Supporting the Olive One player

[Kidahl]

Hi,
I recently purchased a great embedded player/amp from Olive as part of a Kickstarter (see http://www.myoliveone.com)

Unfortunately for us backers, the company now seem to have gone offline, leaving the backers with a player that only supports half of the promised features. Fortunately for us, we have the root password for the unit.

I have been able to play sound from the command line using: cat /dev/urandom | aplay -f S16_LE -c 2, and it seems to have configured ALSA.

The unit has no AUX in, so we are currenly limited to very bad Bluetooth streaming from mobile phones and an unstable GUI.
The hardware is however fantastic and the backers would love to keep the unit alive into the future.

Developing the GUI on the unit is probably too much for a small non-tech community so the possibility of running a community-developed headless server on the unit seems to be a great idea.

I am myself a professional developer, but not for linux. Most other backers are hi-fi enthusiasts. I suppose we are 100-1000 stranded users, maybe more.

The unit is running BusyBox on: Linux OLIVE 3.0.35 #1 SMP Tue Apr 26 14:52:01 CST 2016 armv7l GNU/Linux

Could you please give me some pointers on the dependencies of the distribution so that I can get a grip of the scope of porting Rune?

There is no apt-get, but RPM seems to be available on the unit. It would really be appreciated if it was possible to avoid cross-compiling binaries.

Currently I am considering finding a way to install the Raspberry PI distribution, but I suspect there will be a lot of missing pieces (such as phyton).

Any help is greatly appreciated,
Karl Ivar Dahl

[hondagx35]

Hi Kidahl,

i first would try to get more info about the hardware.

Many of the virtual files in the /proc directory contain information about hardware and configurations.

Code: Select all

cat /proc/cpuinfo

You also can try commands like
- lsusb
- free
- mount
- df -h
- ....

http://www.binarytides.com/linux-comman ... ware-info/

Frank

[Kidahl]

Code: Select all

Processor   : ARMv7 Processor rev 10 (v7l)
processor   : 0
BogoMIPS   : 790.52

Features   : swp half thumb fastmult vfp edsp neon vfpv3
CPU implementer   : 0x41
CPU architecture: 7
CPU variant   : 0x2
CPU part   : 0xc09
CPU revision   : 10

Hardware   : Freescale i.MX6Solo Olive One
Revision   : 63000
Serial      : 1e1e09d4df644f57


[Kidahl]

Code: Select all

root@OLIVE ~$ lsusb
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002
Bus 002 Device 002: ID 0489:e00d

[Kidahl]

Code: Select all

root@OLIVE ~$ free
             total         used         free       shared      buffers
Mem:        447772       359540        88232            0        10660
-/+ buffers:             348880        98892
Swap:            0            0            0


[Kidahl]

Code: Select all

root@OLIVE ~$ mount
rootfs on / type rootfs (rw)
/dev/root on / type ext4 (rw,relatime,user_xattr,barrier=1,data=ordered)
proc on /proc type proc (rw,relatime)
/sys on /sys type sysfs (rw,relatime)
/tmp on /dev type tmpfs (rw,relatime,mode=755)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,relatime,mode=600)
shm on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw,relatime)
rwfs on /mnt/rwfs type tmpfs (rw,relatime,size=204800k)
rwfs on /tmp type tmpfs (rw,relatime,size=204800k)
/tmp on /tmp type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime)
/dev/mmcblk0p4 on /cfg type ext4 (rw,relatime,user_xattr,barrier=1,data=ordered)
/dev/sda on /cfg/data type ext4 (rw,relatime,user_xattr,commit=30,barrier=0,data=ordered)
root@OLIVE ~$ df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
rootfs                788M  471M  277M  64% /
/dev/root             788M  471M  277M  64% /
/tmp                  219M   56K  219M   1% /dev
shm                   219M     0  219M   0% /dev/shm
rwfs                  200M     0  200M   0% /mnt/rwfs
rwfs                  219M  4.4M  215M   2% /tmp
/tmp                  219M  4.4M  215M   2% /tmp
/dev/mmcblk0p4        2.0G   40M  1.8G   3% /cfg
/dev/sda              917G   32G  840G   4% /cfg/data


[Kidahl]

The unit has an optional disk (1TB on mine), the music directory is shared via SMB and mounted under /cfg/data. So if we could install Rune in this folder it would be much easier for non-tech backers to update it in the future.

BTW, I believe some of these units are for sale quite cheaply these days, If you have a "good feeling" about me successfully porting Rune you can make a great bargain for an amazing amp.

[Kidahl]

Code: Select all

root@OLIVE ~$ lspci
00:00.0 Class 0604: 16c3:abcd
01:00.0 Class 0101: 1b21:0611

Code: Select all

root@OLIVE ~$ python
Could not find platform independent libraries <prefix>
Could not find platform dependent libraries <exec_prefix>
Consider setting $PYTHONHOME to <prefix>[:<exec_prefix>]
'import site' failed; use -v for traceback
Python 2.4.4 (#1, Jul 16 2013, 18:38:13)
[GCC 4.6.2 20110630 (prerelease)] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> ^C


Code: Select all


root@OLIVE ~$ cat /proc/meminfo
MemTotal:         447772 kB
MemFree:           87048 kB
Buffers:           10740 kB
Cached:            75792 kB
SwapCached:            0 kB
Active:           249660 kB
Inactive:          65484 kB
Active(anon):     228904 kB
Inactive(anon):     4048 kB
Active(file):      20756 kB
Inactive(file):    61436 kB
Unevictable:           0 kB
Mlocked:               0 kB
HighTotal:             0 kB
HighFree:              0 kB
LowTotal:         447772 kB
LowFree:           87048 kB
SwapTotal:             0 kB
SwapFree:              0 kB
Dirty:                 4 kB
Writeback:             0 kB
AnonPages:        228624 kB
Mapped:            29768 kB
Shmem:              4364 kB
Slab:              33196 kB
SReclaimable:      27684 kB
SUnreclaim:         5512 kB
KernelStack:        1496 kB
PageTables:         1952 kB
NFS_Unstable:          0 kB
Bounce:                0 kB
WritebackTmp:          0 kB
CommitLimit:      223884 kB
Committed_AS:    1310032 kB
VmallocTotal:    1335296 kB
VmallocUsed:        2116 kB
VmallocChunk:    1332204 kB


[hondagx35]

Hi

Unfortunately for us backers, the company now seem to have gone offline, leaving the backers with a player that only supports half of the promised features.

The latest software update is SW: 1.0.31 Build 67 Date: 2016-05-11.
For me this looks like they are still alive and develop new features.
What are the problems? I couldn't find any negative statements on the net.

BTW, I believe some of these units are for sale quite cheaply these days, If you have a "good feeling" about me successfully porting Rune you can make a great bargain for an amazing amp.

I searched the web and couldn't find a cheap one.
For me this device is far away from being an amazing amp (device).
With its 500MB RAM, single core 1GHz CPU it is comparable with the first Raspberry Pi.
I really like the design and the integrated HDD.

Could you please give me some pointers on the dependencies of the distribution so that I can get a grip of the scope of porting Rune?

RuneAudio is based on ArchLinux and only available as whole image.
So the first thing you have to try is to get ArchLinux running on your device.
Is it possible to take a look inside the device? We need to know more about the used hardware.
On their homepage i saw a sd card socket on the circuit board.
A serial debugging port would also be very helpful.

Frank

[Kidahl]

Well, I suppose "cheap" is a relative word. The amp is a real great piece of hardware that is unfortunately hampered by unfinished software. We would not put in this effort if the unit was not still a significant investment. The last release implements about half of what backers were promised, and two years late at that..

The last firmware is also the last we heard from Olive. Up until then there has been continuous dialogue on https://olivemediainc.zendesk.com/hc/en-us . Some backers have units for sale there.

Given that we have root access to the unit, is serial access needed at this point? There is a mini-jack at the back that I believe is a serial connection, but I have no serial port on my machine.

I´ll upload an image of the hardware an have a look at ArchLinux. Thanks.