Comments Off on Enable 512MB RAM on latest Raspberry Pi

By TeK, October 19, 2012 20:20

At first I was very disappointed, because my new Raspis showed only 256MB RAM, although the shop promised to deliver the new model with 512MB RAM.

Mr. Watterott answered my email- support request within 5 minutes (!). He told me, that it’s a software issue and pointed me to this link, showing how to identify, if the SoC has 512MB of memory: www.raspberrypi.org/archives/2191

Luckily my boards have a chip with “4G” in the model number 🙂

Shortly after that, I found out, that a new firmware already exists:  www.raspberrypi.org/archives/2180

“Update: Those of you lucky enough to receive a 512MB Pi this morning can download updated firmware here. For example, download arm384_start.elf and rename it to start.elf on /boot partition. You will then have a 384M/128M memory split.“

Replacing the /boot/start.elf on the SD-card did the trick 😀

Comments Off on Rasperry Pi SPI Touchscreen X-Server

By TeK, October 19, 2012 19:37

Thanks to Dominique Gallot and vis, I managed to drive a MI0283QT-2 color touchscreen on the raspi 🙂

I followed the steps at www.gallot.be/?p=197 and added the framebuffer driver by vis to run X and LXDE-desktop. 40px in vertical are missing and touch is not working yet, but it’s very funny to use a mouse on the mini-screen.

Dominique Gallot’s howto is very accurate, so these are just additional notes to avoid a few catches I noticed:

1. Install debian –  the Chris boot kernel was not required – the module spidev is already included in the latest debian image
2. Put this line into /etc/modules:  modprobe spidev bufsiz=256000
3. Install wiringPi https://projects.drogon.net/raspberry-pi/wiringpi/download-and-install/
4. Download and compile MI0283QT2-pi

5. Download the framebuffer driver by vis: https://snr.freifunk.net/trac/vis/browser/raspberrypi/fb.cpp into a subfolder on the same level as MI0283QT2/ and compile it with:                         gcc -lstdc++ -iquote ../MI0283QT2 fb.cpp ../MI0283QT2/MI0283QT2.cpp ../MI0283QT2/font*.c -o fb
6. Put https://snr.freifunk.net/trac/vis/browser/raspberrypi/10-monitors.conf into /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d to set X server resolution to 320×200 px
7. Unplug HDMI ( / DVI adapter)
8. Move all USB devices to a powered hub
9. Use a stroooong 5V usb power supply – a 1000 mAh smartphone plug was not enough
10. Run these commands from a terminal connected via SSH as root:

gpio load spi
gpio -g mode 18 pwm
gpio -g pwm 18 1000
./fb

start the x-server in a second console:

startx

As you can see in the pictures, the startmenu of LXDE is not really readable and the terminal- fonts are too small, but I’m sure to find some nice applications for this setup.

The gameoflife demo runs very well: its fast and stable. It uses 30-34% CPU

Comments Off on Raspberry Pi Initialization

By TeK, October 18, 2012 20:21

Today I received 2 Raspberry Pi boards from watterott.com – Thanx for the fast delivery!

Specs: www.watterott.com/de/Raspberry-Pi-Model-B

During installation and configuration some bugs appeared, so here are some notes to get around:

I used this debian wheezy image: www.raspberrypi.org/downloads

and followed the linux console install guide elinux.org/RPi_Easy_SD_Card_Setup

At first various problems occurred: locale- and keyboard- config did not work in raspi-config, apt-get dist-upgrade failed to install libgcc1, …

so I changed the dd command to blocksize 1MB and re-installed the SD-card:

dd bs=1M if=~/2012-09-18-wheezy-raspbian.img of=/dev/sdX

Those problems did not disappeared, instead:

• HDMI to DVI-D(igital) adapter works instantly
• USB-keyboard and mouse work instantly
• 1000mAH 5V adapter is strong enough to power the board with keyboard LAN and DVI connected
• apt-get dist-upgrade works
• locale- and keyboard- config works in raspi-config
• LXDE desktop works
• network and ssh-daemon up and running

Installation of some basic tools:

apt-get install mc screen rcconf tmux

Moving on to some multimedia stuff, I found alsa and sound- modules correctly installed, so I added:

apt-get install mplayer vlc

work in progress…

Raspberry Pi setup