Using the TI MSP430 LaunchPad with Ubuntu 10.04

TI MSP430 LaunchPad

The Arduino and the massive community around it have made AVR the de facto standard for hobby microcontrollers, despite the aloofness of Atmel to take advantage of it.  TI apparently decided that they wanted a piece of the pie, so they took a peek at the Arduino recipe and are now selling something that looks a whole lot like it for a fraction of the price.  The TI MSP430 LaunchPad ships with a MSP430G2231 and a MSP430G2211, microcontrollers sourced from TI’s Value Line.  The first, with I²C, SPI, ADCs, PWM, and UART, is a capable Arduino replacement for physical computing, though the latter chip is limited mostly to GPIO.  Unfortunately, both are a bit anemic when it comes to Flash and RAM.  TI’s roadmap shows promise regarding this issue.

The big problem though, is software.  The appeal of Arduino is largely that it has a dead simple to use, cross platform IDE, running on the well maintained and supported avrgcc and avrdude.  TI’s solution, on the other hand, is a set of two Windows-only, registration-required, code-limited, IDEs.  Linux and Mac users are left a little high and dry.  Luckily, there are some projects, new and old, that make it work out.

You can follow the instructions at mylightswitch to install MSPGCC4 and mspdebug, neither of which is in the Lucid repositories.  MSPGCC is an MSP430 port of the GCC toolchain, complete with GDB.  mspdebug lets you program and erase the flash on the LaunchPad, among many other things.  There are some usage instructions for it at Ramblings and Broken Code.  True to its name, the guide is partially broken.  To use the LaunchPad with mspdebug 0.9, you have to specify the driver instead of using -R.  In our case, we want to use the following:

mspdebug rf2500

Ideally, we would be able to use the uif driver that the eZ430U and other TI development boards use.  Unfortunately, the LaunchPad is incompatible with the firmware used with the ti_usb_3410_5052 module that comes with Linux.  There is a really amazing three part series on this at Travis Goodspeed’s blog.

While it is indeed possible to use the LaunchPad and MSP430 devices in general in Linux, I’m going to stick with the trusty AVR/Arduino combo for now.

11 Comments on Using the TI MSP430 LaunchPad with Ubuntu 10.04

Ubuntu Mobile on an OLPC XO

Ubuntu Mobile on an OLPC XO

Sugar is fine and dandy, but its nice to have the option to run something a little less… sweet.  Unfortunately, with a 433mhz Geode and  256mb of RAM, its kind of a stretch to run a real desktop environment like Gnome or KDE on an XO, and even XFCE is a bit heavy.  Luckily, with low powered UMPCs coming out in abundance, there is a lot of development going on for these kinds of devices.  Ubuntu Mobile and Embedded Edition shows a lot of promise, as you get the massive number of packages available for Ubuntu in a distro designed for low power and small screens.  So, this is a guide on installing and running Ubuntu Mobile on an SD card on an OLPC XO.  Ubuntu Mobile is still very much alpha software and is designed for touchscreens, but it’s generally usable and quite speedy.

This guide is based largely on the following sources.  It could be useful to check them if something here doesn’t work:

Requirements:

  • OLPC XO
  • 1+GB (2 GB or more is much better) SD card or USB thumbdrive
  • SD card reader if you’re using an SD, which this guide assumes
  • A linux box (besides the XO).  This guide assumes Ubuntu 8.04

First, download and install what you need to install Ubuntu on an SD.  We’ll be using Qemu and a Hardy Heron netboot image.

sudo apt-get install qemu qemu-launcher qemuctl
wget http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/hardy/main/installer-i386/current/images/netboot/mini.iso

Run qemu-launcher.  Check “Use CD-ROM,” set Boot Disk to CD-ROM, and in the CD-ROM field open the path to the mini.iso you downloaded earlier.  Set Hard disk 0 to the location of your SD card or thumbdrive, which will be something like /dev/sdb or /dev/sdc.  If you aren’t sure, after inserting the card or drive, open a terminal and run dmesg.  The last few lines will mention some sd* and that’s what you want to use.  If it automounted, unmount it before going on.  The last thing on this tab of qemu-launcher is to set RAM to 256mb.

Qemu Launcher

In the Networking tab, set Number of networking interface cards to 1, and in Card 0, choose Use the user mode network stack, and set MAC address to the address of the card currently connected.  To get it, open a terminal and run ifconfig; the 12 digit hexadecimal number after HWaddr is what you want to copy and paste in.

Qemu Launcher Networking

 You can then hit the launch button.  You want to type cli at the boot prompt, hit enter, and then just follow the usual instructions on installing Ubuntu.  The actual install part is probably going to take a while, so you may want to bake a cake.

When the install is done and it reboots, close the Qemu window. In Qemu Launcher, switch Boot disk to Hard disk 0 and uncheck Use CD-ROM.  Then hit launch again, wait for it to finish booting, and log in with the user/pass you created during the install.

You’re going to want accelerated video, so add the following two lines to the end of /etc/apt/sources.list with your favorite text editor and then do a sudo apt-get update.

deb http://layer-acht.org/debian etch olpc xorg
deb-src http://layer-acht.org/debian etch olpc xorg

You need to install sysvinit, video drivers, and ubuntu-mobile.  I find it easier to work with GDM than manually messing with xinit, so I install that too.  If you have the space, you’ll probably also want to install XFCE, since Ubuntu Mobile is somewhat incomplete for now.

sudo apt-get install sysvinit gdm xserver-xorg-video-amd ubuntu-mobile xfonts-base

You then need an xorg.conf that works for the XO.  I modified one from Free Like GNU to use 120 dpi to have more reasonable font sizes.

sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.bak
sudo wget https://eclecti.cc/files/2008/03/xorg.conf -O /etc/X11/xorg.conf

To add Hildon, the Ubuntu Mobile desktop, to GDM, edit /usr/bin/start-hildon and comment out the line “export DISPLAY=:1”. Then download the xsession file.

sudo wget https://eclecti.cc/files/2008/03/hildon.desktop -O /usr/share/xsessions/hildon.desktop

You’re done with qemu, so you can close that window and pop out the SD card or thumbdrive.  The XO expects the boot partition to be named OLPCRoot though, so you need to plug the thing back in.  Ubuntu will detect the partitions and automount, so you’ll want to unmount it and then run the following command, replacing sdb1 with whatever you were using before with a 1 on the end of it.

sudo tune2fs /dev/sdb1 -L OLPCRoot

Then, power on your XO to boot into regular Sugar, and put the SD card into the XO.  Then open up Terminal and become root.  This could mean typing “su”, “sudo su”, or clicking on the become root icon, depending on your OS version.  Then execute the following commands.

cp -ra /boot /media/OLPCRoot/
cp -ra /lib/modules /media/OLPCRoot/lib/
cp -ra /lib/firmware /media/OLPCRoot/lib/
cp -ra /security /media/OLPCRoot/
cp -ra /etc/modprobe.d /media/OLPCRoot/etc/modprobe.d
cp -ra /etc/fstab /media/OLPCRoot/etc/fstab
sudo wget https://eclecti.cc/files/2008/03/olpcsd.fth -O /media/OLPCRoot/boot/olpc.fth

One last thing that I like to do is disable tap to click on the touchpad, since its pretty sensitive.  These instructions are from the OLPC News forums.  Add the following line to the end of /media/OLPCRoot/etc/modprobe.d/modprobe.d/olpc.conf.dist

options mousedev tap_time=0

Leave the SD card in and reboot.  The XO should boot straight into Ubuntu and start GDM.  When the login screen comes up, go to Options, and Select Session.  Choose Hildon, hit ok, and log in.  Enjoy!

Ubuntu Mobile Desktop

MidBrowser

35 Comments on Ubuntu Mobile on an OLPC XO