PandaBoard, Mer and XBMC

It has been a while when I posted anything about my Pandaboard+MeeGo+XBMC HTPC project, this "pause" has been mainly because of lack of time. Now when Intel announced Tizen and MeeGo was announced to be more or less discontinued as such community started a new project called Mer.

Mer supports more architectures from the beginning than MeeGo did as well as it is a lot smaller and easier to maintain still keeping many of the things that were available in MeeGo as well. So after a while playing with Mer I decided to give the pandaboard and XBMC a go with it and after a while I got it running on my PandaBoard as well. Below is a small video clip that demonstrates the current status of my configuration:

So as shown on the video the XBMC on PandaBoard can already play video files and most of the XBMC features are working as well. Some of the missing parts from the adaptation are audio, WiFi and bluetooth as well as hardware accelerated codecs etc. Mainly because those are proprietary binary blobs and I haven't had time to test those yet.

Image is available for download at http://sage.kapsi.fi/Mer/images/0.20111120.1.CE.2011.11.20.1/mer-tv-armv7l-pandaboard/

Creating bootable Pandaboard MeeGo image with MIC

Here is a quick guide how to create bootable Pandaboard image with MIC.

First of all you need to install MIC and I personally recommend git master because that has the best support for ARM bootstrap installation on non-official MeeGo .ks files. However any MIC should do that is taken from git master after 10th December 2010 that includes the omap vfat patch. The git master can be installed e.g. with following commands:

git clone git://gitorious.org/meego-developer-tools/image-creator.git
cd image-creator
make
sudo make install
cd ..

NOTE: You might need to install some additional packages for more information see MeeGo wiki.

After you have installed the MIC image creator you can start creating the actual image. For this you first need to get a .ks file, in this guide .ks file is downloaded from my pandaboard-image-configuration clone that I have modified and tested. This branch does only bring up the xterm for now as it is just a proof that MIC can actually create an image with suitable partitions for pandaboard.

mkdir panda-image
cd panda-image
wget http://gitorious.org/~sage/pandaboard/sages-panda-image-configurations/blobs/raw/pandaboard/handset/handset-armv7l-panda.ks
sudo mic-image-creator -a armv7l -c handset-armv7l-panda.ks -f raw --run-mode=1 --pkgmgr=yum

NOTE: it seems that the zypp packagemanager does not support all of the kickstart features yet so the --pkgmgr=yum option is required to be used with my .ks file.

After this the mic-image-creator starts creating the image, which will take a some time depending your computer and network speed. When the process is ready MIC will inform you where the image file can be found, e.g.,

Your new image can be found here:
/home/sage/panda-image/meego-handset-armv7l-panda-1.1.90.20110303.1939-raw/meego-handset-armv7l-panda-1.1.90.20110303.1939-mmcblk0p.raw
/home/sage/panda-image/meego-handset-armv7l-panda-1.1.90.20110303.1939-raw/meego-handset-armv7l-panda-1.1.90.20110303.1939.xml

Next thing is to put the image to the SD card, for this you can use the "Installing rootfs on external MMC card" section of MeeGo N900 installation guide.

Enjoy your new pandaboard image. If you have any problems booting the image let me know.

Ubuntu on Pandaboard

In pandaboard community there is already a decent amount of information how to utilize the hardware. There are ready made images running Ubuntu and Android (pandroid) on Pandaboard. I downloaded the Ubuntu image and flashed it to SD card based on the guide in omappedia wiki pages. The flashing and booting the image went without any problems and I was actually a bit surprised how easy it was in the end. During the first boot the installation extended the partition to maximum of the SD card so it took a while to get the first graphical screen. After booting the installation asked couple of very basic questions such as username, password, timezone and keyboard layout and did some configurations.

When the installation was complete the image was still missing the proprietary components for example WiFi, BT and graphics firmwares and some hardware accelerated codecs for video playback. Installing these took over an hour with me setup (Class 6 SD card).

The ubuntu works quite well on pandaboard I haven't used it much yet so can't give very extensive report, but there are couple of things that I noticed that are bothering me currently. First of all the usage is a bit sluggish to which the rootfs change to USB HDD could help, so that is one of the next things to try. The second thing is that the WLAN MAC address is not static but changes on every boot so it is not possible to set the static IP to my DHCP server for this. There might be a solution for this MAC address problem already but I have not looked so much into that yet.

Starting to build new HTPC solution

I have pondered a long time getting a HTPC type of device connected to Full HD screen. It has taken me so long, because of the long list of requirements that I have. First of all the device should not consume much electricity in idle state or even when used still keeping in mind that it should also have a decent performance. While the device should be able to decode 1080p content it still needs to be quiet, so it would not disturb the user experience while listening music, watching a video clips or photos. There is also connectivity requirements such as HDMI and WLAN, and still it should be small device.

While searching a device I first came across the Intel Atom based nettops and boards.  However because I like to have challenges in my life I wanted to select something more "exotic" for the base of my device. So, I continued my search and finally found the Pandaboard, a very small ARM based board manufactured by TI.

I got the device in a small black box a printed pandaboard image on top of it, which contained only the board in antistatic bag and some padding.

The board itself is in my opinion a very nice piece of hardware in very compact space. Pandaboard has very nice features including for example 1080p decoding, HDMI, WLAN, BT, and two USB 2.0 ports. In addition to the Pandaboard itself one needs to get also a power supply, SD memory card, HDMI cable and wireless keyboard/mouse or other controller for the device to get started.