Thank you for your donation!


Cloudsmith graciously provides open-source package management and distribution for our project.


moOde on Libre Computer Le Potato
#2
(09-06-2022, 02:11 AM)TheOldPresbyope Wrote: I love to tinker, especially with new hardware or at least with hardware that is new to me.

So I was reading yet another one of those click-bait pieces about "best alternatives to the Raspberry Pi" that continually pop up in my news feeder. As usual, the article was horribly shallow and looked mostly like a paste-up of vendor announcements. For some reason, though, its mention of the Libre Computer Le Potato (AML-S905X-CC) board selling for just 45USD caught my eye. The specs of this old-ish SBC weren't great but the price was right and I was intrigued that this is an ARM board yet its firmware uses grub and uefi to boot an OS the way x86 boards do.

Sunday morning I ordered one along with a Libre-branded power supply from Amazon and the package arrived this afternoon.

15 minutes later I had it running moOde 8.1.2 and playing through my Creative BT-W2 USB adapter to my Sennheiser Bluetooth headphones. Woof.

How was that possible, you may ask, especially since the boot process in the Le Potato firmware works so completely differently from the way the Pi loader works. 

Well, their software devs have created a script---Libre Computer Raspbian Portability, aka LRP---which one executes on a Pi running Raspbian/Raspberry Pi OS to populate new subdirectories in the running OS's /boot partition to support the Le Potato boot process. It also installs a more recent kernel.

It turns out that the script works just fine when run in moOde 8.1.2. The result is a uSD card which will boot into moOde on either a Pi or a Le Potato. In my case, the kernel is now 5.19.6.

There's also a program---Libre Computer Wiring Tool---which translates GPIOs and dtoverlays but I haven't dabbled with it yet.

Many things don't work right, at least not yet, some of them superficial (moOde can't identify the board/CPU type, for example) and some not (can't use a DAC hat, for example; for another, smb/cifs filesystems won't mount although nfs filesystems do). 

Still, it's fun to see how far I can push this. It was far easier to get to the point I can listen to music than when I tried to build moOde 4.0 on foreign boards such as a CuBox-i 4P years ago. As a friend was fond of saying, it keeps me out of bars.

Regards,
Kent

Thanks for this, looks like a viable alternative to the now unobtainium RPi 3B+, as they indicate the form factor matches to the extent you can use a case/enclosure meant for the 3B+ too.

So the initial build of the uSD card is done in a RPi using the LRP script, and then once completed that card boots the Le Potato board?
Reply


Messages In This Thread
RE: moOde on Libre Computer Le Potato - by MikeyFresh - 09-06-2022, 03:11 AM

Forum Jump: