Nxt CubieTruck
CubieTruck arrived here yesterday and I got it online with Nxt Client 0.5.4e and 0.5.5 after several hours work. To set up CT and let it work is not so easy but it can be handled with the help of google and some knowledge of linux. I promised to write a small guide for the set up of Cubietruck, so I will tell you how to do it and hope you nxters get CT set up and happy forging. The following steps may be a little simple and without so many details, but I will tell you what you need to take care and I hope I have time to finish it with details.
Firstly, let's see the box. It's a little bigger than Raspberry Pi. CT was designed in Zhuhai and made in Zhuhai, China. Actually, I just learned it a week ago. Before that, I ran a public VPS node and a Rasberry Pi node. The Pi node has only 512 M memory, and it was very slow as I complained it before. So I was very eager to have one mini PC more powerful to run Nxt 24/7.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/4n4pza3id89yu5r/IMG_20140111_145239.jpg
Open the box, you get the red board and the other accessories, including the mini USB you will use to flash the system and power line.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/n6pr50fp63fz145/IMG_20140111_145502.jpg
https://www.dropbox.com/s/e1x3ejtev24l6bs/IMG_20140111_145540.jpg
https://www.dropbox.com/s/9907t2g0gn9xvpb/IMG_20140111_145837.jpg
Okay, now let's assemble the board with the plastic case. It doesn't need any other device and it will just take you several minutes. So you get it as following.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/e27hq47m6eeena5/IMG_20140111_155551.jpg
After the assembling, now the soft part coming. We need to light up the cubieboard. Before we start it, let's learn a little about the cubieboard 3, that is, cubietruck. The official website is http://cubieboard.org . One great forum for it is www.cubieforums.com, which you will reference to for your question. You can find the hardware information about the board, and here I just mention the CPU is ARM A20, and 2 gb memory, and it has 8 gb nand flash memory, so you don't need to prepare additional micro SD card to install operating system to set up Nxt client.
So now we install a operating system to nand flash memory. I choose to install
lubuntu system. There are two great guides for it.
=http://docs.cubieboard.org/tutorials/ct1/installation/cb3_lubuntu-12.10-desktop_nand_installation_v1.00Here cubieboard doc and another
blog. BTW, I downloaded lubuntu image from
http://dl.cubieboard.org/software/a20-cubietruck/lubuntu/ct-lubuntu-nand-v1.01/ct-lubuntu-desktop/ , which is lubuntu 13.04 system, not 12.10.
After download the image and the flashing tool, you can use the mini USB bus to flash the image to the board. It's simple to do according to those instructions. When the system installation complete, you can start the system. However, you don't know how is going on. Don't worry, you don't even need the monitor, mouse and keyboard. Plug the network to the board and wait one or two minutes, and then you can get your board IP address through your router's (here for me is
http://192.168.2.1) client list. The client "cubietruck" is just your cubietruck board, and here I get my board IP 192.168.2.105. Now ssh with putty to your board. Wow, I connected to it. The default user name for lubuntu is "linaro", and password is also "linaro". So you login and do what you want to do.
Do something as the above blog recommends to do. One important thing you need to do is to combine two partitions in the nand flash memory so as to get bigger root file system. "/dev/nandb" is mounted as root system, and after the installation you may have about 700 M space for use, but it is too small for install java and other development tools and libraries. There is another "/dev/nandc" partition which owns about 5 gb. You can get help from
http://www.cubieforums.com/index.php?topic=1134.msg6783#msg6783 to get things done.
I also installed desktop for the system by "sudo apt-get install lubuntu-desktop", and then installed x11vnc for vnc desktop connection. After those work, finally, I set up java environment and install Nxt client. I works fine and it's running very fast and easy to deal with vnc connection for web browser operating. The images go here for you.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/8y6muyuw9mpjj1y/IMG_20140113_003131.jpg
https://www.dropbox.com/s/lyu2puw4ksqtxxu/Screen%20Shot%202014-01-13%20at%2012.02.27%20AM.png
https://www.dropbox.com/s/xnky9etdf6d0qcb/Screen%20Shot%202014-01-13%20at%2012.06.08%20AM.png
