Arietta 25

I picked up two Acme Systems Arietta G25‘s. They’re a tiny Atmel ARM9 powered board with most of the I/O out on a 0.1″ header. I hope to hook one up to a GPS to send up in my plane and record the track and speed.

Some random notes:

The board shows up as a USB CDC EEM Ethernet adapter. ChromeOS includes the CDC Ether but not the EEM driver. I built the chromeos-3.8.11 EEM driver from source and it worked just fine.

The usual SSH port forwarding trick works well for installing extra packages. Run Polipo somewhere on your network, SSH into the board with port forwarding (-R 8123:proxy-name:8123), set the proxy (export http_proxy=http://localhost:8123/), and apt-get away.

The default hostname is arietta. Add it to the localhost line in /etc/hosts to make sudo faster.

The default golang packages that come with x86_64 Ubuntu Trusty work great for cross compiling, and the statically linked binaries run on the board with no extra support. Try GOARCH=arm GOARM=5 go build.

I can’t figure out how to build a Device Tree script into the binary form. The Linux kernel uses #include and abuses the C preprocessor, but you need a whole set of flags to cut the extra noise that cpp adds so that dtc can still parse the output. Copying into the Kernel tree works fine.