Thursday, October 31, 2013

Tighten your bolts

Just a post wishing everyone a Happy Halloween and hoping you avoid zombie processes and scary code.  Continuing from my post last weekend the UDOO is quite a board.  More on it soon, later!

And this is my 2014 rendition of halloween:
Hop eyou enjoyed your halloween!

Sunday, October 27, 2013

UDOO? Well I do.

So I received my UDOO last week which I snatched during its kickstarter campaign.  I was surprised at how easily it booted once I found the nearly appropriate power supply should be 6-15 volts dc at 2 amps, I found one at 9 volts 1 amp.  My next amazon order will include a 2 amp 12 volt power supply.

Here are pictures of the board and the initial screen.  Unlike rasbpi you do not get all of the gruesome but useful details of the boot - at least for their ubuntu OS variant, which is unfortunate.  I will probably boot android next and determine whether there are more initial diagnostics.



One immediate bit of advice for the aging hackers among us is to come prepared to create an .Xresources file and add this line:

xterm*font: *-fixed-*-*-*-18-*
Turns out the xterm in UDOO Ubuntu is initialized in 6 point font!  Very painful for my reading glassses.  You will have to reboot to make it so. 

I ran the old Byte nbench benchmarks and got some interesting results with what I am sure is not exactly a tuned kernel.  For example the numeric sort was 492.92 on the UDOO using gcc 4.4.1 while a 3 Gig Xeon ranged from 684 to 973 depending on the gcc version (not as recent as the UDOO version).  According to a post on the raspberry pi site the rasb pi did score was 200.4.  Not bad for a $100 quad sporting an arduino!  I will keep you posted on my adventures with more extensive comparisons to the raspberry pi and beaglebone black.

On a totally unrelated note, one of my friends Allan Wilks is walking from Scotch Plains to Toronto, Ontario, Canada.  You can follow him on the link I provided and his adventures are truly inspiring.  Allan is one of the nicest, kindest folks I have ever met and if you are along the way, please offer, if you can, to have him stay at your place for the night.  You will be rewarded with an evening with an outstanding and brilliant person.  Allan Wilks along with Rick Becker and John Chambers invented the Statistical package S - you may be more familiar with the open source package R.  If you are not along the way, check out the blogging on his site.  It is interesting and inspiring.

Much more in my queue but no time for now.  Hopefully more in another week.  Later!