Snowball Board

@Simon,
Glad you got your PDKs’ . I should have waited but in the end ordered some a couple of days before yours arrived. Min order quantity is now 5.

I wonder how you got on with first boot.

In my case I get nothing displayed using CVBS or HDMI other than a message (from the monitor) indicating 1280×720/60p. My DVI monitors show the usual ‘running rabbits’ of an unsynched display. I’ve yet to find gender benders to allow me to connect a hub/keyboard.

@ Matthias,
Thanks for the heads-up on enabling DVI. Unfortunately without the display the only indication of a successful boot is the blue light turning on brightly. I presume I have to type the configure string blind! Do you, (or anyone) have details of the board links other than RS232 and Battery enable. These two are the only ones described in the hardware manual.

@David
Like you, I get no display, and nothing on the serial port. Actually, something’s going out to the fullhd monitor, because it gets stuck in DVI-D input mode and doesn’t flick back to D-Sub, which it does if nothing is plugged in. In fact, I need to switch the snowball off again to get back to the D-Sub input.

Plugging in a network cable seems to have some effect; the leds on the connector flicker realistically, but ssh/telnet/ftp/http/rpcinfo connections all fail.

@Simon,

I’m so glad I’m not alone!
I’ve just done a quick check and find that I can see it on my network. I can ping it too.
Haven’t tried the serial port yet. By the way, which one do you mean, over OTG port or the dedicated connector?
As its abit late and having just got back from the weekly computer club meet (pub) I’ll postpone further investigation ’till later in the day.

I’m using the 10-pin connector. It’s keyed, but I should probably check the my cable is compatible. It looks like it should be OK, pin 1 is connected to pin 1, etc.

@Simon,

A quick update on my earlier post on network connection. While I could ping the snowball I could only manage 2 or 3 pings. I have tried to use both telnet and SSH via PuTTY. Neither worked but got a “connection refused”. I think its on port 23.
The Hardware reference manual talks about enabling the 10 pin RS232 connector by removing a link (section 9.10).
I another test I can’t detect the WiFi signal or Bluetooth.

The link seems to be there (labelled EN_RS232). However, the pinout is very different to the BeagleBoard (and, since the BB’s link is working, it’s probably wrong for the snowball.

BB: Tx: 3, Rx: 2, Gnd: 5
SB: Tx: 5, Rx: 3, Gnd: 9

Looks like the odd wires are going to have to come out again.

BB: Tx: 3, Rx: 2, Gnd: 5
SB: Tx: 5, Rx: 3, Gnd: 9
Looks like the odd wires are going to have to come out again.

It seems the snowball is using an old style IDC connector pinning see the table in the URL:
http://pinouts.ru/SerialPorts/Serial9_pinout.shtml

Just use a mini-B to USB cable in the serial port and hook it up to a PC.
The extra RS232 port (with the pins sticking out) is not used with u-boot nor the console..
There is a on-board rs232 to USB converter. this is not the OTG port. it looks the same though.

So it does.

[128552.017306] usb 1-4.4: new full-speed USB device number 8 using ehci-pci
[128552.107418] usb 1-4.4: New USB device found, idVendor=0403, idProduct=6001
[128552.107434] usb 1-4.4: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
[128552.107442] usb 1-4.4: Product: FT232R USB UART
[128552.107449] usb 1-4.4: Manufacturer: FTDI
[128552.107456] usb 1-4.4: SerialNumber: A6007NUK
[128552.191532] usbcore: registered new interface driver usbserial
[128552.191605] usbcore: registered new interface driver usbserial_generic
[128552.191642] usbserial: USB Serial support registered for generic
[128552.222295] usbcore: registered new interface driver ftdi_sio
[128552.222349] usbserial: USB Serial support registered for FTDI USB Serial Device
[128552.222627] ftdi_sio 1-4.4:1.0: FTDI USB Serial Device converter detected
[128552.222740] usb 1-4.4: Detected FT232RL
[128552.222748] usb 1-4.4: Number of endpoints 2
[128552.222755] usb 1-4.4: Endpoint 1 MaxPacketSize 64
[128552.222762] usb 1-4.4: Endpoint 2 MaxPacketSize 64
[128552.222768] usb 1-4.4: Setting MaxPacketSize 64
[128552.223253] usb 1-4.4: FTDI USB Serial Device converter now attached to ttyUSB0

Removed J24, and I’m getting something!

On both cables…?

115200 8N2 has got me a console!

stty -F /dev/ttyUSB0 ispeed 115200 ospeed 115200 cs8 -parity cstopb

Lets me cat /dev/ttyUSB0

Last login: Sat Jan 1 11:27:08 UTC 2000 on tty1
Welcome to Linaro 11.09 (development branch) (GNU/Linux 2.6.38-1001-ux500 armv7l)

Yikes! 115KBaud, it would have taken me ages to cycle through to this. Thanks for the heads-up.

Well, I can see the various boot and loader messages and it does terminate in a # —But the snowball won’t listen to me. Perhaps I should take it to the London show tomorrow, someone might be able to shine some light on it.

try ‘minicom -D /dev/ttyUSB0’

to get to the serial port setup: ‘ctrl-a’ ‘o’
select baudrate and no hardware flow control.

the hw flow control is most likely causing the lack of response.

Resolved! It was a hardware flow control problem, but not in the way Jan meant. I had removed the link (J24) to enable the ten pin RS232 port, thus disabling the MiniB port.

The voyage begins,

Bother, now I have to find the link again to put it back on!

They should make them bigger.

The MiniB – A connectors I had a link to earlier don’t seem to work, but I’m not sure yet… I cut one up, and it’s got four cables going to the A socket connector, but I can’t tell what’s up with the fifth pin.

The OS doesn’t manage apt-get update, the version, Natty, is too old (and the networking seems to be rather flaky). I’m working on sorting out/finding something newer that can be installed from micro-sd card.

I await with bated breath, or something.

FWIW there appears to be a version of Ubunto ‘Precise’ on the Linaro web site. Would this not be a useful intermediary?

Glad you sorted out the serial port.
Today the ARM linux distributions use ‘armhf’ instead of ‘armel’ which is a change in ABI and also uses hard-float. This makes it impossible to upgrade. The best way is to install a armhf distribution of your choice to a SDcard and boot from that. Once booted you can replace to OS on the eMMC. IF (that is a big ‘if’) the OS you run from the eMMC is armhf then it is possible to change the ‘natty’ into ‘precise’ in /etc/apt/sources.list and do ‘apt-get update && apt-get distupgrade’. That would upgrade your system to the next version.

I got a micro-sd card yesterday, but u-boot doesn’t seem to like it, or possibly just its formatting.

CPU: ST-Ericsson db8500 v2 (Dual ARM Cortex A9) 998.400 Mhz
I2C: ready
DRAM: 1 GB
MMC:
MCDE: startup failed
sec_bridge: ISSWAPI_FLUSH_BOOT_CODE: 2
EMMC: 0, MMC: 1
env crc failed, so setting default env!
In: serial
Out: serial
Err: serial
Net: smc911x-0
Hit any key to stop autoboot: 0
Partition info retrieved
Reading boot.scr

* Unable to read “boot.scr” from mmc 1:1 *
Partition info retrieved
Reading /uImage

Strangely, the uImage, above, is the one on the my card, so why can’t it read boot.scr in the same directory?

Is this the version you were talking about?
http://releases.linaro.org/12.11/ubuntu/precise-images/ubuntu-desktop

I can’t see a kernel image in the archive…?

It should probably be here: http://releases.linaro.org/12.11/ubuntu/precise-hwpacks
But it isn’t. :(

Strangely, the uImage, above, is the one on the my card, so why can’t it read boot.scr in the same directory?
Is this the version you were talking about?
http://releases.linaro.org/12.11/ubuntu/precise-images/ubuntu-desktop

Don’t know whether this helps:
https://wiki.linaro.org/Boards/ST-Ericsson/Snowball/building_uboot

Specifically references to where the snowball build u-boot etc expect files to be placed.

This is the latest version I can find with snowball support appears to be
http://releases.linaro.org/12.07/ubuntu/leb-snowball

@Simon: if you stop u-boot can you do ‘fatls mmc 1:1’
i have often made the mistake of putting boot.src instead of boot.scr on the disk.
also the boot.scr is a script converted by mkimage.

 ** Can't read from device 1 **
 
 ** Unable to use mmc 1:1 for fatls **

Also:

 U8500 $ mmc rescan 1
 U8500 $ fat info mmc
 
 ** Invalid boot device, use `dev[:part]' **
 U8500 $ fat info mmc 1:1
 Partition info retrieved
 Interface:  MMC
   Device 1: Vendor: Man 02544d Snr 1dcf0235 Rev: 1.1 Prod: SA04G
             Type: Removable Hard Disk
             Capacity: 3724.0 MB = 3.6 GB (7626752 x 512)   

 No valid FAT fs found
 U8500 $ fat ls mmc 1:1
 Partition info retrieved
       529 Nov 10 2013 15:56:00 [file] boot.txt
       545 Oct 10 2013 13:41:09 [file] flash.scr
       601 Oct 11 2013 12:20:06 [file] uImage
       601 Oct 10 2013 17:28:28 [file] boot.scr
         0 Oct 11 2013 10:10:17 [dir ] boot 

 5 files, 1 dir

uImage is just a copy of boot.scr so that I can tell if it has been loaded from the sd card (fails) or emmc (works).

Progress update:

I downloaded http://releases.linaro.org/12.06/ubuntu/leb-snowball/lt-snowball-x11-base_20120626-156-ubuntu-desktop.img.bz2 and installed it to a micro sd card. (There is one later version; it didn’t work, so I thought the one before support was suspended might work better. It turned out that it didn’t work for the same reasons as this one.)

The default u-boot system does not result in a working system*, so I use the following minicom script to start up the snowball:

print Running uboot script

expect Hit any key to stop autoboot:

send

print Stopping autoboot

expect U8500 $

send mmc rescan 1

print loading uImage

send fat load mmc 1:1 0×00100000 /uImage

expect U8500 $

print loading uInitrd

send fat load mmc 1:1 0×01000000 /uInitrd

expect U8500 $

send setenv bootargs “console=tty0 console=ttyAMA2,115200n8  root=/dev/mmcblk1p2 rootwait ro earlyprintk fixrtc nocompcache vmalloc=300M mem=128M@0 mali.mali_mem=64M@128M hwmem=168M@192M mem=22M@360M mem_issw=1M@383M mem=640M@384M 2”

send bootm 0×00100000 0×01000000

For some reason my ethernet port seemed to be a bit flaky, at first, but after a while it settled down and I’m now running an apt-get update/upgrade.

I’ve noticed it seems to get a new IP address every reboot, perhaps it randomises its MAC address?

*Symptoms available on request, and when the upgrade is done.

I can confirm that the boards get new IP addresses each boot and that the reason for that is that is the presentation of a new MAC address on each boot.
Now I have to go out acquire a micro SD card, that is if I can get anywhere after this mornings storm!

I can confirm that the boards get new IP addresses each boot and that the reason for that is that is the presentation of a new MAC address on each boot.

As I recall u-boot has a command to specify the MAC.
Ah, yes http://www.denx.de/wiki/DULG/UBootEnvVariables

ethaddr: Ethernet MAC address for first/only ethernet interface (= eth0 in Linux).
This variable can be set only once (usually during manufacturing of the board). U-Boot refuses to
delete or overwrite this variable once it has been set.

eth1addr: Ethernet MAC address for second ethernet interface (= eth1 in Linux).
eth2addr: Ethernet MAC address for third ethernet interface (= eth2 in Linux).

0000A4FF50xy should be fine (where x is 0-F and y is also 0-F)

Progress — Backwards!
Have sourced a micro SD card, flashed Linaro 12.06.
Set up Snowball and stopped autoboot.
Tried to follow the script above as single commands (I don’t have minicom -using PuTTY on Windoze7) and get variations on ‘Reading data failed: status:0×00082008’, usually twice followed by ‘MMC read single failed, err=30’
Does anyone know what the problem may be, syntax SD card speed?