Now that I've got the hardware, I wanted to try build my own kernel and test out the camera. You may ask "why didn't you use a precompiled image?". Well the simple answer is that the precompiled images don't have the packages I need. I followed the instructions to use bitbake and setup my environment from gumstix (found here). Everything was pretty straight forward, was able to get everything up and running. Now comes some of the tricky parts
- Following the instructions here (This is Scott Ellis's website, it's awesome. I'll be citing it many times), I edited the file $OVEROTOP/org.openembedded.dev/conf/machine/overo.conf and changed PREFERRED_PROVIDER_virtual/kernel = "linux-omap3-caspapx". This uses the 2.6.34 kernel, which is compatible with the Caspa drivers.
- I wanted to use the omap3-console-image file system. This is assumes kernels >= 2.6.36 I guess because after I first compiled and loaded the image (and many subsequent loads) I would always get a ... respawning ... error. This was because the new file system assumes the console is at ttyO2 but older kernels use ttyS2. So ... you have to edit /etc/inittab and change S:2345:respawn:/sbin/getty 115200 ttyO2 to S:2345:respawn:/sbin/getty 115200 ttyS2. Not a big deal but it sure halts development when you can't boot.
Once that booted up all was good. I didn't really bother playing with the camera because at the moment I don't have an LCD screen to show anything. Plus, I need to do more work on the kernel to enable the DSP. I did verify that the camera is listed at /dev/video0. I should mention, all of this was done on a NFS (network file system) boot. I'll talk about that in a sec.
Last modified Sun, 4 Sep, 2011 at 16:38
