MarsBoard is a modest clone of RPi. We put and configure the system

  • Tutorial

Good day, the inhabitants of Habr! Some time after the games with the Raspberry Pi , I got a clone of this board - MarsBoard on the Allwinner A10 chip. Technical specifications can be found here . 4 things attracted me - low power consumption (500mA, which is lower than RPi), the presence of a SATA connector, USB-OTG and built-in NAND storage. Who is interested - read on.

The kit (finally!) Guessed to put the minimum necessary cables (power, SATA, USB-OTG). Upset one BUT: HDMI produces only FullHD video signal, so connecting to a regular 4: 3 monitor will not work - you will behold a black screen.

First start


To test the performance, you can start MarsBoard without a memory card, in which case the default installed in NAND Android 4.0.4 ICS with minimal functionality will be loaded.

At the time of receiving the board, I did not have an HDMI cable, but I wanted to poke right away. So we will configure the system for SSH.
For initial setup, we need:
  • Power Cord There is a kit. The end stuck into the device resembles charging from a Nokia (narrow tube). The other end (USB) can be connected to the USB output of the computer, there is enough energy.
  • microSD-card at 4GB minimum (better at 8, to be safe). Not included.
  • Card reader for computer.
  • Ethernet cable. Not included.


First you need to download the system image from the offsite. I chose the image of Lubuntu 12.04 v4 with LXDE, and I will build on its example. The link to the image is www.haoyuelectronics.com/marsboard/lubuntu-desktop-12.2.04-4-720p-marsboard.img.7z. To upload the
image, we will need the Win32DiskImager utility for Windows , for Linux we will use the standard command dd.

So, download and unpack the img file from the archive, connect the microSD via the card reader.
Further:
for windows
  1. Launch Win32DiskImger
  2. Specify the path to the img file of the system image and the drive letter with the memory card
  3. Click "Write"

for linux
  1. We launch the terminal
  2. Format the flash drive:
    marsboard@marsboard ~ $ sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=$card
    
  3. We write an image:
    marsboard@marsboard ~ $ sudo dd if=$img of=$card
    

Where $cardis the flash drive device (for example /dev/sdc), and $imgis the path to the system image img-file


We are waiting for the completion of operations. We insert the card into the board and plug it into the network. 4 LEDs next to the processor and 1 next to the HDMI output should light up.

Network setup


To continue the configuration, we will use a LAN connection. We connect the board and the router with an Ethernet cable. Next, we go into the web interface of the router and see which IP was automatically assigned to our board by the DCHP server. We are connected via SSH using this IP.
Login: marsboard
Password:marsboard

I advise you to immediately determine the static IP for the device. To do this, open the file /etc/network/interfacesand add the following to it:
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
# статический IP для платы:
    address 192.168.0.104
# маска вашей подсети
    netmask 255.255.255.0
# ваш шлюз:
    gateway 192.168.0.1

I use nano, but it is not out of the box in the system, so do not forget to install:
marsboard@marsboard ~ $ sudo apt-get install nano

Another point. For some strange reason I in the development of DNS service processing system configuration slipped localhost (127.0.0.1), because of what fell off apt-get updateand installsome of the packages. So let's add another Google DNS server:
marsboard@marsboard ~ $ sudo echo "nameserver 8.8.8.8" > /etc/resolv.conf

Reboot, reconnect to our static IP. Further, you can perform the initial configuration of the device according to your spiritual needs, for example, install a VNC server if the HDMI cable still does not appear, or disable the graphical shell at all if it is supposed to work only in the console (Linux, all the same).

UPD1: fixed interface config

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