On Saturday 22 July 2017 08:00:10 Erik Christiansen wrote:

> On 22.07.17 06:07, Gene Heskett wrote:
> > I did get an up board. SOB has a uefi bios, and would not boot
> > anything I tried. So I went trolling thru the bios looking for a way
> > to turn that crap off. The only thing I could find was to disable
> > the tcp chip. Bricked it. According to their web site, a $400 jtag
> > programmer and an 80 dollar adapter are needed to rewrite the bios
> > in that event. Questions beyond that on the forum have been ignored.
> > IOW, that board, while seemingly have great specs, has a windows
> > only attitude. UP is otherwise totally unresponsive to users
> > problem.
> >
> > As far as I'm concerned, I got screwed out of a 100 dollar bill and
> > a week.
>
> "UP" stands for Unix Prohibited?

Seems to an accurate description. :)
>
> > The last price I saw for a Udoo was in the neighborhood of 150
> > dollars. I can get a std mobo, with cpu and enough memory for that.
> > So 4 questions now that its shipping:
> >
> > 1. Udoo X86 Ultra, $267.00 on the Udoo site today. Thats not even
> > close to realistic.  The dual/quad is $135 but I can't find any
> > other data on it quickly. Ah, its an arm, claims to be an rpi3
> > performance wise.
>
> Yeah, add the optional M.2 on-board SSD, and you're up to around A$400
> just for the Advanced, but then ours is only worth 3/4 of one of
> yours. And mount that on the back of a monitor, add a wireless
> keyboard & mouse, and you're good to go. I don't think there's any
> need for an Ultra unless you're into games.
>
> I can't see any sense in buying cheap if all it gets you is another
> RPi pig-in-mud. How usable is Machinekit? A Beaglebone is pretty
> competitive, isn't it?
>
It may have been, were I will to learn a new program. Now I am quite 
comfy, although not quite an expert at carving hal stuff, particularly 
when the available docs are often lacking an example line to demo the 
syntax that is left out of the rest of the docs or man pages. I should 
not have to ask for clarification in order to use the modules available.
My most recent question was about the logic level expected at the pin 
oneshot.reset, its not stated in the man page. I suspected it needed a 
logic one, and I believe it was Andy that confirmed it, so 2 more lines 
in my .hal file, and it works as desired. I think the next edits will be 
to take the 2 higher speed jogs back out of it as its way too easy 
to "wind" it up, limited to available MAX_VEL, and it runs a couple feet 
and into something after you've turned it rapidly. There is a mode where 
it would stop where ever its at when the dial stops, velocity I think, 
but haven't tried to convert the code to do that as I was more 
interested in being able to move the absolute distance desired, touch 
that off and make the final good fit.

But I found yesterday that the spindle to bed alignment is fubar'd by 
several thou a foot. I have not loosened those bolts, but it appears I 
need to do some shimming of the head to rear v-way joint. Probably a 
piece of 20 lb paper which is 3 or 4 thou thick. I'll turn 3 or 4 inches 
clean and measure it before the day is fini, and see if I can calculate 
which side of the v-way and how much, to shim it straight. I'll check 
the up-down too. I've already put some shims between the tailstock 
casting and its bed riding shoe because it was so far out of whack 
vertically it was breaking center drills.  Might have to sacrifice a 
feeler gauge blade to get the correct thickness. They are replaceable a 
heck of a lot cheaper than special ordering shim stock from NAPA. :)

> > 2. can any UEFI bios BS be turned off w/o bricking it?
>
> I briefly saw some UEFI nonsense while installing debian, told it to
> shut up and write the MBR, and I haven't had any problem. I think it
> does mean that I can't dual boot MSW, but I've never let that crap
> into the house on my boots, anyway.

I couldn't get it to recognize an sd card with an image downloaded from 
the UP site on it.

UEFI was blocking access to even read the /boot on the card. And it said 
so on screen.

> > 3. Does it have a working spi driver so I don't have to throw away
> > $250 in interfacing hardware and start writing my configs all over
> > again? The spi must be clocked at at least 25 mhz.  Alternatively,
> > can it emulate an EPP port at equ of 5 megabytes a second both ways?
>
> Interface specs are a bit thin. I don't even know if some of the
> digital I/O is on the Braswell (64 bit 4-core X86 host chip) or all on
> the 32 bit sidekick. It says:   OTHER INTERFACES: Up to 20 external
> GPIOs LPC - 2 x I2C - GPIOs - Touch Screen Management signals on
> expansion connector
>
> I'm not too clear on the difference between SPI and I²C, so can't
> advise.

SPI is a 3 or 4 wire & ground serial interface, clocked (connection 1) 
from the pi, individual addressing of up to 4 devices paralleled on the 
cable, 2 connections to select the address, and a common data wire, and 
with Bertho Stultans new rpspi.so driver, at speeds up to 50 mhz, and 
different speeds for read and write. As I understand it, data is clocked 
into the 7i90 on one edge of the clock, and the 7i90's response is read 
on the other edge. But in my observations, I have not seen any such 
interleaved communications. So its a 32 bit packet, going each way, and 
may take more than one packet exchange to fully update things. So you 
can go as fast as your 7i90 can keep up. Transmit side terminated, 
cabling can be longer than the currently 3" mine is. However I have not 
explored cable lengths above 7", which didn't seem to effect its max 
data rate.  Several feet would probably be a different critter, 
requiring slower clocking, or a rethinking of the termination method.

Gotta run, the missus would like some breakfast.

> > 4. How big is it?
>
> It's 4.72 inch x 3.35 inch (12 cm x 8.5 cm). That's as wide as my
> palm, and 1.5 times its length - with 256 GB M.2 on-board SSD hard
> drive included.
>
> > Their site is slow, and has this annoying pop-over asking where you
> > are nearly everytime you switch pages. All the specs are buried in a
> > pdf download which is near impossible to read as they chose a very
> > light color on a white background for the text. That tells me they
> > have something to hide. I did find the size, about an inch bigger
> > than the pi, both ways.
>
> I view the pdf with xpdf, and have set it for a grey background.
> That's not perfect with the light colours, but a damned sight better
> than white. The inverse video produced when selecting a text block
> with a mouse drag is perfectly readable. There's not an excess of "All
> the specs", just some basic numbers.
>
> I've never seen any pop-over asking where you are, on that site.
>
> > All of this is why I'll be watching the rock64 board at $44 fully
> > stuffed,  Claims it doesn't have the pi's i/o bottleneck. And that
> > would be huge.
>
> Best of luck. I'll be waiting for your review. It could be a good
> little unit, if it pans out.
>
> Erik
>
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Cheers, Gene Heskett
-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>

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