Lady Heather on beaglebone black

[cncjerry]

I didn't have a lot to do this Thanksgiving holiday. I've wanted to hookup a rubidium oscillator to lady Heather, like I had in my office a while back, to control a full-time atomic clock that didn't rely on Gps or a radio signal.  I was using a small HP notebook to run lady heather, but over time they've crashed and I didn't want to dedicate something like a Surface to this project. I had a few beaglebone blacks around, and a few 7" HDMI monitors. So I decided to give them a shot. After a few days of screwing around, I have it working. Granted, I have a fair amount of experience with all this stuff, but still I must admit it wasn't easy. I haven't figured out if it's the lowest cost alternative for running lady heather, and I don't know if you can run more than one copy because of the support for the USB RS232 adapters required. I used to run three GPSDOs for testing along with cesium and two rubidiums.  The hardest part of this project was getting X11 to start.  That took about 24 solid hours.  Compiling Mark's linux version of lady heather was easy and that worked like a charm. I used the lxde desktop.  I could write up the instructions if somebody's really interested. The picture doesn't do it justice as that little 7" monitor actually is very crisp.  I'm just using a small X72 rubidium oscillator for this project.

Jerry

p.s. I just checked, and I'm not an expert, but it looks like there is only one USB TTY device, ttyusb0, defined.

[lowimpedance]

Any effort to unshackle from a PC is worth documenting, for any future users. 
Noted we have the same dining chairs 

[Gerhard_dk4xp]

I once used a BBB to read out an ADC via its real time unit and to process the data
with FFTW. I made a control interface that looked like GPIB, but over LAN; much in the
style of my Agilent 89441A. I opened port ~5002 on BBB==192.168.x.y and could then
feed / read GPIB / IEEE-488-like strings from anywhere in the LAN. That was not
too much ado.
It ended somewhat prematurely because I got the 89441A back to life. :-)

[cncjerry]

The hardest part of the BBB was getting X11 to work as the frame buffer drivers are not documented that well.  I use the BBB to run 'pianobar' which is a pandora streamer.  I add a small usb->SPDIF optical adapter and run that into a DAC to stream Pandora into a whole house speaker setup.  The BBB boards are very low power.

Here's the basic instructions for Lady Heather, contact me offline for more:

After installing an image to a micro SD card, I used a 32Gb, install X11, LXDE and let it add the other products.  32Gb is more than enough room.

  sudo apt install xorg xserver-xorg-video-fbdev x11-xserver-utils xterm openbox -y

  sudo apt-get install lxde

you also need the compiler and library if not installed:

  sudo apt-get install g++ libx11-dev


You need to clone or download the Lady Heather version from https://github.com/stargo/LadyHeatherGPS

The instructions on how to make the program are in the zip. The instructions on how to download and/or clone the files from github are all over the web.  I downloaded the zip into a directory I created called ‘Lady Heather’ and then used unzip on the zip file.  I then ran make clean and make and things compiled correctly

Add the following to /etc/xorg.conf for the 7” display

Code: [Select]

Section "Monitor"
        Identifier      "Builtin Default Monitor"
EndSection
Section "Device"
        Identifier      "Builtin Default fbdev Device 0"
        Driver          "fbdev"
EndSection
Section "Screen"
        Identifier      "Builtin Default fbdev Screen 0"
        Device          "Builtin Default fbdev Device 0"
        Monitor         "Builtin Default Monitor"
EndSection
Section "ServerLayout"
        Identifier      "Builtin Default Layout"
        Screen          "Builtin Default fbdev Screen 0"
EndSection

I then use “startx” to bring up the desktop as well as LXDE.

Open a terminal window in the desktop, navigate to the Lady Heather directory. The startup for heather  and the x72 rubidium installed in ~/Lady Heather is below.

The ‘u’ after the ‘1’ tells it to use the USB TTY device.  I was surprised to see that heather detected the display correctly, something that didn't happen on my notebooks.  If you are using the 6-pin serial port, you would drop the 'u'.

./heather /1u,57600:8:N:1 /rxsy

Oh, and I think the kitchen chairs are Williams-Sonoma circa 1990.

Jerry

[KE5FX]

Thanks for doing the homework on this, Jerry -- I will drop a link to this thread on the old V5 page, as I get occasional questions about how to build the Linux version.

One detail that might be nice to add: specific instructions on how the installation can be set up to boot into Heather automatically, if the BBB loses power.

[cncjerry]

John,
I'll add those instructions as I am making another setup for my GPS.  I can use the GPS PPS output to verify the PPS output of the rubidium occasionally so I'd like to figure out a way to add a 2nd USB serial interface too (or maybe a 3rd).  I'm not sure if this is the lowest cost hardware, possibly the lowest cost new hardware to run LH, but it sips power.  I had planned to send you a note, John, mentioning this setup once I got it all wrung-out.  Hope all's well, it's been a while since I've bugged you with sometimes redundant questions, like why does my GPIB adapter not work again?

By the way, the full instruction for downloading the LH code from github and cloning it to your own ~/Lady Heather directory is:

-> sudo git clone https://github.com/stargo/LadyHeatherGPS

Then run:
-> cd ~/Lady*
-> make clean
-> make

if you get a fatal error, it is most likely because you don't have the X11 library libx11-dev installed and that is corrected by:

->  sudo apt-get install g++ libx11-dev


Jerry