[9fans] it's live

[9fans] it's live

[Ronald G Minnich]

ok, so it's trivial, but if you look at mbgokhale.org/bustracker today,
you'll see a track of my wife's Honda Fit ... the arrow on the bus
really does mean 'I am going this direction, as indicated by GPS'.
Josiah built 36 different bus icons to make that go. I'll try to get a
link for node pictures and setup info.

Thanks to Google for Gooooogle maps. Thanks to everyone for Plan 9 :-)

more later. We just built the machine into the toolbox. I gave it the
'drop kick' test (drop it, kick it, kick it, drop it) and it survived.
For this embedded stuff, you need to be pitiless. My wife was kind of
shocked at how mean I was to the hardware before I put it in the car.

I wrote a basically working driver for the DoC Millenium for Plan 9
yesterday, using linuxbios and linux sources. It has debug prints in it,
and it has a problem in one sense, in that a 'busy' bit in a status
register NEVER clear, so every op has to time out (but succeeds). I
think it's a standard docmil hardware problem (doc hardware is a mess,
even if it is cool). I did install an mbr, file system, etc. and it all
works on this part.

If anyone wants the driver to have a go at finishing it up, you're
welcome to it. I was going to put it on sources but I can't get to
sources just now (down?).

I stopped doing it because the (AHEM) fuctory bios is SUPPOSED to treat
doc mil as an IDE drive if the right bios settings are made. It does
nothing of the sort (SURPRISE! a fuctory bios doesn't work). So, I have
to do linuxbios for this node ... but ... it will boot plan 9 really
fast when I'm done. But, the only way to have ONLY a docmil part on the
node is to have linuxbios, as the fuctory bios just won't work.

The docmil driver is small. It made me a big fan of copy and convert.
The Linux doc driver is pretty general, and hence complicated, as it
weaves around the various doc part bugs and 'features'. A simple docmil
driver is ... simple. And, it can be copied and converted for standard
doc. A good deal. I like copy and convert.

oh yeah ...
doc == disk on chip -- 32 pin DIP flash, looks like programmed I/O disk,
up to 64 MB
docmil == disk on chip millenium -- 32DIP, 8 MB

all doc are proprietary, all neat, all full of bugs.

ron

Re: [9fans] it's live

[Devon H. O'Dell]

That is hot. I must have one.

-D

2006/7/26, Ronald G Minnich <rminnich@lanl.gov>:
>
> ok, so it's trivial, but if you look at mbgokhale.org/bustracker today,
> you'll see a track of my wife's Honda Fit ... the arrow on the bus
> really does mean 'I am going this direction, as indicated by GPS'.
> Josiah built 36 different bus icons to make that go. I'll try to get a
> link for node pictures and setup info.
>
> Thanks to Google for Gooooogle maps. Thanks to everyone for Plan 9 :-)
>
> more later. We just built the machine into the toolbox. I gave it the
> 'drop kick' test (drop it, kick it, kick it, drop it) and it survived.
> For this embedded stuff, you need to be pitiless. My wife was kind of
> shocked at how mean I was to the hardware before I put it in the car.
>
> I wrote a basically working driver for the DoC Millenium for Plan 9
> yesterday, using linuxbios and linux sources. It has debug prints in it,
> and it has a problem in one sense, in that a 'busy' bit in a status
> register NEVER clear, so every op has to time out (but succeeds). I
> think it's a standard docmil hardware problem (doc hardware is a mess,
> even if it is cool). I did install an mbr, file system, etc. and it all
> works on this part.
>
> If anyone wants the driver to have a go at finishing it up, you're
> welcome to it. I was going to put it on sources but I can't get to
> sources just now (down?).
>
> I stopped doing it because the (AHEM) fuctory bios is SUPPOSED to treat
> doc mil as an IDE drive if the right bios settings are made. It does
> nothing of the sort (SURPRISE! a fuctory bios doesn't work). So, I have
> to do linuxbios for this node ... but ... it will boot plan 9 really
> fast when I'm done. But, the only way to have ONLY a docmil part on the
> node is to have linuxbios, as the fuctory bios just won't work.
>
> The docmil driver is small. It made me a big fan of copy and convert.
> The Linux doc driver is pretty general, and hence complicated, as it
> weaves around the various doc part bugs and 'features'. A simple docmil
> driver is ... simple. And, it can be copied and converted for standard
> doc. A good deal. I like copy and convert.
>
> oh yeah ...
> doc == disk on chip -- 32 pin DIP flash, looks like programmed I/O disk,
> up to 64 MB
> docmil == disk on chip millenium -- 32DIP, 8 MB
>
> all doc are proprietary, all neat, all full of bugs.
>
> ron
>

Re: [9fans] it's live

[Anthony Sorace]

i know you said "more later", but i'm impatient.

i *think* this is really cool, but i'm not entirely sure. that is, i'm
sure there are cool bits, but i don't know which ones. how's the thing
work? i assume the embedded system's connected directly to the GPS, as
you talked about a while ago, but isn't the web server. how's that
transfer happen? and what system/web server is doing the overlay?

i'm not tremendously interested in GPS myself, but very much so in DoC
and the other connecting bits.

Re: [9fans] it's live

[Ronald G Minnich]

Anthony Sorace wrote:
> i know you said "more later", but i'm impatient.
>
> i *think* this is really cool, but i'm not entirely sure. that is, i'm
> sure there are cool bits, but i don't know which ones. how's the thing
> work? i assume the embedded system's connected directly to the GPS, as
> you talked about a while ago, but isn't the web server. how's that
> transfer happen? and what system/web server is doing the overlay?

The board is a lippert cool frontrunner. Kernel is on IDE-FLASH, soon to
be on DOC. GPS is a fortuna U2, serial port, 9600 baud. Modem is from
airlink, and provides PPP.

SO, board boots p9, runs a /rc/bin/cpurc that starts up ppp over the
modem (I stopped using telco -- it kept dying on me); mounts from
mbgokhale.org; mounts my hacked gpsfs; and, once a minute, does this:
cat /mnt/gps/gps.xml >> /whatever-i-called-it/dsn/gps.xml

That's it. easy as pie. Well, not that easy, there were a LOT of
practical issues, but the node at this point is very reliable. And, I
would not have wanted to do this with Unix.

mbgokhale.org runs an httpd with a bit of code josiah england wrote to
integrate the gps data into google maps. Again, easy in principle, a lot
of work in practice. But it works.

There's a lot more to it, but I need to write it up. But, let it suffice
to say that Plan 9 sure makes this type of thing easy.

thanks

ron