The art of shamanism or custom firmware for Olinuxino. Part 1

Once an old Olinuxino board from Olimex was found on an A13 processor from Allwinner, with 512 MB on board, in an old box. Having rummaged, an old homemade USB interface converter - uart / spi on the FT-shke (which was once made for AVRok firmware) and a power supply from some kind of radiotelephone were found there, as well, all this stuff is in the photo below.

It’s a pity to throw out, I don’t want to keep the garbage too, so it was decided to collect a simple web server from this and play around.

Only one problem was with this set ... there was no ethernet, but there was a connector for it with a 3.3V power supply. It remains the case for small, from the old broken tablet to extract the wifi module and put it all together in a heap. Wifi module in the tablet in the upper right corner is sealed. It must be discharged like a wire with an antenna at the end.

The realtek RTL8188 chip module is not the best choice, but it is what it is. It must be installed on the intermediate board for further installation in the board. As a result, we get something like this, the wifi module is removable.



Then we collect everything in a heap and get a green light and a connection to wifi, but it will be later, and on the way to this we need to also assemble the firmware for this.



In the next article we will build the firmware for the board from scratch, starting with the bootloader and ending with Ubuntu 18.04. because there is no nand memory on the board, then we will collect for the boot option from the SD card. And since We will not use the monitor and then Linux will be small in the absence of xorg.

In general, to be continued.

The second part of the article
The third part of the article