Embedded Systems Developer Notes

Still busy getting a decent development environment set up using the old Soekris 4501 I had kicking around. After getting cgit working as a git repository server on my Soekris 4501 box, now I have git running as well.
It’s still kind of cool to be running all of this from what’s essentially a first generation 486 class embedded server.

Looks like I’m on a bit of a roll lately. Now I’ve got cgit working as a git repository server on my little Soekris 4501 box. There’s a new tutorial on running cgit in the Stories section of the site. Check it out!
It’s written with the Soekris hardware in mind, but you can use this to get pretty much any little low-horespower computer to serve up content for you. If the 486 class processor with 64 MB of RAM in the Soekris 4501 can do it, then anything will work!
Let me know if you want to see more how-to articles like this.

After a bit of headscratching with an “Illegal Instruction” trap after building Hiawatha from source, I finally figured out that the PolarSSL library had an option that was causing inline assembler to be generated. Of course, the 486 class Elan 520 CPU in the Soekris Box did not have that instruction – hilarity ensues.
But that’s the nice part about Open Source – find the problem, fix it, then post the solution and send a note to the original author.
There’s nothing like positive feedback (and donations) to keep a maintainer of an open source package motivated to continue their work.
So after all that, I’ve got a new article on getting Hiawatha built for and running on a Soekris 4501. You can do a lot with a little 486 class CPU that consumes about 3 watts of power. The box has 3 Ethernet ports and 64 MB of RAM – more than any 486 I ever had!

I got the Voyage Linux SDK up and running on my 64 bit Debian host last week, this week I got Voyage Linux installed on the Soekris 4501 I had lying around.

I’m happy to report that it works, and I can share files with the Voyage VM on my host development computer. Next step – build and install the Hiawatha Secure Web Server and the cgit repository browser.

For the last couple of weeks, I have been trying to repurpose an old Soekris 4501 Single Board PC as a secure server for git. It’s a small 486 based PC with 64MB of RAM – waaaay more RAM than any real 486 I ever owned!

The point is that it’s possible to run useful apps on what I like to call fractional horsepower computers, and it’s much easier than you might think. There is, of course, a bit of fiddling required. What mkes it easier is that Voyage Linux provides an SDK that you can install on a VM using this tutorial that I wrote.

Future articles will describe the install onto a CF card that will boot my Soekris 4501, and using NFS to mount the web pages and git repo from my NAS so that the CF card does not get rewritten that often. I’ll also describe using the SDK to build custom packages for the Soekris 4501.

I’m pretty excited about this project – it shows that older, smaller PCs are still useful.

I’ve recently added a set of tutorials on setting up Debian Squeeze virtual machines to run under VirtualBox. The articles walk you through getting VirtualBox, setting up a VM using command line scripting instead of the GUI, and doing the Debian install without ever touching the keyboard using preseeding.

Here is a set of links to the articles:

1. Headless Debian VirtualBox Setup
2. Debian Squeeze PXE Netboot For VirtualBox
3. Need An Ultralight WebServer? You Need Mongoose!
4. Preseeding a Debian Squeeze Netboot Install

It was a lot of work to get set up, but I’ve simplified all that you you only get to see how easy it is!

If you have wondered what happened to the Embedded Systems Development section of the site, I’m glad to say it’s back up after being down for several months. I have finally converted the site over to WordPress and I’m reasonably happy with the result.
OK, it’s actually pretty ugly right now, but it’s probably more important to get the content up first, then worry about making it pretty.
There were a few pages under the Stories subdirectory, but most of them had to do with setting up BSD for firmware development. In the last few years, I have focused on using Debian as a development platform instead, so those BSD pages are gone unless someone really, really needs them back.
The Embedded Memory Manager page was very popular, and it’s back in the original location.
I’ll be adding articles on setting up a Debian development system using VirtualBox, and some odds and ends on Subversion and my multi-platform make system are due as well.