ilu

Does anybody here have experience with the Beagleboard ? It doesn't seem to be supported on this site. It also seems to be rather old? But it's the only board I can find with open hardware/firmware. Any opinions, hints, ideas, other suggestions for truly open hardware?

Sorry I forgot your first reply while reading through the rest. Having children around tends to break my concentration every 5 min and reading one page easily takes up several hours. I found the connector name (JST XH in case anybody is interested) and I will read through the lemaker.org links. Thanks again.

Thank you all for your suggestions. I have no idea how to handle voltage spikes, I always thought 230V would mean 230V, at least in Europe. Since fractal mentioned "UL rating" he seems to be american, so he sure can relax with only 110 V around. I can't get the power supply Igor and Kaiser have, but I found a power supply from an old Sun Workstation with 2A on 12V and 5V. That should be reasonably good quality, shouldn't it? No idea how it handles spikes though ... The plug is a 6-pin mini-DIN connector like those used for PS/2 keyboards. I'd need to make an Y adapter with the right pins to connect to the Banana Pi and to the Banana Pi SATA cable. 1. Does anybody know what the power connector type on the Banana Pi and its SATA cable is called? I need the name to get the fitting counterparts. 2. Can I share the 5V output between Banana Pi and HD? 2A should be enough for both but will just connecting like Y work? 3. I can measure what's what on the power supply but which power should go to which pin on the Banana Pi and the HD (via the special SATA cable)?

I want to turn my Banana PI into a NAS. Since SSDs are still too small (or much too expensive for my purpose) I need to use a standard 3,5 HD and those will need that much power (on spin-on at least) that I can't use the Banana SATA to power up the HD, right? Can those people that use banana pi et al. as NAS tell me what kind of external power supply they use with what type of connector? If you can recommend low-power HDs I'd like to hear that too. Are there power supplys that can safely feed the Banana pi itself and the HD? Preferably without soldering the connectors?

What would be the best way to backup a full bootable image of the sd-card on my harddisk which can be restored to the SD in case I muck everything up? Of course I don't mind putting the SD into my main computer (which has Debian). I know I could use dd but this always frightens me - one mistake and my (important) data could be gone.

I created an account on github to edit the FAQ but it tells me that this was creating a fork as my own project ... and then something about pull requests? I'm confused - what's a pull request ? I just wanted to edit something in but not create anything new.

Console. If I connect via ssh (xfce-terminal) the lines are drawn ok. But mc function keys don't work ... this is another problem I'm working on but probably not connected to this one because on console the function keys work ok. Similar problems with line drawing graphics are usually reported in connection with ssh / PuTTY. It always has something to do with character sets (ISO / UTF-8) or fonts but the proposed fixes don't work on console debian. Edit: I was searching for several days already but I finally used the right search words (which is sometimes difficult if english is not your native language) and found the solution here: http://askubuntu.com/questions/602824/ncurses-line-drawing-not-working-on-console. dpkg-reconfigure console-setup was set to ISO-8859-something and not to UTF-8. You should add # dpkg-reconfigure console-setup to the FAQ, because if people choose UTF-8 on dpkg-reconfigure locales (which they will do nowadays) they sooner or later run into problems if the console-setup doesn't match. As a side note: Via ssh now most of the mc function keys work, but not F2 F3 F4. So it had something to do with the Banana's setup. But the change fixed only half of them. Strange.

Hi Igor, could you please look into the character set problem mentioned in the comments? Jessie kernel 3.4: Line-drawing graphics for programs like aptitude or mc don't work. The screen displays garbled characters instead, which renders all programms with a graphic interface unusable :-(. After install I noticed that dpkg-reconfigure locales did not work as expected. LANGUAGE stays en_US and LC_MESSAGES stays posix. I configured them manually # update-locale LANGUAGE=de_DE.UTF-8 LC_MESSAGES=de_DE.UTF-8 but german umlauts (äöü) still don*t work although the system now seems to be configured correctly for de_DE.UTF-8. I don't care too much about the umlauts but the garbled graphic interfaces are a major problem. Maybe both problems are connected. Thank you for your work!