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:
- 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.
- 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}
- A gumstix board with a power supply
- 8 GB or higher capacity SD card, the faster the better
- USB to mini-USB cable
- Regular UTP network cable
- 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
- Ubuntu OS on your Gumstix
- Support libraries
- Paparazzi main software
Before proceeding
- If you encounter unexplainable error messages during installation take a look a the tips and tricks section.
- You can just copy the line(s) in the
$ this is an example of how a command for your terminal 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 this custom OS with everything already installed for a gumstix board and Chestnut43 with touchscreen.
{TODO: provide an image with everything alreadly fully installed}
Installation Steps
Unzip the downloaded OS via
$ gunzip gcsStix.img.gz
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=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
When you have a Linux version running on your Gumstix, you can add a LCD, or a mouse, or a keyboard. First, install CuteCom on your local machine running on a terminal:
$ sudo apt-get install cutecom
To set up your LCD you must follow these steps:
- Start cutecom
- Connect LCD flex cable to Gumstix connector
- Attach USB-to-mini-USB cable to both your local machine and Gumstix board.
- Power up Gumstix board
$ cutecom
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 $ sudo apt-get install libsdl1.2-dev
Keep it clean
- 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
- 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 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
- 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 tcl-dev libxt-dev $ 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
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 $ export PPRZ_HOME=/home/sergiu/paparazzi/ $ export PAPARAZZI_HOME=/home/sergiu/paparazzi/ $ export PAPARAZZI_SRC=/home/sergiu/paparazzi/ $ make ground_segment $ X& $ export DISPLAY=:0 $ xterm $ git status
run paparazzi center
$ ./paparazzi $ 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 $ 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.
- 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.
- 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
- 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.
- 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}
- 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
Installing
Testing
Next
The next step will be to make onboard video work in the GCS.
Tips and tricks
Links
Links to related information