Ox64 SBC - Connecting, Flashing and Booting Linux! ($8 from Pine64)

Passing sign can't believe how well that just worked all right today we are looking at the new of newish ox64 single board computer by pine64 so I have here the 128 uh megabit version it's important to note that this is 128 megabit not megabyte uh there is two variants of this there's the version with 16 megabits so two megabytes usable or 128 megabits so eight megabytes usable if I did that math right in my head just divided by eight now these are a competitor to the uh Raspberry Pi Pico and I think they do a very good job at it they're both about 11 Australian I just ordered two of them and we're gonna flash them with Linux this is what makes it interesting as well though is that uh let's see if I can get a bit closer it's not going to be focused um I'll put some close-up pictures on there anyway but what makes these interesting is they're very much like an stm32 or a uh espressive like esp32 that they're almost a MCU or an SOC System model chip they're very small very compact they've got a lot of functionality built in a lot of GPO reports however what this and the Raspberry Pi pick code does which is based on the RP 2040 and this is based on the Buffalo Labs 808 is um they are actually essentially still a full-fledged computer this is running a risk V processor which is a dual core up to say I think it was 480 megahertz and you can run Linux on this so normally you'd need a Raspberry Pi zero or four or something like that you can't run Linux really on a sp-32 I wish I should have had some here to show you or on a scm32 like an f-103 or something they can run free rtos a real-time operating system which can do some very linuxy things but you're not booting a Linux kernel and getting a bash shell this can do that and it's in a form factor that is very tiny obviously so comparing them to each other they're both eleven dollars Australian which is great they're both the exact same size they've both got very similar connectivity they've got the same amount of GPRS however where Planet 64 have smashed it is that you've got more RAM so this has a 64 Meg of ram as opposed to a quarter of a Meg of ram as I understand it on the Raspberry Pi I feel free the pipe picker sorry feel free to correct me if I'm wrong also has more storage this comes in the 16 uh megabit or 128 megabit option which is this SPI flash right here and you can most likely swap that out yourself but that's a hell of a lot more storage faster processor so the RP 2040 is a cortex m0 plus chip at 130 133 megahertz this is a buffalo Labs 808 which is I believe it's got like two performance calls and two low power cores if I recall correctly something like that and it's up to 480 megahertz so it's a lot faster it also supports zigbee out of the box and has USB 2s at a USB 1.1 so I'm pretty excited about this it does off the cuff seem less user friendly though I've already had to mess around with that little bit to try to figure out what's going on such as what you can actually use this USBC and micro USB ports for haven't really tried to use these JTAG ports yet because believe it or not it isn't 2.54 mil spacing now to flash this you're going to need a few things you can't really just connect it straight away I'm going to use my saw I'm gonna have to refocus that oh my so I'm going to be using my cp2104 there is quite a few different things you can use to flash it and they've got different recommendations so you can use a pi Pico running uart firmware and Flash it with that you can use an esp32 with a CPU CP 210x or you can use a cp210x itself I've got the 204 210 4 whatever you want to call it you can use a black pill which is an stm32 F 401 or 10 three I get confused because there's so many ripoff versions of it and then some random uh adapters do work like some of the CH series ones or the uh which I think are prolific or the ftdi ones either ft232 work but I've had the best luck using this cp2104 with everything so I'm going to keep using that now one of the things is I'm using two USB cables here this one is just a power so I've got TX and RX connected here and that is two pins uh what was that if I look at the thing so 14 and 15 which is uart zero and then I'm creating a common ground here it will get grounded to the same USB ground however being such long cables I want to make sure there's no issues with the serial connection and ground is very important so I am then going to power it with this now I can power it directly from here if I plug this in we'll see it power up if I get the right one and don't cook it there we go and it's online the issue is every time I need to power cycle this this disconnects from the computer for a moment which means we lose our console session so instead of that I'm not going to power it from there I power it from here using another USB cable in fact let's swap these around plug that one in this side I really hope this is all in Focus my lighting today isn't great I've got to order some new lights there we go and so I will power it with this and it is quite happy doing that now if we switch over to the computer I'll start OBS recording and we'll have a look at essentially what the computer sees first things first you're going to want to connect to your serial Port have a look at what number that is in device manager if you also probably do that too it's getting a bit warm all right so we've got com4 here and the interesting thing is uh for most of these you want to connect at 2 million board which I know is weird some of them seem to connect at 11 5200 Summit 2 million and it depends as well because GPO 16 is 17 which is your kind of stood out or uart once you're in normal mode seem to be at 11 5200 but this can also be highly dependent on which revision you get so mine has a build date here of 2022 10 18th of October now they are continually developing these they're shipping them with newer firmware essentially what this ships with now though is the default that is on that 808 chip and they're not hugely user friendly they've created this minimum viable Hardware product that seems to work absolutely perfectly but not created a user environment for it and they've left that up to the community pros and cons all right that's kind of what 0.64 does so no judgment there but it does make it for people with a little bit newbie like me it makes it a bit harder which is why I'm going to do this step through so now we've got ground and those two gpos connected as you can see there now if I connect to that 2000 and power cycle it you'll see the Buffalo lab Boot and then it sits there saying ping and pong you'll see that if we then hold down the boot function to put it into flashing mode and power cycle again we just get this weird little output there right now that I've got the software I need on here we're going to be using devcube by Buffalo labs and this looks like the best way to get going there's some instructions I'll link to below which are from the ox 64 Wiki uh it's where the community is being put together a full Linux stack and I've already flashed this SD card with the base part of it but we'll launch this software go to MCU com4 2 million now let's go create and download all groups are unused what have I missed here ah that's uh that's where I've got to be a little bit smarter and actually read the instructions and set those groups so look at that shake hand success and it's flashing that was a lot easier than what I thought so I'd look everywhere for instructions before I even dive into this and it did not look that easy to get it do anything that is insane all right so next we then go to the iot bit and enable single download wherever that is yeah and we want address D2 0xd 2000 now if we browse for this we also have one more image that's what I flash the SD card with this is the one that we want to put in this location so then I go create and download again just do a good 20 seconds or so this is loading a fair bit more data across that's probably why they use the 2 million baud rate which is incredible but that's awesome it works that gives us a lot more throughput a lot less waiting here's a um a pin out as well we're gonna have to refer to this a bit to move to pin 16 and 17 which are the important output for the serial console it's just doing the right check now and then we'll have a look at the output excellent that's theoretically done next steps let's pull the power out let's take our Linux image in which is this SD card if I can figure out how to there we go get it in there so then what we want to do is move these two from 14 and 15. to 16 and 17 which are going to be on the other side and a bit further down so I think pardon me in it there let's see I hope I was off by one so very close I accidentally pulled my ground connection there so let's put that back on the third pin down on that side now in theory back on the computer if we reopen putty and we go back to that com4 it's either going to be 2 million or 11 5200 but powering this up open that it should boot to flash which should have our image which then should load the OS from the SD card that's insane can't believe how well that just worked so there's going to be the one slow thing the first time it boots up is it just resize the petition to take up the rest of our SD card so I've got a random 32 gig in there which is more than this thing would ever ever need I thought I had some crappy old like 32 Meg cards apparently not though so using this one the other thing that apparently is pretty awesome is how quickly These Boots so these boot as fast as an SOC or an MCU like in sub one second it's going to boot a full Linux kernel in that time and have you at a prompt where you can start doing things I find that amazing so here we are at build root ox64 login I don't even know what the default login is but I'm going to assume root and blank yep there we go so we can set a new password and make it aux 64. too short I hope that worked um proc CPU info there we go we're seeing one processor there doesn't give us any [Music] um boggo mips which is interesting three minus M we have our 64 Meg with a bit of overheads ram there it's also enabled one gig of swap which is probably very necessary but this whole kernel is using nine Meg of ram which is mental uh nothing USB nothing PCR I can see there's a bit missing here A D message gives us pretty much the entire boot thing we can see the bit going on here is it showing any all right just the local interface so if we then go what's the last one DF minus H it shows there just our SD card that we've booted and now let's pull the power and watch it boot again because is what I'm really curious about there are different images that boot at different speeds and you can of course tune this to boot faster you can turn off all sorts of features you don't want let's just see ready all right so that boot was less than a second to start loading all of the user environment and I'd say that was about four seconds flat including starting ntpd SSH syncing the time every or trying to running dhcpd everything like that so I'm really impressed with that theoretically there was no yep it kept our password change and then we should be able to start doing things with us we this should be able to start using Wi-Fi there is a small antenna port on there uh it's got Bluetooth and zigbee I'm probably going to replace my Raspberry Pi zero with this because all it's doing is running python turning GPS on and off the controls relays but this is a lot cheaper a lot faster a lot less power draw like this is going to be running on a fart basically and I might order a few more um this is genuinely impressive well done pine64 so to reiterate what we did is we connected to pins one and two or G power 1450 which is TX and RX held boot as we plugged it in that's going through our cp2104 we loaded the dev Cube tool selected 808 and we flush the two groups and then we flashed the main image we used bolina etcher which I didn't record to flash this SD card with the third image and then we build it to it and it works perfectly it probably realistically could be done in about four minutes flat and you have a full usable computer that's got networking capabilities it's got ethernet coming out in the future apparently through a header someone's probably going to be able to hack that in same as Mike speaking camera module looks like someone's going to be adding that in or there's you know the plans for a add-on module for that it's very capable if you've got any questions if you want to know if something can be done with it I'm going to keep one spare I would recommend soldering the header pins on this side though because it actually makes it nearly impossible to read the label of the gpio pins there but that's the ox 64. a very capable single board computer that can run a full Linux kernel so thank you very much for coming by I apologize if anything here is slightly out of focus or if I got any details wrong if anyone knows why they call Buffalo Labs is that just how maybe the manufacturers origin says or spells Buffalo I don't know but I'm going to keep this video short I might do another one when I find some interesting news for this or I start playing with these JTAG headers they probably just go straight to pin 16 or 17 to be honest I'll put all the links below to the wiki to the GitHub where I got the images from all that sort of stuff and don't forget to like subscribe hit the little bell if your notifications for more leaving comments if you want to know anything flaming if you feel like it any sort of Engagement is good engagement till then enjoy the start to 2023 look after yourself stay safe all the things supposed to say I'll catch you next time

Channel: Platima Tinkers

Views: 105,514

Keywords: IoT, Espressif, Firmware, Smart Home, Internet of Things, Zigbee, Matter, Open Source, Bouffalo, Bouffalo Lab, BL808, Raspberry Pi, Pico, Pi Pico, Ox64, Pine64, Pine 64, SBC, Single Board Computer, RISCV, RISC V, RISC-V, MCU, SoC, Linux, Single Board, Ox 64, Ox-64, 0x64, ox64 sbc, ox64 linux, raspberry pi, pine64 ox64, pine ox64, single board computer, sbc computer, risc v sbc, risc v, 128mb ox64 sbc, 0x64 pine64, raspberry pico, best sbc, raspberry pi pico, pi pico, sipeed m1s

Id: czRtF-UNiEY

Length: 15min 40sec (940 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 02 2023