Hello from the development lab for Nomadness, a 44-foot sailboat that
is in the process of getting rather obsessively geeked out with a
dozen or so Arduino nodes connected via USB to a TS-7800 that shares
an EVDO router with a Mac Mini. The links at the bottom of this post
will take you to the various project pages for more context on the
project.
We've just fired up the 7800 for the first time, and I have a few
comments and questions.
First, just to make a key piece of information Googlable and help
others, the OP-SWITCHREG that we received is, incredibly, NOT labeled
for polarity on the input connector. It is diode-protected from
being hooked up backwards, but this is a one-shot protection method
that destroys diodes, so it's good to get it right. We spent at
least an hour examining the board, Googling, and sleuthing about...
finally finding confirmation in an obscure forum post in which
someone with the same problem guessed and got it wrong... making lots
of smoke.
So here's the polarity: looking at the back edge of the board, the
+12 goes on the left pin of the OP-SWITCHREG (closest to the PC-104
connector); the GROUND goes on the right, close to the three jumpers.
There. Now there are two places in the world to find this critical
piece of information.
Once that was behind us, the board booted without incident, and with
a bit of fiddling we gave it a static IP and got it onto my LAN. I
set up port-forwarding so the development team can get to it, and
other than one mysterious hang that occurred early in the boot setup
process, it's been stable and behaving well with SSH from both near
and far.
Now for a question. We were surprised to find no sudo utility, and
while figuring out what to do about that, discovered that it can be
installed with apt-get. Except... the version of apt-get that came
on the SD card does not know the current archive structure and will
not correctly update itself to get that info. Apparently our SD card
has Debian sarge (obsolete stable) installed, though the current
version is lenny, with etch in between.
I'm sure this is a newbie question, but this board is brand new...
did we just get an old SD card by mistake, or is there an update
process that is expected as part of startup? Have I stumbled into a
well-known issue?
Many thanks for any thoughts and suggestions... I've been lurking for
a few months, and now that I'm getting a bit of hands-on context,
I'll probably have a few questions. If this is well explained in a
FAQ or previous thread, please feel free to point me there.
Cheers,
Steve
--
Steven K. Roberts, N4RVE
Nomadic Research Labs
http://microship.com - http://www.nomadness.com/blog
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