I didn’t want to fiddle around with getting power to the Chumby, so the test is simply using my trusty old laptop and the EasySync adapter.  Only the speedometer, the tachometer and the accelerator pedal position is attached because again I’m too lazy to fiddle with my cable layout and as such its connected to the Mazda HS-Can bus only rather than the MS-Can where the goodie trip computer information is contained.

Almost every concoction of technology is used ranging from CAN, USB, PHP, HTTP, Shared Memory, XML, Flash, to an obscure programming language called HaXe.  Here is the result :-

The flash movie was set to 6 frames per second and the responsiveness of the data was superb.  I think I’ve stated before that the CAN speed data differs to the one displayed on the instrumentation cluster and this again really shows at higher speeds.

All I need to do now is to try it on a Chumby, there should be no portability issues as I’ve tested both flash and php on the Chumby before.

So does anyone have any comments and suggestions on the GUI and what else I could put on it?

Picture time :-

Most of the gear laid out on carpet

Read on for a little bit more…

All crammed into a waterproof case for a test fit

Motor/pump mounts attached by cable ties...

Motor/pump mounts attached by cable ties...

Water Float Test

Water Float Test

Parts List so far

• Asus WL-520GU Wireless Router
• Denkovi USB 8 Channel Relay Board
• AV-Tech AVI202 IP Camera
• Johnson L450 Cartridge Bilge Pump
• 12V 7Ah SLA Battery
• 6V 3.2Ah SLA Battery
• $8AUD Waterproof Case from the discount store

Video time :-

Johnson L450 Bilge Pump Thrust Test

Why do I need a toolchain for programming ARMs?

1. I found a LPC2378-STK development board in my room
2. I want to give ARM programming a try (PS WinAVR is great for programming AVRs)
3. I found I have some spare ARM7 LPC2378′s lying around (WTF?) and thought I’ll actually complete my Chumby Speedometer on my car project!

The compile process should be pretty straight forward, but I made a few stuffup’s along the way.

• I had originally wanted to keep it neat and install to a new directory, then the PATH annoyance thing hit me.  Setting the path under my user shell didn’t carry over when using sudo which is required to make install.  Solved using sudo -s, but then in the end i just redid it all and installed to /usr/local/.
• Realised (should have known) that you need ‘GMP’ and ‘MPFR’ to compile GCC.  Available as packages libgmp3-dev and libmpfr-dev in Ubuntu.
• Did my usual of forgetting to set up the prefix install location when configuring…minor boo boo

Setting it all up

Install any packages you need… build-essential is probably essential… GMP and MPFR could be got by using

sudo apt-get install libgmp3-dev libmpfr-dev

Set-up some directories…I opted to use create an ‘arm-elf’ directory in my home to hold both the source and build directories…

cd ~
mkdir arm-elf arm-elf/src
cd ~/arm-elf/src

Get the latest sources…

Get the latest sources for binutils, gcc, newlib, insight (click the links if you need).  The versions I used should be obvious from the filenames below.  Just be wary that the insight front page is not kept up to date but you’ll find the latest if you follow any of the release links anyway.

wget http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/binutils/binutils-2.19.tar.bz2
wget http://gcc.releasenotes.org/releases/gcc-4.3.2/gcc-4.3.2.tar.bz2
wget ftp://sources.redhat.com/pub/newlib/newlib-1.16.0.tar.gz
wget ftp://sourceware.org/pub/insight/releases/insight-6.8.tar.bz2

Unpack the sources…

tar -xvjf binutils-2.19.tar.bz2
tar -xvjf gcc-4.3.2.tar.bz2
tar -xvzf newlib-1.16.0.tar.gz
tar -xvjf insight-6.8.tar.bz2

Tweak the gcc source config…

Make a minor config tweak to the gcc source.  Edit gcc-4.3.2/gcc/config/arm/t-arm-elf and append mno-thumb-interwork/mthumb-interwork after MULTILIB_OPTIONS and normal interwork after MULTILIB_DIRNAMES.  I used nano, see the screenshot below if I haven’t been too clear

nano ~/arm-elf/src/gcc-4.3.2/gcc/config/arm/t-arm-elf

Start building with fingers crossed…

Now we can start building the toolchain.  Note my prefix is /usr/local.  First off binutils!

cd ~/arm-elf/
mkdir build build/binutils-2.19 build/insight-6.8 build/gcc-4.3.2 build/newlib-1.16.0

cd ~/arm-elf/build/binutils-2.19
~/arm-elf/src/binutils-2.19/configure –target=arm-elf –prefix=/usr/local –enable-interwork –enable-multilib –with-float=soft –disable-werror
sudo make all install

Next just the gcc part of gcc…note we configure the newlib src headers here…

cd ~/arm-elf/build/gcc-4.3.2
~/arm-elf/src/gcc-4.3.2/configure –target=arm-elf –prefix=/usr/local –enable-interwork –enable-multilib –with-float=soft –disable-werror –enable-languages=”c,c++” –with-newlib  –with-headers=~/arm-elf/src/newlib-1.16.0/newlib/libc/include
sudo make all-gcc install-gcc

Now newlib…

cd ~/arm-elf/build/newlib-1.16.0
~/arm-elf/src/newlib-1.16.0/configure –target=arm-elf –prefix=/usr/local –enable-interwork –enable-multilib –with-float=soft –disable-werror
sudo make all install

Coming back for the rest off gcc (needed newlib)

cd ~/arm-elf/build/gcc-4.3.2
sudo make all install

…and finally insight gdb

cd ~/arm-elf/build/insight-6.8
~/arm-elf/src/insight-6.8/configure –target=arm-elf –prefix=/usr/local –enable-interwork –enable-multilib –with-float=soft –disable-werror
sudo make all install

Voila done!  I should now have all my arm-elf tools!  Just a check…

madox@madox-laptop:/usr/local/bin$ ls arm*
arm-elf-addr2line  arm-elf-gcc        arm-elf-insight  arm-elf-run
arm-elf-ar         arm-elf-gcc-4.3.2  arm-elf-ld       arm-elf-size
arm-elf-as         arm-elf-gccbug     arm-elf-nm       arm-elf-strings
arm-elf-c++        arm-elf-gcov       arm-elf-objcopy  arm-elf-strip
arm-elf-c++filt    arm-elf-gdb        arm-elf-objdump
arm-elf-cpp        arm-elf-gdbtui     arm-elf-ranlib
arm-elf-g++        arm-elf-gprof      arm-elf-readelf

Yup all there and runs   Now the search for the LPC header files… argh

PS : If you copy and paste my commands, be wary of line breaks… I didn’t put \’s anywhere…