GettingTheGCSRunningonAGumstixBoard

Introduction

Would it not be great to have your small UAS in your backpack, throw it in the air and monitor and even adjust the flight via a small device in your pocket? If you think this would be awesome, read on, since that is what this page is all about. It is the first attempt and will not be about iPad, Android Phones, Amazon Kindles or the likes as a ground station. For this we have other wiki pages. No, we will use a thrusted solution; A Gumstix board with Linux on it connected to a small screen.

Outcome

The outcome of our effords will be to:

1. Have the Paparazzi GCS running on a small Gumstix computer board so we can monitoring and adjust the flight of our unmanned aircraft with just a small simple device.
2. Have fully correct instructions on how to get it to work on this wiki page.

{TODO add screenshot of working setup}

Hardware

What do you need to get your groundstation up and running:

{TODO add more links to Gumsticks products}

1. A gumstix board with a power supply
2. 8 GB or higher capacity SD card, the faster the better
3. USB to mini-USB cable
4. Regular UTP network cable
5. A small, or big screen, prefferably with touch such as the 4.3" LCD panel that comes with the Chestnut board kit or this fully integrated Gumstix board

Software

What we will install on the SD is the following

1. Ubuntu OS on your Gumstix
2. Support libraries
3. Paparazzi main software

Before proceeding

1. If you encounter unexplainable error messages during installation take a look a the tips and tricks section.
2. You can just copy the line(s) in the

$  this is a commando for your terminal exame of how it looks

and paste into your terminal. But do not copy the $ or # sign, this symbol is just added on this page to show that it is to be pasted at a terminal prompt as regular user($) or root user(#).

Get the Operating System

Pre-requisites

Have the MicroSD card at hand and download the OS from [vexpress-ics-gcc47-armlt-staging-alt-open.img.gz]

$ wget http://releases.linaro.org/12.07/android/images/vexpress-ics-gcc47-armlt-staging-alt-open/vexpress-ics-gcc47-armlt-staging-alt-open.img.gz vexpress-ics-gcc47-armlt-staging-alt-open.img.gz

or maybe use this custom one with everything already installed for a gumstix board and Chestnut43 with touchscreen

{TODO: provide an image with everything alreadly fully installed}

Installation Steps

1. Unzip the downloaded OS via

$ unzip {TODO}

1. Insert SD card in an SD reader and plug it in an USB port of your PC, then on the terminal type:

$ dmesg 

note line the assigned '/dev/sdX'

{TODO example output}

where sdX is the SD reader device found with the command above, then

$ SDCARD=/dev/sdX  
$ sudo dd bs=64k if=vexpress-ics-gcc47-armlt-staging-alt-open.img of=$SDCARD  

or if you have chosen the OS with included digitizer driver

$ SDCARD=/dev/sdX
$ sudo dd bs=64k if=gcsStix.img of=$SDCARD     

then patiently wait... once the OS is written on your SD card you can insert it in the SD slot of the Gumstix board and boot up your Gumstix on a carrier board.

Connecting peripherals

$ sudo apt-get install cutecom

When you have a Linux version running on your Gumstix, you can add a LCD, or a mouse, or a keyboard.

To set up your LCD you must follow these steps:

Connect through CuteCom to the Gumstix, restart the board and hit a key within 5 seconds:

Hit any key to stop autoboot: 5

Then type the following in the CuteCom command prompt:

setenv defaultdisplay lcd43

Or, if you are using a 3.5" screen (such as the LCD panel with the Palo35):

setenv defaultdisplay lcd35

You can save this setting for future boots by saving it:

saveenv

Finally, continue with the boot process by typing in CuteCom command prompt:

boot

Connect to the Gumstix through the network

If you want to send files to the Gumstix, you can do it via a ssh connection. In order to do this, both devices, your computer and the Gumstix must be connected to the same network. Once you've done this, you can start setting up the connection. Fistly, you need to know the IP address of the Gumstix. Start by opening CuteCom and connect to the device. To do so, download CuteCom tarball and follow the instructions. In your terminal, type:

cutecom

A window will pop up and you must adjust the pull-down menu settings as follows: Device will usually be either /dev/ttyUSB0 or /dev/ttyUSB1 . You can figure this out by typing on your command prompt:

dmesg|tail

Note: apply this command after you connected your Gumstix board to USB with your USB to mini-USB cable. This command lists the last connected devices. Baud rate must be set to 115200, data bits to 8, stop bits to 1, parity to none, handshake none checked, open for both reading and writing checked, apply settings when opening checked, choose "CR,LF end line" and Char delay 1ms.

Click on Open device and your connection should start. If you encounter any problems, but you are sure you did everything right check if your Gumstix board overheated or restart it.

The first thing you need in order to get rid of the USB to mini-USB cable and its physical limitations is to create a user and set a password for it and install openssh. Please feel free to replace "sergiu" with whatever username you choose, but keep in mind that you must replace it everywhere you encounter "sergiu".

useradd -c "Sergiu S" -m -s "/bin/bash" -G sudo sergiu

Note: -G option will add the user to the specified group.

passwd sergiu

You will be asked to enter a password and confirm it. Type your password, then hit CTRL + Enter key combination and then retype your password. IF successful, you will get this message:

passwd: password updated successfully

sudo apt-get install openssh-server

Once you have accomplished this, you must discover the Gumstix ip address, typing on CuteCom:

ifconfig -a 

Note: if you can't use this command for any reason you can get a list with all the IP addresses on the network using 'arp -a' on your machine. Among the data returned, you will see something like this:

eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:15:c9:28:c9:ff  
          inet addr:192.168.0.100  Bcast:192.168.0.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          inet6 addr: fe80::215:c9ff:fe28:c9ff/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:3960 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:727 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 
          RX bytes:3734905 (3.7 MB)  TX bytes:63765 (63.7 KB)
          Interrupt:80 

Now you should be able to connect using:

ssh sergiu@192.168.0.100 {TODO USERNAME change}

You will be asked to type the password you previously set for the user.

Install the prerequsites

Now that you are connected to the gumstix via cutecom wh can get the rest installed:

Libraries

Installing one package at a time is the best path to succes since it is likely during installation that you will be asked to re-run some of the commands with the "--fix-missing" option.

$ sudo apt-get install gtk2-engines-pixbuf
$ sudo apt-get install make
$ sudo apt-get install gcc
$ sudo apt-get install g++
$ sudo apt-get install libgsl0-dev
$ sudo apt-get install gnuplot
$ sudo apt-get install libgnomecanvas2-dev
$ sudo apt-get install bzip2
$ sudo apt-get install git
$ sudo apt-get install libusb-dev
$ sudo apt-get install speech-dispatcher
$ sudo apt-get install glade
$ sudo apt-get install imagemagick 
$ sudo apt-get install libpcre3-dev
$ sudo apt-get install git-core
$ sudo apt-get install python-usb
$ sudo apt-get install python-lxml
$ sudo apt-get install python-wxgtk2.8
$ sudo apt-get install m4
$ sudo apt-get install python-yaml 
$ sudo apt-get install subversion

Keep it clean

1. Create a subdirectory where you will download and install all the libraries and other software tools needed. To keep your home dir tidy use a develop directory to store all the relevant downloads.

$ mkdir ~/develop
$ cd ~/develop/

OCAML

$ wget http://caml.inria.fr/pub/distrib/ocaml-4.00/ocaml-4.00.1.tar.gz
$ tar -xvzf ocaml-4.00.1.tar.gz 
$ cd ocaml-4.00.1
$ ./configure
$ make world
$ make opt
$ make ocamldoc
$ make ocamlbuild.native
$ make ocamlbuild.byte
$ sudo make install
$ sudo make installopt
$ su -c "echo \"export PATH=/usr/local/bin/ocamldoc/:\\\$PATH\" >> /etc/profile"
$ su - `whoami`
$ ocaml -version 
#(make sure you have the right version, meaning 4.00.1)
$ cd ~/develop

Opam tool

1. Install the OCAML Opam tool

$ git clone https://github.com/OCamlPro/opam.git
$ cd opam
$ ./configure 
$ make (because of overheating you may get some errors, but keep doing 'make')
$ sudo make install
$ cd ~/develop

Personal note: later remove ~/.opam !!!!!!!!

opam init
eval `opam config env`

Please select yes.

sudo opam install ocamlfind
sudo opam install lablgtk 
sudo opam install pcre-ocaml
sudo opam install ocamlnet
sudo opam install xml-light

portability-support

1. Get paparazzi-portability-support related files

$ sudo apt-get install  debhelper devscripts fakeroot build-essential autoconf automake autotools-dev dh-make xutils lintian pbuilder dh-ocaml
$ cd ~/develop
$ git clone https://github.com/paparazzi/paparazzi-portability-support.git
$ cd paparazzi-portability-support/linux/
$ sudo ./develenv.sh
$ cd ivy/
$ svn checkout http://svn.tls.cena.fr/svn/ivy/ivy-c/trunk ivy-c
$ cd ivy-c/src/

Patchthe Makefile with : Patch content: --- Makefile.orig 2013-05-23 16:36:45.000000000 +0000 +++ Makefile 2013-05-23 16:32:22.000000000 +0000 @@ -28,6 +28,11 @@ FPIC= endif +MACHINE = $(shell uname -m) +ifeq ("$(MACHINE)", "armv7l") + FPIC = -fPIC +endif + ifndef PREFIX export PREFIX=/usr/local

$ make all
$ sudo make install

IVY

IVY is a simple protocol and a set of open-source libraries and programs that allows applications to broadcast information through text messages, with a subscription mechanism based on regular expressions. The project can be found at: http://www2.tls.cena.fr/products/ivy/

In the paparazzi project, Ivy is used to send telemetry data to where ever you want.

NOTE: Do not confuse this IVY with the Apache Ivy project.

Ivy-OCAML

The Ivy-ocaml is a Library that make it possible to use Ivy via the Ocaml language.

$ cd ~/develop/paparazzi-portability-support/linux/ivy/
$ svn checkout http://svn.tls.cena.fr/svn/ivy/ivy-ocaml/trunk ivy-ocaml
$ cd ivy-ocaml/
$ make
$ sudo PATH=$PATH make install

Ivy-python

The ivy-python package makes it possible to use the IVY libraries from within the Python programming language. The ivy-python package is architecture independent, so it can be downloaded from the Ubuntu or Debian paparazzi repository. However since this is the from scratch page we will download it from the official source repository via

$ cd ~/develop/paparazzi-portability-support/linux/ivy/
$ svn co http://svn.tls.cena.fr/svn/ivy/ivy-python/trunk ivy-python
$ cd ivy-python/
$ sudo python setup.py install

Main sourcecode

Dependencies for paparazzi software;

$ sudo apt-get install libgtksourceview2.0-dev
$ sudo apt-get install libgtksourceview2.0-dev
$ apt-get install ocaml-findlib

Now all the prequisites are installed, finally we can grab a copy of the full Paparazzi project

$ cd ~
$ git clone https://github.com/paparazzi/paparazzi.git
$ cd paparazzi
$ make

run paparazzi center

$ ./paparazzi

---

Note: if you get any errors at this step, please check that the content of this file /root/.opam/system/lib/findlib.conf looks like this. You must be logged in as root to edit this file.

destdir="/root/.opam/system/lib"
path="/root/.opam/system/lib"

make pprzcenter
make supervision
cd sw/supervision/
export PPRZ_HOME=/home/sergiu/paparazzi/
export PAPARAZZI_HOME=/home/sergiu/paparazzi/
export PAPARAZZI_SRC=/home/sergiu/paparazzi/
make
make supervision
./paparazzicenter 
cd ../..
cd sw/logalizer/
make

Note: if you get any errors here, please replace the content of Makefile with the content of this file.

cd ../..

cd sw/ground_segment/multimon/
make clean
make
cd ../../..
make
cd sw/ground_segment/tmtc/
make clean
make
cd sw/simulator/
make clean
make
cd ../..
cd sw/../tools/

Note: please replace the content of Makefile with this.

make clean
cd ../
cd ground_segment/joystick/
make clean
make
cd ../../..
make
make ground_segment
X&
export DISPLAY=:0
xterm
git status
sw/ground_segment/cockpit/gcs  -b 192.168.209:2010
sw/ground_segment/cockpit/gcs 
sw/ground_segment/cockpit/gcs  -b 192.168.209:2010
mkdir /home/dirk
mkdir /home/dirk/nonSynced
ln -s /home/dirk/nonSynced/paparazzi /home/sergiu/paparazzi
ln -s  /home/sergiu/paparazzi /home/dirk/nonSynced/paparazzi
sw/ground_segment/cockpit/gcs  -b 192.168.209:2010

Tweaks

You may get some errors during this installation. This depends on how well you are cooling down your system, how much RAM you have on your platform, the OS you are using and so on.

1. Error and fixes

Some of the errors that you can come accross and how solve them.

If you get errors when trying install a large number of packages/libraries at once, try to divide them into smaller groups.

1. Add swap file

Due to lack of RAM memory it is possible to see errors like this:

==== ERROR [while installing ocamlfind.1.3.3] ====

Internal error:
  # opam-version    1.0.1 (1.0.0-84-g9b3ff34)
# os              linux
opam: "fork" failed: Cannot allocate memory
'opam install ocamlfind' failed.

The solution to this problem is to create a swap file. For this case I created a 512 MB swap file, but you should adapt its size to the size of your SD card and the needed memory size.

Execute these commands to create and mount a swap file:

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile1 bs=1024 count=524288 (will create 512 MB swap file)
sudo mkswap /swapfile1
sudo chown root:root /swapfile1
sudo chmod 0600 /swapfile1
sudo swapon /swapfile1

Note: this will remove the swap file each time you shutdown. If you need the file, you have to repeat the swapon command after each boot. An alternative would be to have it mounted every time you boot the system. For more explanations you can go to this website

1. Autologin

Remove the login prompt

You may want to set your OS to auto-login. Why? Because there may be times you don't have a keyboard for the Gumstix around. You can find a good explanation of this here .

$ sudo locale-gen en_US.UTF-8
$ sudo apt-get install vim nano

Note: if you get an error at this step, use the --fix-missing option as recommended.

$ sudo vim /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf

Edit the autologin-user line by replacing the username with your own

autologin-user=sergiu

and add this line:

autologin-user-timeout=0

or the right locale for your keyboard. If this didn't solve your problem, you may want to read here more about it.

1. More Memory

Remove the Lightdm GUI manager we do not neet to free memory

$ sudo apt-get remove lightdm

After this step you must reboot.

More speed

Remove processes not needed

$ sudo killall -9 NetworkManager  #(for faster system), {TODO in start the config? still needed?}

Because the original image was created as 4 GB big, you have to execute the fallowing set of instructions to enlarge it:{TODO make an 8GB OS image not 4GB the delete this text}

1. Add more space

You can use the gparted GUI tool if the SD in is an external SD reader hanging on you laptop( $ sudo gparted ).

Experimental steps

{TODO: Describe STEPS}

{install python} {install ivy python} {install kivy}

Compile example

Source of Example

X11 server to display on LCD

Next

The next step will be to make onboard video work in the GCS.

Links

Links to related information

• OMAP
• https://www.gumstix.com/
• Dev/Caspa
• https://github.com/paparazzi/paparazzi-portability-support