lanefu

Hi,
 
for the records, the ESPRESSObin runs pretty well with a 4.12-rc mainline kernel. I've merged the marvell defconfig with upstream defconfig, but I needed to skip CONFIG_DRM* (otherwise board doesn't boot). Following things are missing at the moment:
cpu frequency scaling wlan0 (didn't manage to get I working with 4.4 BSP) mtd access (didn't manage to get I working with 4.4 BSP either) USB 2.0 port (while the USB 3.0 runs fine) Did anyone here succeed in getting wlan and/or mtd running?
 
Cheers
Uli

I can see where there's situations where a communication might need some formality.   To me that a pinned post or a locked post probably achieves that.    Coming from the spirit of @tkaisers concerns about censorship, and avoid policing presence... I would be adverse to encouraging people to qualify their posts as coming from a moderator.   
 
Moderation vs. Mediation ( at least my version of it )
 
The terminology of Moderator is kind of an unfortunate standard.   I really wish forum culture had "administrators" and "mediators."   We need Administrators/Moderators to  support the mechanics of the forum...  Help with maintaining hierarchy, fix stupid, etc--- but that authority during a problematic topic is where Mediation is needed not Moderation.
 
The spirit of a mediator is a neutral party that is there keep opposing parties moving, and not because of authority, but because of reputation.   Peacekeepers don't need badges.
 

I've been tracking this thread for a few days, and been trying to get caught up.
 
So lots of good ideas have been posted about things to do and improvements that can be made, however they do feel like solutions to problems that haven't clearly been defined.   It may be worth a moment to take a step back to make sure we're focusing on the right challenges.
 
I've gone through most of the posts and tried to identify the spirit of the problems they appear to be speaking to.    Here's what I identified....please share thoughts and other observations:
 
Forum Challenges that need improvement
* No defined censorship policy
* Eliminate spam posts (solved by having more moderators)
* Tutorials hard to find
* Poorly formatted / difficult to read posts
* General Forum Structure not intuitive
* Forum Structure unclear for supported vs unsupported hardware
* Need differentiation for type of development threads
* Home for reviews unclear
* Homes needed for off-topic / tertiary projects
* Need a way to minimize repeated questions and unproductive newbie questions
* No policy for abandoned single post threads (old thread, 0 replies)
* Heated discussions going too far into negative space
  lane

some people mistook WIP to mean "WOW ITS PERFECT!"

Sent from my SM-G920V using Tapatalk

I used to be a moderator on a big, >30000 members of which about 1500 active, satellite reception related forum in the Netherlands and we found out back then that it did work. Another modification we made was showing a reminder above the text box where the new topic was started... 
If the tag is just the SBC, and all SBC tags have the same color, the christmas tree might not be so bad...
 
Another suggestion; Would it be possible to create per forum a FAQ sticky post, where a lot of the current stickies are mentioned in...? So reduce the number of sticky posts..
 
On the support side it might be good to only support the last 2/3 releases of Armbian, and if somebody asks anything about an older release then they just get the advice to update to be able to get support...
 
Just a few random thoughts..

IMO this would make the forum look like a christmas tree with different colored tags and still won't stop people from posting things not really related to Armbian or in wrong forum sections.

Sounds nice in principle, but I'm with Zador... Christmas tree clutter, and just makes things more confusing to newcomers, who are the ones who are the ones most likely to post stuff in the wrong place. Enough moderators who pay attention (duly slapped by Igor and Thomas) make this a relative non-issue. But please keep the suggestions coming!

I can see where there's situations where a communication might need some formality.   To me that a pinned post or a locked post probably achieves that.    Coming from the spirit of @tkaisers concerns about censorship, and avoid policing presence... I would be adverse to encouraging people to qualify their posts as coming from a moderator.   
 
Moderation vs. Mediation ( at least my version of it )
 
The terminology of Moderator is kind of an unfortunate standard.   I really wish forum culture had "administrators" and "mediators."   We need Administrators/Moderators to  support the mechanics of the forum...  Help with maintaining hierarchy, fix stupid, etc--- but that authority during a problematic topic is where Mediation is needed not Moderation.
 
The spirit of a mediator is a neutral party that is there keep opposing parties moving, and not because of authority, but because of reputation.   Peacekeepers don't need badges.
 

I've been tracking this thread for a few days, and been trying to get caught up.
 
So lots of good ideas have been posted about things to do and improvements that can be made, however they do feel like solutions to problems that haven't clearly been defined.   It may be worth a moment to take a step back to make sure we're focusing on the right challenges.
 
I've gone through most of the posts and tried to identify the spirit of the problems they appear to be speaking to.    Here's what I identified....please share thoughts and other observations:
 
Forum Challenges that need improvement
* No defined censorship policy
* Eliminate spam posts (solved by having more moderators)
* Tutorials hard to find
* Poorly formatted / difficult to read posts
* General Forum Structure not intuitive
* Forum Structure unclear for supported vs unsupported hardware
* Need differentiation for type of development threads
* Home for reviews unclear
* Homes needed for off-topic / tertiary projects
* Need a way to minimize repeated questions and unproductive newbie questions
* No policy for abandoned single post threads (old thread, 0 replies)
* Heated discussions going too far into negative space
  lane

I changed a part of structure which looks more or less clear, but let's do some double checking before we move everything here and there
 
- tutorials which are currently everywhere, mostly under Technical support. There could be also "Tutorials" pinned topics with pinned tutorials, like Tony suggested.
- each subforum in here should have "Readme first - FAQ" tagged with "IMPORTANT" with most common questions -> link to answered topics as Thomas proposed. I added hidden post into Allwinner A20 section as example - unhide when done. You should have the power to do so.
 
It is also possible to make use of "Forum rules". Currently this is the text: Use search before starting new topic - add questions to existing topics - support on private messaging is ignored - humans are not error free, be polite.
 
- what to do with "Preview of this and that" board from Free? I would suggest moving SD card performance, storage benchmark and similar at least to "Technical support / common" section?
- current "Project and services" should be split into other forums and section removed?
- we have "Allwinner A64/H5", but we don't support. Should remain simply under Development?
- Build tasks? Merge / remove?
- community projects: 3rd party, deprecated and exotics boards, ... this part is still a bit confusing to me.

Folks, just don't try to behave like assholes (deleting other peoples opinions/posts, altering contents you don't understand, trying to establish BS like 'peace, love and harmony').
 
Worst case option: move posts to a subforum. Never delete, never alter, never censor. If you do this the whole project becomes irrelevant.

IMHO just try to act as invisible as possible while at the same time never ever delete/censor posts or edit posts (except formatting --> spoiler or code tags while at the same time sending the user a PM asking/explaining to do this the next time on his own). Stepping back is the most important part a moderator can do if we want to avoid situations like in Pine64 or Banana forums (censorship is always wrong).
 
I've to admit that I hate forums in general and especially moderators who misuse their powers and IMO the best thing at Armbian forum so far was that it was not 'overmoderated'. We had a few incidents where former moderators created an impression of an 'Armbian family' normal users were not part of and this should never happen again. So please no 'insider talk' or stuff like that.
 
I also don't think there's a need to 'cool things down', just push it at the technical level again if people start to focus on Mimimi. It doesn't hurt to tell people how they behave so at least they can think about after they cooled down weeks later...

For those of you who are interested in using a OPI zero as a small IoT-Server. I have some hints to get it working. It's more or less a lmgtfy How To plus some arduino code to test if it works.
Hardware:
OrangePi 0 with Armbian 5.25 connected over lan to my router DHT11 Module on a Wemos D1 mini (a small cheap wlan MCU for ~3$ which can be programmed via the Arduino IDE) Installation:
First of all we install node-red on the OPI. Instead of rewrite how to do that again I just give you the link who to do that: Node-Red on armbian
Second we install Mosquitto as a mqtt broker. If I have it right in mind I followed this instructable (I'm not shure, it's more than 2 weeks ago and I didn't save the link then): Mosquitto
To represent the data of our DHT sensor-node graphically we install the node red dashboard module in: /usr/lib/node_modules/
with npm i node-red-dashboard
If everything goes right you should have access to node-red via browser on port 1880:
192.168.1.xx:1880
and to the UI of dashboard:
192.168.1.xx:1880/ui/
Setting up everything:
Now we're setting up the Wemos D1 mini. DHT11 wiring (DHT-->Wemos):
VCC -->3.3V 
Signal --> D4
GND -->GND
Some of the Wemos pins are capable for 5V (A0 definitly not!) but the DHT readings gets noisier when the device is powered through 5V (don't ask me why, I'm not en electronic engineer...)
For the testprogramm we need two libraries which can be installed via the arduino IDE lib manager (+ ESP8266WiFi.h which comes when adding the generic ESP8266 board via Boardmanager):
PubSubClient.h (PubSubClient by Nick O'Leary) DHT.h (DHT sensor library by Adafruit) And here comes the simplyfied code publishing to the mqtt broker:
The code is more or less a combination of the examples which comes with the PubSubClient & DHT libraries + throw away all the stuff that we don't need (I had also a version of code where the Wemos D1 mini subscribe to the mqtt broker and gets a timestamp injected from node-red which was then added to the published sensor data).
Humidity data is stored in the "hum" topic, temperature in "temp". Keep in mind that if you plan use more than one senor-node, you should name the topics properly (see: MQTT topics best practices for more information about proper topic nameing)
We can now generate our test-flow on the node-red webpage (See printscreen). Subscribe to the mqtt topics and publish it on the chart and gauge (more information about Dashboard can be found on: Node-Red & Dashboard). 
Powering the Wemos and deploy the created flow shoud show us the graphs on 192.168.1.xx:1880/ui/ (see picture)
To call me an IoT expert is like someone calling tkaiser a fan of micro USB powered SBCs. According to the MIT licence this HowTo  is provided "as is", without warranty etc.

Thank you @lanefu.
I have 3 amcrest ip2m_841 and 3 Wansview ncm625ga.
All cameras recording 24/7, 5 fps and audio.
Server --> raspberry pi 2
Os --> dietpi
Sdcard overclocked.
 
Right now Amcrest record to vstfpd (it's going to be changed by proftpd).
Wansview cameras record method is in bash script with ffmpeg and systemd for start recording.
Record time for file is min.
Some shell scripts for delete files when directory match x kb. Running by Cron.
Plex is running in server mode. Transcode very well and I can connect from whatever through vpn and watch files.
 
 

so the pi 2e is awesome... but transcoding with the Opi stuff is genreally just a bummer.     Although not impossible, really your best bet is to run the legacy kernel.... compile the ffmpeg that supports the cedarx stuff, and script your transcoding process and make pre-transcoded files that are generally compatible rather than try to do on the fly.
 
Are you making this a plex server or client?
 
re cameras.. what kind of hardware. will they record x264 steams on their own?       I have managed to compile the x264 branch of zoneminder and do direct storage from my amcrest camera high res streams.

What shall moderators do on our forum.
 
Basics:
 
- job should be invisible
- spam control and clean up (rare)
- approve posts from new users (daily)
- Warning: editing topic tittle change it's URL
- move topic to appropriate forum (rare) (tick "Leave a link to the new location" - it deletes auto in 30 days) 
recognise and tag tutorials & researches. Move them into "Research Guides & Tutorials" - merge, pin and lock topics (rare, with caution)
- cut and move posts to new topics (rare, with caution)

Intermediate:
 
- Warn User for:
spamming,  inappropriate language, signature violation, abusive behaviour, topic bumping.  
Stop being a moderator:
- when you don't want
- on multiple complains
 
To study and add more:
https://bubbajuju.com/forum-moderating/

Well, u-boot doesn't support DSA at all, so DT in u-boot doesn't have DSA related definitions (though DT may be synced up with the kernel later). On devices like sunxi boards u-boot just sets some DT properties for the kernel to use.

@lanefu I add few fixes since I just received my board and needed to try out a bit ...  to be continued.

IMO we should push Igor to push Steven to push an universal bootloader on the SPI flash since then we'll provide two H2+/H3 images (legacy/mainline) and one for H5 (mainline only, please let's forget about the BSP crap, everytime I look at https://github.com/OrangePiLibra I get a headache)

Okay you guys inspired me enough to do some tinkering with my armbian build container.   Looks like there's newer stable kernel from Marvell.   linux-4.4.52-armada-17.06
 
I tried building with the linux-4.4.52-armada-17.06, but  my current deb-pkg patch no longer seems to do the right thing and install an uncompressed image..    I probably need to redo my patch anyway.
 
so uhm todo:
 
switch stable to linux-4.4.52-armada-17.06 improve deb-pkg script to cleanly install image in /boot/Image switch away from u-boot rc build. explore how to actually use our u-boot build instead of on-board make frequency scaling work Tinker with mainline builds since espressobin support was supposed to be merged into 4.11 Update Armbian docs on board  

ooo i have the technology to do the bandwidth testing... etc.. i gotta get a new image building host up and then ill get some data.

Sent from my SM-G920V using Tapatalk

Ok, understood now. But in case you've a fast SSD and also a quality USB to SATA bridge (ASM1153E, JMS567 or JMS578) then it would be great if you could repeat the test with such a SSD and this time with the first iozone call from https://forum.armbian.com/index.php?/topic/1925-some-storage-benchmarks-on-sbcs/&do=findComment&comment=15265
 
 
Wrt network tests I'm still interested in the only real question: Is SoC and Topaz switch interconnected with 2.5GBE or just 1 GbE? It's so easy to test (you need 3 hosts and care about IRQ affinity) but unfortunately no one cares: http://espressobin.net/forums/topic/performance-router/#post-360

So it appears when utilizing the boot information from the boot.cmd I mentioned in my last post you get a completely different experience on UART as it stays up.  This time it looks much more like a normal Armbian boot experience.
 
I found however that I had to set the initrd slightly different as the one mentioned looks incorrect..
 
As you can see with initrd loading and correct environment variables set it even loads the serial terminal and leaves it active  YAY!
 
So from what I understand if I could find the correct jumper settings to have it boot SDcard it would probably work out of the box from the SDcard, without it you have to get a bit creative and setup uboot your self like above.
 
To clarify I had been testing back and forth between the custom kernel and the 4.4.52-devel-17.04.2-mvebu64 kernel provided on the Armbian image, this time I actually fully booted the Armbian kernel and image and it actually has provided access now to cpufreq and a few other things I wasn't seeing on my custom kernel and is exposing 1Ghz CPU speed where the custom 4.4.8 kernel I made had a hard max of 800Mhz, so this should be an improvement:
 
Will have to retest with iperf later to see if the network performance differs any.
 
Update: from my updated iperf tests it looks like the 4.4.8 kernel actually out performs the 4.4.52 Armbian kernel, not by a huge amount but 4.4.52 seems to average around 92.3 MBytes/sec while on 4.4.8 it averages over 110Mbytes/sec.
 
 
Hopefully this helps!
 
Cheers!

Some quick tests of a 2.5" 1TB SATA drive via USB 3.0 enclosure attached to the USB 3.0 port on the ESPRESSOBin:
 
Iperf tests between my 2 ESPRESSOBins, both linked at gigabit:

Board Running Armbian/OMV:

Board Running Ubuntu 16.04LTS image with custom compiled kernel:
 
There are probably some better tools to use, but at least this will give an idea.  Looks like the drivers for the NIC in my customer kernel may be a bit faster?
 
Shameless plug: If you get bored and have Allwinner H3 device, check out H3droid - an Android image developed specifically to work on Allwinner H3 devices!
 
Cheers!

Okay, FINALLY I have had time to test this...
 
@tkaiser @Andrius @lanefu
 
The issues are as follows:
1. You are lacking the dtb file in /boot (armada-3720-community.dtb)
2. Once the kernel boots it disables UART which is a huge pain
3. Requires manual changes to uboot config at startup (you need serial connection at boot time)

To get it to boot:
1. Copied the armada-3720-community.dtb into /boot on the SDcard
2. stopped uboot during start up and entered the following:
Marvell>> setenv image_name boot/Image Marvell>> setenv fdt_name boot/armada-3720-community.dtb Marvell>> setenv bootmmc 'mmc dev 0; ext4load mmc 0:1 $kernel_addr $image_name;ext4load mmc 0:1 $fdt_addr $fdt_name;setenv bootargs $console root=/dev/mmcblk0p1 rw rootwait; booti $kernel_addr - $fdt_addr' Marvell>> save Saving Environment to SPI Flash... SF: Detected W25Q32DW with page size 256 Bytes, erase size 4 KiB, total 4 MiB Erasing SPI flash...Writing to SPI flash...done Marvell>> run bootmmc
While the UART serial console no longer works, the board is online:
 
 
 
Sorry for such a long delay!  I will see if I can let this run for a bit and do some performance testing to see the difference between the Armbian kernel and the one I compiled my self.
 
Have a great weekend all!
 
Shameless plug: If you get bored and have Allwinner H3 device, check out H3droid - an Android image developed specifically to work on Allwinner H3 devices!
 
Cheers!