verypossible / nerves_system_giant_board

Nerves system for the Groboards Giantboard

Giant Board

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Feature	Description
CPU	500 MHz ARM Cortex-A5
Memory	128M DDR2
Storage	MicroSD
Linux kernel	5.4
IEx terminal	UART ttyS0
GPIO, I2C, SPI	Yes - Elixir Circuits
UART	ttyS0
Ethernet	No
Video	No
Camera Interface	No

USB OTG support

One of the goals of this system is to make it possible to do most development via one USB cable. That cable, when plugged into the USB OTG port, powers the Giant board and provides local networking. Via the network connection, one can access an IEx prompt via ssh, transfer files via sftp, run firmware updates, use Erlang distribution and anything else that works over IP.

When you connect the USB OTG port to your laptop, it should "just" work if you're using OSX or Linux. If you're on Windows and want to access networking natively (not through a Linux VM), you will need to install linux.inf. This file is unsigned and will fail to install unless you disable signed driver enforcement. The basic idea is to go to settings, go to the advanced boot settings and navigate the menus to boot with it off. There are examples on the web.

Console and kernel message configuration

You will need to use a USB-to-UART adapter and connect it to the UART pins on the Giant board GPIO header. Make sure to use a USB-to-UART adapter with 3.3V logic levels. This is most of them and to make things confusing, most adapters can supply 5V. Just don't connect the 5V wire.

Supported WiFi devices

The board includes support for the ATWILC1500 WiFi chip. This chip is commonly found on the Giant board WiFi feather.

Provisioning devices

This system supports storing provisioning information in a small key-value store outside of any filesystem. Provisioning is an optional step and reasonable defaults are provided if this is missing.

Provisioning information can be queried using the Nerves.Runtime KV store's Nerves.Runtime.KV.get/1 function.

Keys used by this system are:

Key	Example Value	Description
nerves_serial_number	"12345678"	By default, this string is used to create unique hostnames and Erlang node names. If unset, it defaults to part of the Giant board's device ID.

The normal procedure would be to set these keys once in manufacturing or before deployment and then leave them alone.

For example, to provision a serial number on a running device, run the following and reboot:

iex> cmd("fw_setenv nerves_serial_number 12345678")

This system supports setting the serial number offline. To do this, set the NERVES_SERIAL_NUMBER environment variable when burning the firmware. If you're programming MicroSD cards using fwup, the commandline is:

sudo NERVES_SERIAL_NUMBER=12345678 fwup path_to_firmware.fw

Serial numbers are stored on the MicroSD card so if the MicroSD card is replaced, the serial number will need to be reprogrammed. The numbers are stored in a U-boot environment block. This is a special region that is separate from the application partition so reformatting the application partition will not lose the serial number or any other data stored in this block.

Additional key value pairs can be provisioned by overriding the default provisioning.conf file location by setting the environment variable NERVES_PROVISIONING=/path/to/provisioning.conf. The default provisioning.conf will set the nerves_serial_number, if you override the location to this file, you will be responsible for setting this yourself.