Posts made by WayneL

So I'm almost there. Almost.

Inspired by some posts by Mr. Bloomquist, I managed to get my dumb terminal hooked up to the Omega2 through a null modem.

I'm able to send text to the terminal by echoing to /dev/ttyUSB0.
And I'm able to read text from the terminal by cating /dev/ttyUSB0.

But I'm having trouble figuring out how to route a full shell with login to the dumb terminal.

The closest I've come is by issuing the command ash >/dev/ttyUSB0 2>&1 from my shell connection over wifi. But this only echos what I type on the computer connected by wifi to the dumb terminal. It doesn't accept any input from the terminal.

I've tried to figure out how to also route stdin to the same ash session with no luck. But I know it can be done, as demonstrated in Mr. Bloomquist's photos linked above which show a login prompt on a C-64 and a TRS-80 100.

Is it simply a problem of not being able to figure out the correct shell command from the wifi connected terminal, or am I going about it entirely the wrong way?

@Leif-Bloomquist Thats exactly what I’m looking for. Great job. Building that is beyond the capabilities of my geriatric hands, but if you ever decide to sell them, let me know!

I have a piece of legacy hardware that communicates over RS-232. Currently it is hooked up via a DB25-USB null modem to a Mac which reads the incoming text (at 9600 8N1), processes it, and then spits back its own text over the same serial connection.

I would like to replace the Mac with an Omega2 with a mini dock.

The work done by the Mac is pretty light, so I should be able to recreate the processing on the Omega in PHP or Python.

I figure my first step is to try to connect to the Onion via serial cable using a dumb terminal. Can I use the DB25-USB null modem to connect from the terminal to the USB port on the mini dock? Will I be able to log in to the Omega’s console the way I currently do over WiFi?

I feel your pain. I'm in a similar situation.

Onion will connect to:
Apple Airport Extreme with no security

Onion won't connect to:
Apple Airport Extreme with any kind of security
Cox-supplied home wifi router with WPA
Commercial-grade wifi at work with security
Commercial-grade wifi at work with no security
Random Netgear router I have laying around

Every time someone brings up this problem, the answer is always more questions: "Does the SSID have any special characters? Are you using any special characters in the password?"

How about this for an answer: It doesn't matter! If my laptop can connect to a wifi signal, I expect the Onion to connect to the signal, too. Clearly one is correctly following the specifications (the laptop) and one is not (the Onion).

I can only hope this is going to be fixed in the next firmware release, like the SD Card fiasco. Though even that isn't 100% yet.

And while they're at it, how about fixing this terrible forum software? Until just this week it would crash Safari on even a very powerful Mac. It's still not possible to reply to messages on an iPhone because the textarea is larger than the screen. I know Chrome is all the rage among the nerds these days, but you know what else is pretty cool? Usability. Cross-browser compatibility. Testing.

If I built a web site like this at work, I'd be fired.

I have the same problem with wifimanager failing for no apparent reason. I hate to say it, but from the shipping delays to the firmware bugs, the whole Onion Omega 2+ experiment has been a complete failure. It's completely unusable, and doesn't even perform the basic functions which were promised.

We paid $5 for a computer, and got what we paid for. Too bad it's too small to use as a doorstop.

@Joris-Mulliez Thanks. I'll look into it. Right now my goals are evolving, so I think I'll stick with Apache until things settle down and then see if they fit in the (presumably) more efficient uhttpd.

@jorgegarciadev Awesome, thanks. I noticed there's a few other repos in there that are commented out. Any notion about why this was done?

@WereCatf But we're talking about building docks here. It doesn't matter what the Omega lacks, you add it in with the dock. Or its modern equivalent. That's the point.

People have built entire Atari 2600's in form factors as small as an Omega2 dock before. Since the Omega can handle some parts of it, like power, it's far from impossible.

So many Negative Nellies on the internet these days. Everything's a "no" before it's even been tried.

@WereCatf And you think it's a good idea to let the Internet have access to your Omega2?

it's not for you to decide what he does with his Omega2. He paid for it. It's his property. There are plenty of reasons to run a web server on an Omega2. Sure, he may be going about it the wrong way, but the only way he's going to learn is by making mistakes, not by being shut down by someone unfamiliar with his needs or goals.

If you don't have a solution to his problem, then resist the temptation to post.

My suggestion is a dock that holds a bunch of AAA batteries to power the thing. Maybe an on/off switch to go with it.

Also, there should be a video out option. I know the official line is that the Omega2+ isn't powerful enough to output video, but that's horse hockey. That's thinking like a Millennial who only knows HDMI and 1080p.

If the Atari 2600 could output composite video in 1977 with 128 BYTES of RAM running at 1MHz, then the Omega can do at least as good as a Commodore VIC-20.

I'm not able to install apache via opkg, and opkg list, even after an update doesn't list apache as an option.

root@Omega-5D21:/# opkg install apache
Unknown package 'apache'.
Collected errors:
opkg_install_cmd: Cannot install package apache.
root@Omega-5D21:/#

@Adrian-Rix said in Very Hot Onion2+ after plugging in expansion boards.:

Mine is not getting hot.
Warm but not that hot.

Does your Omega provide a wifi hotspot when powered?

Yes

Have you tried to power it without a dock?

No. That was the point of buying the dock — so I wouldn't have to wire my own power. Adding a dock shouldn't matter, since it was designed to accept docks.

Could it be that you have put it in the dock in the false direction
because if that happened then your Omega is dead.

My Omega is designed to only go together in true directions. It is not possible to join the Omega to the dock in a false direction.

@Andy-Nevill

Using a basic kitchen thermometer, the temperature of the top of the Omega (near the MAC address) reads 99°F. I feels much hotter — scalding potential — but that's all I can get with the inexact thermometer I have.

This is at idle. I hate to think what it's going to do once I start making it do hard things.

Don't take the heat as a sign that your machine isn't working. Mine is in working order (except for the SD Card problem that most people have), and it runs very very hot all the time. I guess this is why computers have fans in them.

Re: Omega2+: reboot and sd card fixed!

Did the firmware upgrade with great hopes, but still no luck. No SD card visible on my Onion Omega2+.

I'd like to mount it so I can reformat it as ext4 so I can eventually make the SD card the boot volume and put a LAMP stack on this thing.

But, I'm unable to mount the card at all:

root@Omega-5D21:~# ls /dev
autofs mtd3ro ppp
bus mtd4 ptmx
console mtd4ro pts
cpu_dma_latency mtd5 random
full mtd5ro shm
i2c-0 mtd6 snd
kmsg mtd6ro spidev32766.1
log mtdblock0 tty
memory_bandwidth mtdblock1 ttyS0
mmcblk0 mtdblock2 ttyS1
mmcblk0p1 mtdblock3 ttyS2
mtd0 mtdblock4 ttyS3
mtd0ro mtdblock5 uinput
mtd1 mtdblock6 urandom
mtd1ro network_latency watchdog
mtd2 network_throughput watchdog0
mtd2ro null zero
mtd3 port
root@Omega-5D21:~# mount /dev/mmcblk0 /mnt/sda
mount: mounting /dev/mmcblk0 on /mnt/sda failed: No such file or directory
root@Omega-5D21:~# mount /dev/mmcblk0p1 /mnt/sda
mount: mounting /dev/mmcblk0p1 on /mnt/sda failed: No such file or directory

I read that the new firmware is supposed to auto-mount the SD card in /tmp/mounts, but no luck there, either:

root@Omega-5D21:~# ls /tmp/
RT2860.dat lib run
TZ lock shm
dhcp.leases log state
dnsmasq.d overlay sysinfo
etc resolv.conf tmp
hosts resolv.conf.auto wifi_encryption_ra0.dat
root@Omega-5D21:~# ls /tmp/mounts
ls: /tmp/mounts: No such file or directory

root@Omega-5D21:~# df
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/root 5632 5632 0 100% /rom
tmpfs 62880 80 62800 0% /tmp
/dev/mtdblock6 25728 760 24968 3% /overlay
overlayfs:/overlay 25728 760 24968 3% /
tmpfs 512 0 512 0% /dev

At this point I'm glad I only paid $5 for this thing, as I'm realizing that you get what you pay for.

I have the Onion Omega2 with the built-in SD card slot. I'm not using ext like the other posters, but FAT, and the card is not recognized at all by the Omega.

I know the card is OK because I can put it in a USB card reader and connect that to the Omega's USB port and it works fine. But somehow the internal card reader is not recognized.

Updated to the latest firmware with oupdate, and still no change.

Thoughts?