Scavenger Hunt

[wandboard]

OK. So we are on a "Scavenger Hunt" to find community software created for the Wandboard and the blog post linking to a demo image as well as wiki instructions are posted on the Wandboard frontpage. (http://www.wandboard.org)

Today in our first post we cover XBMC / Kodi.

[seb-esperanto]

The idea is great, thank you !
Would love to see Kodi working with my Wandboard Quad...

Unfortunately, I get the wandboard logo for 4 seconds at the very beginning of the boot process,
and then just a black (HDMI-connected) screen...

Keyboard light does change when I hit Numlock key : system seems to be alive...

Any idea about what I should do ?

[Wig]

Hello seb-esperanto:

Did you connect panel via HDMI to DVI connector or not?
If not, would you mind offer your brand and model type for panel?

In addition, you can trying this way:
Don't connect the HDMI connector first until system boot success(about 20 seconds), if this method can works,
please let me know.

Thank you so much!

[synportack24]

This is a really cool idea!

Just downloaded Geebox can't wait to give it a try.
There is a lot of good work being done by xoddark with a wandboard branch of openelec see the tread
https://github.com/xoddark/OpenELEC.tv/
and this
https://github.com/OpenELEC/OpenELEC.tv/issues/3653


a cool idea would be something lakka TV or some other emulation system like that

[seb-esperanto]

Dear Wig,
Thank you so much for your answer !
About the kodi image,
good news and bad news here !!

First, good news because you solved my problem !
Reading your answer I had the feeling you were sure about the image,
so I double-checked everything. Same problem with another screen, another HDMI-HDMI cable... But when I tried to write the image on another microSD card... it worked ! And I'm happy to see that kodi is working (very) well on my Wandboard Quad ! Just the microSD card was failing...

But, also bad news !
Because every 10 minutes... the screen goes black !
The system is still alive because the sound is still here, Numlock's LED blinks when hitting it, I also can telnet to the system...
I made a lot of tests and finally understood how I can reproduce the problem... Very strange behaviour !
When the screen goes off, I can make it go on again with the following sequence :
Step 1 - unplug USB keyboard
Step 2 - plug USB keyboard again
Step 3 - hit a key
And this only works if Step 3 occurs no more than 5 seconds after Step 2 !
After this sequence, the screen goes on immediately... but it will get black again exactly 10 minutes later...
I tried to do the sequence again before the 10 minutes delay. This is useful because it seems to reset the 10 minutes counter before the screen goes black : the screen will go black exactly 10 minutes after the last Step 1 - Step 2 - Step 3 sequence (it must be complete ! this was not valid when I tried with only Step 1 and Step 2).

Of course I switched off both screen saving and energy saving in Kodi...

Really, really strange...
I can reproduce this exact behaviour with another screen, another HDMI-HDMI cable, another keyboard...
No matter whether Kodi is playing a video stream or doing nothing.
So I think you all should have the same problem... Can you confirm ?

Maybe I should ask for help somewhere else...
Another topic in the Wandboard forum ?
Or maybe in geexbox's own forum ?

Thank you again for your answer,
and thanks to the Wandboard team !

[HB1964]

So I think you all should have the same problem... Can you confirm ?

Yeah, same problem here and the solutions given in the xbmc section of this forum by editing the uEnv.txt to add "video=mxcfb0:dev=hdmi,1920x1080M@60,if=RGB24,bpp=32 consoleblank=0" don't work either this time.

[seb-esperanto]

Hi,

Yeah, same problem here and the solutions given in the xbmc section of this forum by editing the uEnv.txt to add "video=mxcfb0:dev=hdmi,1920x1080M@60,if=RGB24,bpp=32 consoleblank=0" don't work either this time.

Thank you for confirming the problem, and for pointing us to the consoleblank=0 parameter.

It seems that /boot/uEnv.txt is not used,
because the effective kernel command line is different :

Code: Select all

root@geexbox:/boot# cat uEnv.txt
mmcargs=setenv bootargs 'console=ttymxc0,115200 root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 rootfstype=ext4 rootwait rw consoleblank=0 video=mxcfb0:dev=hdmi,1920x1080M@60,if=RGB24,bpp=32 dmfc=3'
root@geexbox:/boot# cat /proc/cmdline
console=ttymxc0,115200 root=/dev/mmcblk2p2 rootwait rw video=mxcfb0:dev=hdmi,1280x720M@60,if=RGB24 fbmem=28M


In the thread http://forums.wandboard.org/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=140&start=10 I found that

Code: Select all

echo -e '\033[9;0]' > /dev/tty1

should disable blanking...
I typed this in a telnet terminal and... it works ! No more screen blanking after 10 minutes !

It would be fine if the geexbox sdcard image could be updated to solve this bug.

Thank you all !

[Tapani]

Seems like there is a screensaver that goes on, and good that there is a workaround.

FYI we have updated the image in downloads with one where the console blanking has been turned off.
(We patched drivers/tty/vt/vt.c to set blankinterval to 0)

[seb-esperanto]

I do confirm that the new image for Kodi doesn't have the blanking bug anymore.
(but be careful that the link on the main webpage at wandboard.org still points to the old one)

I'm really happy to see that the Wandboard behaves very well at rendering video content !

Thank you very much for your work !!

[seb-esperanto]

I also would like to thank you all for the very useful wiki page describing how you produced the XBMC-Kodi-Geexbox sdcard image.

I needed a lot of time and web search to succeed to build everything, I think the wiki should be improved, because there are a few mistakes (both in english text and in command lines).
Also a step 0 would be useful : Setup cross-compiling (download wandboard-SDK archive and read doc/wand-dev.pdf)

But now I still have a problem : my own-created sdcard does boot and I can login, but XBMC does not start.
When I type xbmc-standalone, I get :
XBMC needs hardware accelerated OpenGL rendering.
Install an appropriate graphics driver.

The problem can be reproduced by just changing your (working) zImage (3.10.53-1.1.0_ga-wandboard-06036-ge248105) by mine (3.10.53-1.1.0_ga-wandboard-06036-gf5f4aea) on the sdcard.
Maybe the small version difference makes problem with the GPU userland code ??

For your information and to help others, I give the exact commands I used to build the sdcard.

First, I setup a clean Debian Jessie chroot.

Code: Select all

###   SETUP JESSIE CHROOT   ###

sudo debootstrap jessie jessie
sudo chroot jessie


Then, inside the chroot, the difficult part :

Code: Select all

###   INSIDE JESSIE   ###
# http://wiki.wandboard.org/Kodi_/_XBMC_for_Wandboard

set -e
cd /root/


# Step 0a. Setup cross-building for Debian Jessie
# https://wiki.debian.org/CrossToolchains

apt-get update
apt-get -y install curl
echo deb http://emdebian.org/tools/debian/ jessie main >/etc/apt/sources.list.d/crosstools.list
curl http://emdebian.org/tools/debian/emdebian-toolchain-archive.key | apt-key add -

dpkg --add-architecture armel
apt-get update
apt-get -y install crossbuild-essential-armel

export ARCH=arm
export CROSS_COMPILE=arm-linux-gnueabi-



# Step 0b. Install needed tools

apt-get -y install bc git lzop



# Step 1. Build u-boot bootloader

git clone https://github.com/wandboard-org/u-boot-fslc.git
pushd u-boot-fslc
make wandboard_spl_defconfig  ;### NOTE: "uninitialized" error, but .config and spl/.config are created
make
popd


# Step 2. Prepare kernel
# Step 3. Prepare device tree blob

git clone https://github.com/wandboard-org/linux
pushd linux
# git branch -a
git checkout wandboard_imx_3.10.53_1.1.0_ga
make wandboard_defconfig  ;### NOTE: "uninitialized" error, but .config is created
make zImage
make imx6q-wandboard.dtb
popd

exit


The last steps are easy. No problem with them.

Code: Select all

#!/bin/sh
set -e


# Step 4. Partition the SD card
# Partition your SD card in two partitions, but leave some space before your first partition, around 128kB is more than enough

DISK=/dev/mmcblk0
PARTITION1=${DISK}p1
PARTITION2=${DISK}p2

sudo sfdisk ${DISK} <<EOF
type=c,  start= 8192, size=  16384, bootable
type=83, start=24576
EOF


# Step 5. Format SD card
# Format first partition as FAT16 and the second one as ext4

sudo mkfs.fat       $PARTITION1
sudo mkfs.ext4 -FFq $PARTITION2


# Step 6. Make SD card bootable

# copy SPL image to the unpartitioned space before the first partition
sudo dd if=jessie/root/u-boot-fslc/SPL of=$DISK bs=1k seek=1 oflag=dsync

# copy u-boot.img, zImage, wandboard dtb files into $PARTITION1
mkdir /tmp/PARTITION1
sudo mount $PARTITION1 /tmp/PARTITION1
sudo mkdir /tmp/PARTITION1/boot
sudo cp jessie/root/u-boot-fslc/u-boot.img jessie/root/linux/arch/arm/boot/zImage jessie/root/linux/arch/arm/boot/dts/imx6q-wandboard.dtb /tmp/PARTITION1/boot
sudo umount /tmp/PARTITION1
rmdir /tmp/PARTITION1


# Step 7. Prepare rootfs

ROOTFS_TAR=$(ls geexbox-*.cuboxi.tar | tail -1)
if [ -z $ROOTFS_TAR ]
then
  echo "Missing file : geexbox-*.cuboxi.tar ... Please download from http://download.geexbox.org/snapshots/geexbox-xbmc-imx6-cuboxi/" >&2
else
  # Extract Geexbox rootfs tar file to /dev/sdx2
  mkdir /tmp/PARTITION2
  sudo mount $PARTITION2 /tmp/PARTITION2
  cat $ROOTFS_TAR | ( cd /tmp/PARTITION2 ; sudo tar xf -)
  sudo umount /tmp/PARTITION2
  rmdir /tmp/PARTITION2
fi

sync
echo Done.