Mini210S has now got a wiki!

Armworks have put up a wiki for it's devices, you can find it here.  It's a mediawiki based site, so it should be familiar to anyone that's used elinux or any other mediawiki based wiki.

You can jump straight to the mini210S pages here, I've spent a few days adding content with tutorials on things I've managed to discover since I got my lovely mini210S in the post :)  I'm sure over the coming weeks and months the mini210S page will fill out nicely with community contributed code, projects and information.

I will probably start to do a mixture of wiki posts and link back to them here with a bit of background around the tutorial/how to, makes sense rather than blogging about it then having to reformat it for the wiki as well.

The tutorials to note so far are:
How to burn a rootfs image to nand
How to root Android 4.0.3 on the mini210S
How to install google apps into the android 4.0.3 img and burn to nand
How to install google apps on the mini210S Android 4.0.3
How to access android debug bridge via tcpip

Burning your own rootfs to nand is obviously going to be a useful skill :D  FriendlyArm provided a prebuilt rootfs for us, so if you haven't got the time or inclination to build your own, you can just dump your working project binaries and scripts into a known working rootfs and just test them out.  Of course once you work out how to build your own rootfs you can make your own from scratch and burn it quite easily.

Rooting Android 4.0.3 seems odd that you'd have to root a development device until of course you consider it's 'rooted' from a development point of view but not rooted from an end user viewpoint.  so if you want to run around android treating it like you would any other device that you own, then you'll want to root it :)  Of course this won't be the case if you're doing an installation of some kind, so use this with caution as rooting has serious security implications.

Google Apps, there are a couple tutorials for getting google apps. onto a mini210S, if you're developing android software on a mini210S, you're probably going to want some kind of access to google play (formally android market) this has to be done by installing google apps (gapps), if you are 'into' using google's web software then you will need to install google apps.  Google apps. provides youtube, gmail, maps, play apps. for android, unfortunately the mini210S doesn't have them installed as standard so we have no way of installing them normally, so a tutorial is needed, I did 2, to cover 2 different methods.

Android debug Bridge via tcp/ip, this tutorial gives a quick and simple way to connect to adb on the mini210S via LAN/Wifi, saves digging around for a usb cable and could end up being a very powerful remote debugging feature, works nicely on a standard home network, I wonder how well it would cope across the internet?

There's also a tutorial on installing flash player on the mini210S, only really of any interest to UK mini210S owners, I did this one so that I could watch iplayer through the mini210S :D

They are mainly Android tutorials at the moment, should have more linux tutorials coming up.  I will also have some info on booting the kernel and rootfs from an SD card soon too!!

Mini210S, flash player, iplayer and google play

I live in the UK, so I get access to bbc TV/Radio video/audio streaming services for free via their iPlayer service, this needs adobe flash player, unfortunately, flash player isn't installed on the 210S and we don't have access to the android market/google play.  Follow these instructions to quickly and simply install adobe flash player on the mini210S.

1. go to the adobe flashplayer archives and download a version appropriate for the version of android, http://helpx.adobe.com/flash-player/kb/archived-flash-player-versions.html I downloaded the latest version (Flash Player 11.1.for Android 4.0 (11.1.115.17)) as I have android 4.0.3 (Ice cream Sandwich) installed.

2. Save it to the Download dir on your SD card, using the ES file explorer, browse to the Download folder on the card, tap on install_flash_player_ics.apk, (if it complains about not being set to install apps that aren't downloaded from the android market, click on the settings button and scroll down and make sure 'unknown sources' is ticked, then press the back button and try again!).

3. once it's installed you can click done or open, if you click open, it will open the web browser and take you to the flash settings page, it was oversized on my LCD, so I don't think it was showing me the whole screen, probably something to do with screen pixel density maybe?  Either way, you should see something legible on screen, if all you see is a little block with a ? in it, then something went wrong somewhere and I have no idea where :D

If everything went ok and you're in the UK you can test flashplayer by going to http://www.bbc.co.uk/mobile/iplayer and play a tv show. 

Obviously this will use data, make sure you use it via wifi or it will use up your download quota if you're connected via mobile networks!! 

You can still test it by doing going to the shows page but don't actually play the video, if it's working you will see all of the user controls and the video itself, if it's not working you will probably see the blue box with the ? in it or just a black area.

Unfortunately, android and flash player is a well trodden subject on the internet, you will find many forum posts on the subject and many apk files to download, I tried loads of different methods until I stumbled across the the developer archive!!  I think this is probably going to be a bit of a commonly recurring theme while trying to track down issues with android.

Another unfortunate thing with the mini210S at the time of writing, there is no google play/android market support, it appears there are chinese app market tools on the device but nothing to cater for the continental markets.  For the time being at least we will probably have to use an alternative market, it's been suggested to me to use this:

http://www.1mobile.com/app/market/

I haven't tried it myself yet but it will do until I can work out how to get 'gapps' (google applications) installed on the mini210S, which will give us gmail and other google associated goodies including access to the market.

My mini210S has arrived

My friendlyarm mini210S package arrived from andahammer a couple of days ago, unfortunately, I didn't get much sleep, so I didn't have a great deal of energy to do much with it except unpack all of the goodies in the box and power it on with the preloaded android 4 image.

A quick run through some of the goodies and there are some very interesting bits, the sdio breakouts look really cute, they fit on the mini210S sdio header, which just happens to have 3.3v, 5v, gnd, spi and i2c on it with a protoboard style which opens up a world of possibilities.

I got the cam130 module which fits into a dedicated cmos camera port, I'm looking forward to seeing what it can do in my astro projects, I think the cmos module on there might give me access to the 'frex' pin via the 2mm header block. 

I got the sdio wifi module with it's obvious benefits. I also got the comprehensive mini210S cable kit for every header on the board and there was also a good quality mini hdmi to hdmi cable :)

Charlie also very kindly chucked in some free goodies, some poe kit, a tiny usb wifi adapter, a nice clear breadboard and a handful of jumper wires, Thanks Charlie!!

So with anticipation I plugged the power supply into the mini2010S, checked that it was in nand boot mode and flipped the power switch, the first thing I noticed is that I didn't have to fish around for jumpers, it might seem daft but little things like switches for boot mode settings are a refreshing change :)

I have zero experience with android, so as far as boot times go I have nothing similar to judge it against, it was around 20 or so seconds but either way, I wasn't annoyed by the wait.  Once the gui is up and running, the mini210S is nice and responsive, flipping through the menus is a pleasant experience, with a mixture of touchscreen and the 4 side buttons to help you navigate, it is a resistive touch screen so there are no gestures/multitouch but it's been as good as other resistive touchscreen devices I've used.

There are plenty of apps. preloaded but for now I settled for trying the iTest app first, testing the leds, pwm buzzer and adc, as expected they worked just fine, the led test app. allows you to turn the leds on and off independently of each other and the buzzer app allows you to set the pwm speed and hear it through the buzzer, no shock there then!

the A/D Convert test shows the value of the ADC pin that is connected to a small blue pot, which is nestled between the buzzer and the back of the ethernet socket, if you adjust the pot with a screwdriver you can see the adc value change on screen, unfortunately there appears to be a glitch in the display side of the software as it's not rendering the bottom 1/2 of the numbers but you can clearly see that the adc is working as expected.

I also tested out the sdio wifi module, unfortunately there doesn't appear to be an app. store icon/app installed on the mini210S so I couldn't go and test bbc iplayer etc. but browsing the bbc website was simple enough and youtube worked just fine too :)  I tested the music player and got very decent quality audio from the headphone socket.

The video player appears to want mp4/aac encoded video, so a quick re-encode of some video with my cuda enabled graphics card and a few minutes later I was watching video on the mini210S, I had to access the video via the 'es file browser' app but once you click on it you get the option of using the es video player or the gallery software, either is capable of playing the video and does it well.

Last thing I tested was the cam130 cmos camera module, as previously mentioned, it fits onto a dedicated cmos camera socket on the mini210S, in android there is a simple camera application that allows you to take snapshots or record video, the software starts up quickly and presents you with a picture.  There are the usual settings buttons which allow you to change exposure, brightness, mode etc. as well as a set of buttons to allow you to swap between camera/video modes and a third mode that I haven't quite worked out yet :)

So that's my initial experience of the mini210S and android, I'm really happy with the potential of the mini210S, the onboard android image has enough software on it to give you a very reasonable media experience out of the box, I forgot to mention that you can also connect it to a hdtv, for a device that has been built for developers, it's a great little media centre which just adds more power to your elbow :)

I can't wait to get linux onto it now and start developing, the mini210S has shown itself as being a very capable device just from me messing around in the stock android and I've barely scratched the surface, I have a feeling that it's just going to get better and better once I start developing on it :)

Clearing the decks for the min210S

So it looks like I'm getting a mini210S, in honour of the fact, I decided to clear some bench space for it.  Not sure about anyone else but my computer desk is a mixture of computers and random circuits/electronics all vying for the same desktop space, it's a bit like the penny falls machines in the arcades, eventually, stuff makes its way to the back of the desk and falls off. 

I've been slowly tidying my desk over the last few weeks, lots of sets of plastic drawers etc. for the random stuff I collect/use.  After all the tidying, I now have a reasonable 12-18" sq. area of space that should do just nicely for the 210S and any associated circuits that are bound to build up around it!

Mini210S

In my introduction I mentioned that I'd been looking at the mini210S, after my raspberry pi experience, I feel like I needed a full arm dev board, it's a logical progression really, from hacking arm devices, to a small dev board, to a full board.  I've often looked at the mini2440/6410 etc. range of arm boards, they always impressed me as looking like very neat devices, well presented board designs with ports everywhere and some nice looking addon screens, however the price put me off.

I spoke to a friend recently about the way forward and he informed me about the forthcoming mini210S release.  As you can see, it's a very well featured device, it comes with an arm cortex a8 @ 1Ghz, 512MB of ram and 4gb of nand, a huge list of features and more IO connectors than you could shake a stick at.  Very interesting indeed!