server issues and bad links fixed
Filed under: Frozentux.net
Several more server issues where found which in turn caused the server to DoS’ing itself with disk-io. I’m sorry for the inconvenience, personal life has taken too much time simply.
Also, based on reports from some users, I’ve fixed several bad links in the iptables-tutorial and ipsysctl-tutorial documents. This was caused by an earlier move between servers.
If you find any other issues, let me know!
Raspicam and OpenCV instructions
Filed under: Development, Hardware, Linux, Robots
I have previously gotten the opencv and python bindings to work via the 2.3 opencv system and facial recognition did work, but the system is bugged out and I could only get 64x64px image size.
I followed these instructions to get the raspicam to work with opencv and simplecv
http://tothinkornottothink.com/post/59305587476/raspberry-pi-simplecv-opencv-raspicam-csi-camera
However, there where some minor details wrong with it so here is a short list of the updates to the installation instructions on that page.
I noticed a few problems as I saw it with the above instructions, or possibly I didn’t read the instructions well enough. That said, very good info! Thank you!
Here are the issues I had:
The opencv_2.4.5.sh script pulls in libopencv-dev which in turn pulls in the entire libopencv2.3 from raspbian repositories, which in turn meant that simplecv was still using libopencv2.3.
apt-get remove libopencv-core2.3
Once that is removed, python-opencv is also removed and simplecv will not even run anymore. Adding the following will add the path to where the python cv bindings are.
export PYTHONPATH=/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/
And finally, the LD_PRELOAD to actually use the correct uv4l libraries.
export LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/uv4l/uv4lext/armv6l/libuv4lext.so
Once this is done, you should no longer get the munmap errors etc, and large resolution should work:
SimpleCV:1> cam = Camera(0, {“width”:640, “height”:480})
SimpleCV:2> cam.live()
etc.
Server troubles
Since the server update we’ve experienced several issues causing disruptions and downtimes. We believe that the issue causing the problems have been addressed and that webserver should resume normal operations from now on.
Server update
The server was updated during the last week thanks to very good friends at http://www.haringstad.com. The old server had some issues with sporadic crashes causing a some downtime over the last two years, which was the main reason for the update. As a part of the server update, all web content and accesses should be protected using HTTPS from now on, and a lot of backend stuff has changed as well. If you are experiencing any issues with the site, don’t hesitate letting me know about it.
Mirabox dist-upgrade causes system to deadlock/hang on bootup
I think there’s something bad going on between GlobalScales patches in the rootfs images they have for download for the mirabox when doing an apt-get dist-upgrade to the latest version of debian. This causes a complete lockup during boot of the device (network seems to work, but ssh and services are not started in time, and the console is completely locked up). There is pretty much nothing that works in this state, and I’ve found no way to skip ahead and get a login prompt.
I tried booting to Single user mode, but this is not possible because GlobalScale make pretty much everything start in rcS.d. I’m stuck in the same position as in a normal boot as described above, nothing possible to do.
Finally I resorted to using init=/bin/bash and managed to locate the issue down to the S07mountall.sh and/or the S08mountall-bootclean.sh. It seems S07mountall.sh will mount everything from fstab, which also seems to mount “something” on /dev, causing all dev entries to go missing, and hence several different things will just not boot. rm -rf’ing the S07mountall.sh and S08mountall-bootclean.sh script seems to have fixed the issue for me. However, I’ve severely remade the whole rc.d structure since I think it’s a really bad idea to start so much services in rcS.d as it will block single user mode and kind of against the design philosophy of the init system. This rework may have made the situation better or worse, I’m not completely sure.
If anyone is willing to go more in depth I’d be happy to go into the details with them on what I found.
As for the Mirabox, I think it’s a good device so far, but this is my second GlobalScale device (had a Guruplug Server Plus for almost 2 years as my home server). There are a few things that nags at me so far though:
The file system is having the same issues as the Guruplug Server Plus, strange scripts running at strange times in the bootup procedure (for example, all the stuff that’s gone into the rcS.d directory), the rc.local script calling the /root/init_setup.sh script which in turn is loading a bunch of binary blob drivers and so on and so forth. The device as it is looks really well engineered, but the software is really butchered because of these strange setups. Putting in some good time to create a good integration with Debian (since that’s what they are using anyways) would help insanely much. Also, documenting the reflashing processes and so forth could also be very much helpful.
Reflashing GlobalScale Mirabox filesystem
I just worked my way through reflashing the mirabox and figured I’d post some instructions on how to do it. I’ve used the descriptions from this http://www.newit.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=3880.0 post but found it to be lacking a few steps that could be construed as obvious… perhaps. Especially the use of ubifs is quite new to me, even though the commands are quite straight forward I got snagged up a bit in understanding how it works.
I’ve used the following rescue disk image:
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B0imSF-34b8dZEc0SFo3N1Fzb0E/edit
And this rootfs image:
http://code.google.com/p/mirabox/downloads/list
Download and install the rescue disk on a microSD card:
- fdisk the microSD, create on FAT16 partition of 100mb size, the rest of the device as EXT3.
- Unpack the rescue disk
- Copy the mirabox file to the FAT16 partition
- Extract the rootfs.tgz file to the EXT3 partition.
- sync and umount the microSD card
- Connect a USB flash device to the computer
- Extract the rootfs image downloaded above
- Copy the rootfs to the USB flash device.
- Disconnect USB device.
- Connect micro-sd with mirabox kernel and rootfs to mirabox
- Plug in the mirabox to a computer via USB.
- Start the mirabox
- Hit a key at uboot
- >> set bootcmd ‘usb start; fatload usb 1 0x6400000 mirabox; bootm 0x6400000’
- >> set bootargs ‘console=ttyS0,115200 root=/dev/sdb2 rootwait’
- >> boot
- login as root password nosoup4u
- connect USB disk with rootfs on it to mirabox
- # cd /media/usbX where the rootfs img is located
- # ubiformat /dev/mtd2 –flash-image=rootfs-debian6.0-gti-mirabox-v5-0-1-120924.img
- # sync
- # reboot
- disconnect USB disk and remove devices.
- login to your hopefully working new filesystem using root/nosoup4u credentials.
Ubuntu 12.10 on Dell Precision M4600 APIC issues
I’ve recently installed Ubuntu 12.10 on a Dell Precision M4600 and had some APIC issues when trying to reboot, the same as everyone else seems to have pretty much. After upgrading the BIOS from A08 to A13 the issues seems to have gone away (not extensively tested, but so far so good).
Before the update, the computer got stuck on the last step of shutting down for restart, but after upgrading to A13 the computer is no longer stuck at that point anymore.
XBMCBuntu stole my heart
As some who have read this site before might remember, I didn’t have much luck with LinuxMCE as a media center for my home (basically I couldn’t get any functionality working properly. I got a lot of flack for being pissed and not having talked to the devs/asked for support, which I can understand to some degre).
Anyways, I later on installed XBMCBuntu on my media center that was previously running Mythbuntu (MythTV). I semiliked Mythbuntu, but it had some really nagging issues where it lost my remote control settings and some other settings every time i updated those libraries etc. XBMCBuntu however has really grown on me, some of the functionality is just plain awesome in it, and the ease with which I set it up was amazing. Basically, I had the foundations set up, installed and working within 2-3 hours, downloading subtitles is a breeze, the remote control apps works for my phone and both tablets I have and they got some really nifty functionality (pausing videos when i get a call, scroll through lists of my videos directly in the phone, etc).
XBMC also has excellent support for a ton of different plugins, for example I love the video plugins for SVT Play, TED Talk, and so on. So far, I have nothing but the best to say about XBMC, and I’ve used it for 2-3 months now. The only issues I have are connected to my hardware which is behaving rather strangely (unpredictable boot order and turning on the ethernet wakeup interrupt triggers the machine to boot on its own for some reason. Both issues are unrelated to XBMC however, and the hardware is quite old so…).