A Million Useless Thoughts

Yocto again, but it always takes some time to learn something new. Today we are going to venture down adding a custom layer to setup wpa-supplicant and interfaces. The goal is to make a Pi Zero W come up and connect to WiFi from a base build.

Today's goal in the build toward the house of cloud PI is to add WiFi and SSHD to our current Yocto Image. Currently following instructions from This Blog . Stay tuned with the results. One more thing here, we will a do a full wrap up once we get a build that is ready to be setup and will open a repository to all of the changes that were done to make a pi-zero-w that auto-connects and can do updates to the image. Looks like everything is ok, but we'll need a make a new layer to make WiFi work.

Got all of the seeds planted into the plant grow lights. So progress on this. Unforutnately not quite done on the Yocto Side. But progress, it looks like the output 'core-image-base-raspberrypi0-wifi-20210205102113.rootfs.wic' Is what we can use without having 'dd' working correctly under WSL. So now will try out the image and make sure it works. Using the WIC works! But no WiFi on startup. Next steps WiFi, then SSHD and we'll be up about what a raspian build looks like.

Getting the gardenator prototype onto the grow lights. This includes a monitor for temperator and humidity sensor and a moister sensor for the plants. Part of the goal was to get a timelasp on the plant growth, but the camera fell off, so we will have to switch out the PI with a new PI once we get more of the yocto setup going.

Put the grow lights back together today. Most of the work was spent getting it back out of storage. This is in preperation for the prototype gardenator.

Yocto is currently building as Dunfell. We will know more later on how well this works. Excavator switch from relays to H-bridge L298N is working so much better. The relays were getting back powered and stuck on after an abrupt stop or turn. The H-Bridge has fixed this issue. Now we need to fix the rest up the rest of the excavator. Vitory on dunfell building. Now to put this on a SD card and test it out.

Let continue the thing-a-day with continued effort on the Yocto front. We last left off with the Zeus and Ubuntu 18.04. Which has failed. We are now moving on to try and get warrior to work. This currently feels like a bit of a retreat, but so far the results are little different time will tell as it takes a while to build out Yocto. Warrier failed to get files from github. So next up we will try dunfell, this is one past zeus, maybe there was a fix there. Dunfell is also one branch back from the lead branch. Fingers crossed for this working.

There is still a bug with getting yocto to work with Docker for Windows. One issue might be related to the underlaying Ubuntu version being 20.04. There is some evidense that file names play a role in preventing it from running successfully. If the latest clean and rebuild fails we will rebuild the Docker using 18.04 as the base and spin it back up. Looking at Docker Hub there are several Yocto Dockers, but none with instructions on how they work or even what version of ubuntu they use, in short they all look like crap-shoots. With that in might I will publish my version when this work and add some documentation on how it works. In the meantime there has been a need to update the Excavator project as there was an issue with the relays getting stuck open cause the wheels to constantly spin. The upgrade will be switching to using a H-Bridge for the main motors. Hopefully with some good thoughts we'll make progress today.

Currently Yocto is still compiling. Partially due to the issues that needed to be resolved in the setup to get to building with a little luck today we will test out the image produced, provide some results below, and then get started on the next task which will be to get a SWUpdate working with the image. So fingers crossed here that we get everything up and running. Decided this was not going to resolve well. Rebuilding the Docker and the build. Fingers crossed, this takes about 8 hours or so to build, so we may end up having to switch to something else to try. On the plus side this is progress the Docker appears to start and work on the first try now. This means that the docker can continue to be evolved into something more complex. It also likely means we are missing something from the docker for building out yocto, might have to download an image from docker hub to get past this issue. While this might be a downspin on getting an image going for "The House of Clo...

Yocto! Today we will attempt to build/install Yocto for a Raspberry Pi Zero W. This is also a part of the The House of Cloud PI . Like the begining of the software setup side. Directions Attempt 1 Follow instructions and wait for about an hour or more, so long delay here before we get an image. Then we will move on the next step. The instructions did not work for WSL at all. Ended up creating a docker for building yocto. This is part of my virtual machines projects now. Ended up having to added 'cpio', 'locales' and 'python2' to base Ubuntu. Then had to generate the 'en_US.UTF-8'. Finally had to build inside the docker volume by changing the TMPDIR in the local.conf for yocto. So not entirely ideal here, but it's building, which is a great start! As a side note, thinking about building up the docker (tomorrow) to assist with making the build process that much easier, likely going to need to add in some sheel scripts to...