Pandaboard ES Experimentation

Please spare us this rubbish, David. What they are doing is entirely legal. It seems monstrous to me that the politicians make the laws, then bleat when someone uses the law to their advantage in a way that the politicians hadn’t thought of.

It’s also entirely legal to boycott a company because you disapprove of the manner in which its directors maximise its profit. If the boycott gathers enough people to make the corresponding revenue loss greater than the cost saved in tax, it will become more profitable to pay their taxes than to avoid them.

That’s how capitalism works, right?

Except the style guide says the icon should go on the left, since the CPU & battery/batteries are physical devices :) (Not sure how the display manager ended up on the right!)

Or how the RAMdisc icon is the wrong side of the Apps folder icon too? <— personal gripe of mine…

???
Running CPUClock that appears to be exactly what happens.

Sorry, my bad. Was late, tired, and getting confused with all the build options (Stork and PokeBorder, mostly). Now I’ve had a chance to read it with some tea percolating into my brain… ;-)

Looks like it is counting poll loops per second, in Wimp03? Is this correct?

Fan in!

One of those gigantic 120mm PC case fans (this one will work at 5V):

http://quietpc.co.uk/afdp-12025b

Placed horizontally over the PandaBoard and held in place with some of these:

http://quietpc.co.uk/nes-rubber-mag-screws

Silent in operation (I actually had to stick my finger into the fan to see if it was running!) and dropping the temperature nicely despite the less than ideal installation.

Still need to sort out the rats nest of internal power & USB wiring though.

Until that happens no pictures :-p

Since the Pandaboard has an RTC, there is, presumably a place to attach a battery? I intend to buy a Pandaboard, but would be discouraged if it can’t be made to tell the time. I know about net time, but what if I and my Panda are away from an internet connection. Is there software for Linux on the Pandaboard to present the time from the RTC?

@Keith
How long did you have to wait for your Pandaboard from time of ordering with Mouser to time of receipt?
Also, how much extra did you have to pay on top of their USA price?

Does anyone know how much R-Comp charge for their Pandaboard (in a case I think) as I couldn’t find any mention of it on their website?

The Pandaboard has no option for a Battery! We have prototype daughter boards that include a Battery Backed RTC and a lot more. Details will be announced shortly!
n.b. The Daughter board has a PIC that like STD PS2MouseMini is more powerful than an A3000!

@Chris ‘xc8’
Sorry, at the end of the year the freetime is “sold out”. I think the grub-bootloader can do a dual boot but I have no time to try this. At the Pandora-bootloader it works. I hope at the begin of 2013. But any hardware-things are waiting also ;-)

Thanks Raik, no worries! cheers!

Right I have finally got around to tidying things up a bit and taking some pictures of my PandaBoard ES.

You can find it all here:

http://www.usablerange.co.uk/RISCOS/

I even bothered to add text!

Enjoy :-)

Nice case ….
I can use it as an example for my pandaboard. :

Did you noticed a Pandaboard runs about 10 degrees higher when you use a lot of networkactivity such as making a backup ?
On the webpage at the bottom your screenshot shows a front end for dcraw , could you tell me where to download ?
(I have tried with frontender but it looks like the manual doesn’t cover everything)

One of the reasons I used the biggest fan I could was also to get air moving over the SMSC LAN9514 chip (it is next to the JTAG connector – to the right of it in the orientation of my photographs).

The chip is the 4 port USB controller and the USB to ethernet adaptor.

This can get hot as research by people doing temperature readings with their Raspberry Pis have shown (the Pi uses a LAN 9512 – the difference between the two, as the number suggests, is how many downstream USB ports it has) when heavy network traffic is happening.

The screenshot shows RAW DSLR files on the NAS being processed into TIFF onto the PandaBoard and then saved back to the NAS – I presume that the temperature rise seen in !CPUTmpMon is mostly to do with the amount of processing the SOC is doing.

That frontend for DCraw is Chris Grandsen’s work. As it needs SharedULib113 (which hasn’t been released) it can’t yet be made freely downloadable as far as I understand the situation.

As an aside here is another screenshot showing the playback of Rick Murray’s Youtube video about setting up his Raspberry Pi:

:-p

Proof that it can be done!

Proof that it can be done!

Cool, but what resolution/codec? Try the bird show video (hmm, is the public or unlisted? let me know…) as that one runs to HD. I’ll be impressed if it can do HD.

Oh, and if it can do HD, hit it with this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjl_a3rt6VM
That brings moderately well-specified PCs to their knees.

You mean this?

It’s a bit jerky but it does work

I’ve joined the Panda Club. I have had Pandaboard (Extra Special) for a few days now. I know it’s supposed to be unstable, but should it, of its own volition, produce 7 files typed as text in the root of the USB stick (that contains !Boot) in the space of 5 seconds?
On looking at the files in an editor they seem to be binaries and near the beginning of each file a name of a font like, Gen_Times_Italic and CMBX10-OV-AZTWMB. Their filenames are of the form /tmp/__xz66kg , where x is q,r,s,t,u,v,w, respectively.

Those files are being created by something you have installed.

By itself a clean RISC OS PandaBoard doesn’t do what you have described.

Also you need to move over to a fast SD-Card and SDFS – makes a big difference to the snappyness of the machine!

Keith, can you recommend a brand & model of fast SD-Card?
I’ve not had my Pandaboard setup for a while, and want to get back into RISC OS!

Rob:

I am using an 8GB SanDisk Extreme Pro card.

Overkill really (as there’s no way a PandaBoard will support 95MB/s transfers!) but as I use a NAS for all my data storage I went for the smallest / fastest combination I could find.

OT but these cards now work with the Pi too and you can feel the difference from a slower card.

Even if you’ve got !Scrap in a RAM disk a good example to feel the difference with SDFS / card speeds is !Netsurf as it has a habit of using the hard drive when it is doing stuff.

Thanks Keith, I’ll pick up one of those cards!

The difference using a SanDisk Extreme Pro card is amazing!

@ Keith
Do you have any other tips to make RISC OS faster still?

What speed are you running at?

Chris Gransden did a MLO that pushed the SOC to 1.6GHz but I found it too unstable to use. 1.5GHz is OK though.

Again, with the right MLO, you can run the RAM at 466MHz too.

I’m using an MLO from Chris that runs the SOC at 1.5Ghz, I’m not sure what speed the RAM is running at.

Any chance you could upload the MLO to push the RAM to 466Mhz please?

Any chance you could upload the MLO to push the RAM to 466Mhz please?

You can download it from here.

There are two extra MLO files which default the CPU speed to 1500 MHz or 1600 MHz with the memory clocked at 466 MHz as opposed to the default of 400 MHz. Use at your own risk and watch out for overheating.

Thanks Chris!