Thoughts dereferenced from the scratchpad noise.

Building UEFI based firmware on MinnowBoard

Published at March 28, 2018 · Bartek Pastudzki · 8 min read

Building coreboot on well supported platform such as Bay Trail is quite straightforward task, however we need to remember about some things in order to have coreboot working. First of all we need to provide up-to-date microcode and FSP (Firmware Support Package), which are not included in coreboot source tree and coreboot build system won’t complain about it. Second thing is that Bay Trail has TXE firmware on the same ROM as boot firmware so we have to make sure that we won’t corrupt it because it would brick the platform....

Categories: firmware

Minnowboard Turbot remote firmware flashing with RTE (Remote Testing Environment)

Published at March 23, 2018 · Arkadiusz Cichocki · 7 min read

Minnowboard Turbot remote firmware flashing with RTE (Remote Testing Environment) Introduction Work related to a hardware carries some restrictions which don’t occur when working only with a software. One of them is a limited number of devices. This one may cause a problem with a accessibility to the platform. The limited number of users could slow development and testing. What is more work with a hardware requires a minimal knowledge of the theory of circuits and signals to eliminate platform damage by a user....

Categories: firmware

Flashing eMMC on Hummingboard Edge using fastboot? part 1

Published at March 20, 2018 · Maciej Pijanowski · 9 min read

Introduction Flashing an eMMC of produced board is one of the crucial manufacturing procedures. This post series presents how one can take advantage of i.MX6 features and open source tools to prepare themselves with quite robust and easy to use process. Target reference platform is Hummingboard Edge. General concept The general concept is inspired by this great bootlin (former FreeElectrons) post: I’ve run into some issues while trying to do something similar on Hummingbard Edge, so decided to share my experience....

Categories: app-dev firmware

Robot Framework? using Request library for control RPI GPIO's

Published at January 18, 2018 · Daniel Konopski · 5 min read

Requests library is one of the most popular libraries implemented for Robot Framework. It is very important for testing distributed applications, so this is the first library I got to know in the Robot Framework. To test Request library we can install Pi-GPIO-Server on Raspberry Pi. The server is able to control the state of input and output of GPIOs using REST API. The project is available on the link: Project weekend - GPIO Server...

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ssh reverse tunnel for PXE, NFS and DHCP setup on Qubes OS

Published at December 5, 2017 · Piotr Król · 6 min read

At some point I stuck in the forest with WiFi connection and no physical access to router to create nice networking for my coreboot development needs. Recently I switched my laptop to Qubes OS what give interesting flexibility, but also additional problems. My key requirement is to boot system over PXE, so I can easily do kernel development and play with Xen. Because only available connection for my apu2 platform was directly to my laptop I had to provide configured DHCP server and PXE server on it....

Categories: os-dev

Flashing MinnowBoard Turbot with Raspberry Pi Zero W

Published at November 20, 2017 · Piotr Król · 10 min read

Recently we started preparation of coreboot training for one of our customers. Our platform of choice for that training is MinnowBoard Turbot. There are couple reasons for that: During training we can show recent firmware trends - despite we don’t like blobs (FSP, AGESA, PSP, ME etc.) and bloated designs (UEFI) we cannot escape reality and have to show customers how to deal with those components. MinnowBoard Turbot use couple of them, but also supports coreboot....

Categories: firmware

UEFI/EDK II CorebootPayloadPkg on PC Engines apu2

Published at November 3, 2017 · Piotr Król · 9 min read

Recently we were reached by person interested in running CoreOS on apu2. CoreOS is a very interesting system from security point of view. It was created to support containers and scalability out of the box. Unfortunately it requires firmware supporting GPT. At that point I was not sure if I can utilize GRUB GPT support on apu2, but this led to other questions: Is it possible to boot UEFI-aware OS on PC Engines apux boards?...

Categories: firmware

PC Engines apu2 python Robot Framework validation automation

Published at November 2, 2017 · Piotr Król · 8 min read

Recently we attended ECC2017 conference. One of topics that we considered was a system for development and validation automation. Unfortunately this talk was not accepted, but we present some research below and plan to provide more soon. As maintainers of PC Engines platforms in coreboot we debug and fix quite a lot of bugs, but to take full responsibility for our code everything should be validated each time we do release....

Categories: firmware

How to handle a DHT22 sensor using ARM mbed OS?

Published at August 1, 2017 · Michał Żygowski · 8 min read

Recently I have encountered with temperature and humidity measurements using DHT22 sensor. I was developing a driver source code in ARM mbed OS SDK on particular STM32 NUCLEO L432KC platform. Thorough analysis of DHT22 documentation led me to the following questions: Is it possible to accurately measure voltage-level durations during read process? What duration time values should be considered as timeout or/and error? Should I weaken the time restrictions in order to avoid random delays in voltage level transitions be considered as failure?...

Categories: firmware iot

How to use Ansible via Python

Published at June 14, 2017 · Maciej Ruciński · 5 min read

Ansible is designed around the way people work and the way people work together What is Ansible Ansible is simple IT engine for automation, it is designed for manage many systems, rather than just one at a time. Ansible automates cloud provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, intra-service orchestration, and many other IT operations. It is easy to deploy due to using no agents and no additional custom security infrastructure. We can define own configuration management in simple YAML language, which is named ansible-playbook....

Categories: app-dev

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