Playing with the Odroid-U2

Posted by on 5/11/2013 No comments

Picked up one of Hardkernel’s Odroid-U2 dev boxes, figured a quad-core arm box for less than $100 shipped was worth kicking around a bit. After a week-ish of playing with it I thought it worth posting my findings with various OS variants. For reference, I am using Class 10 microSDHC cards (anything less is painfully slow) and a wired connection while I wait on my USB wifi dongle to show up.

I don’t really have a specific use case for the box, but the main categories I’m poking at are media playback (using XBMC, Plex, Netflix), gaming, and general web/app usage. One big downside for general usage across all the Android builds is that the user interface is only moderately okay if you’re not using a touch screen. Swiping through pages is great using fingers, not so much via a normal mouse…

Stock Android
The first thing I tried was the latest official Android build (dated 25th April, 2013). It’s using version 4.1.2_r1 as it’s base with some custom bits as follows:

  • Right mouse click as the back button
  • Power button on the navigation bar
  • No status bar
  • Mounts SD card as internal storage
  • Working(-ish) USB bluetooth support

Overall it’s a very solid build, however trying to use Netflix or Plex to view videos resulted in a black screen with audio. According to the official forums, it’s a known issue with their 4.1 builds and their advice is to revert back to the 4.0.* based builds instead. I didn’t try going that route since I already had my eye on the CM nightlies. Running XBMC was generally okay here but the UI lagged and there were some visual glitches during playback (mostly menu overlays). Although my cheap BT dongle was seen and I was able to pair my phone with the Odroid, I couldn’t ever get my Moga gaming controller to pair properly so I couldn’t do any real game testing. I’m assuming this was more to do with the dongle and not the build since I saw folks on the forums able to use BT controllers without issues.

CyanogenMod
My next try with Android was CyanogenMod nightlies. It’s based on version 4.2.2 and is overall a better option (IMO) than stock. Media playback Just Works, had no issues with Netflix, Plex was able to do playback of some high bitrate 1080p h264 streams without any glitches. XBMC here has been almost flawless with only minor hiccups during playback. This is certainly the faster of the two Android builds, and the kernel allows overclocking to 2Ghz to give it a boost if you’re so inclined (I wasn’t). However, there are a few gotchas involved through the install and usage.

First, the procedures outlined on the CM wiki to install weren’t entirely complete. After installing the initial image as directed I was unable to reboot into recovery mode. Took a bit of digging, but I grabbed the odroidu2-recovery.zip file they list for the windows install instructions and unzip’d to the root of the vfat partition before rebooting. This seems to only be needed for the initial install, subsequent reboot-to-recovery attempts from an installed CM nightly worked just like it should.

The next big gotcha was with the way CM mounts the sd card. It’s fstab file is setup to treat the eMMC card as the internal sd and the micro sd as external which is great if you’re using eMMC, not so much if you aren’t. Fixing it requires editing /system/etc/vold.fstab and swapping the entries, I’ve got a copy here you can just copy over to fix things. You’ll have to do that after each update since the file is replaced during the flash.

The last thing worth mentioning isn’t really a problem but, since the CM build treats this as a tablet and stays close to ASOP, you get the normal tablet interface. So you’ll need to grab your own power widgets (I use secure settings) and deal with the normal status navigation bar. For the latter I just set up a tasker profile to enable the “Expanded Desktop” option (via secure settings) when XBMC is running to get true full screen.

Linux
For this I used the Ubuntu 12.11 Fully Loaded community image from the odroid forums. It’s a great image with several full desktop environments to chose from, very fast and usable. Using it out of the box on a TV screen requires tweaking DPI or font sizes to be able to read anything, but once that’s done it’s pretty straightforward. The only thing really worth mentioning as a downside is viewing YouTube videos in the Chromium browser is painful since there’s no hardware acceleration of the webm codec. Using Firefox with the provided greasemonkey scripts will allow you to chose the h264 versions of the videos which do work at up to 1080p res without issue.

I think you could use this as a desktop replacement as long as you kept your home directory on either a secondary device (USB drive?) or NFS volume, but flashing wipes EVERYTHING so you wouldn’t want to keep a local home directory. The image also includes various emulators and games, but I haven’t had a chance to try those so I can’t speak to how those worked.

In summary, this little beast draws almost no power and has enough horsepower to do quite a bit. I’m looking forward to support maturing in Android and Linux to take full advantage of the hw, but the potential for usage here is huge.

Straight Talk Debacle

Posted by on 11/27/2012 No comments

tl;dr – Avoid Straight Talk like the plague if you want mobile data or customer service.

Like so many others, we took the plunge and decided to go with prepaid cell service to save money and avoid contracts. After researching the options we went with Straight Talk’s “unlimited” plan on AT&T’s network and all was well for a month or two. Coverage is the same as getting service directly from AT&T and it was just as reliable. Even data speeds were the same and I thought we’d found a winner.

However, the week before thanksgiving I noticed my data speeds had dropped to around 120k/s so I dropped ST an email and the pain started. The first reply stated I’d been throttled for heavy usage (300M in a week and a half by my count), the second said they had to call to “troubleshoot” and the last reply said I’d been throttled. All of them were canned responses and my attempts to clarify via email were ignored completely.

I finally was able to carve out the time to call them on the Friday after thanksgiving and had one of the worst customer service experiences of my life. The first person I spoke with swore I wasn’t being throttled and a power cycle would fix things. Of course it didn’t so I called back and was able to confirm with the csr that I had indeed been throttled. I was bounced to someone in a different department and had to step through a series of questions (they called it a survey) about my usage. The questions ranged from the silly (how do you close your browser) to the standard (do you use your phone to provide internet to other devices), but after completion I was bounced back to the first level csr and data access was restored. For a little while.

I was on Wifi for the rest of the day, but when I was heading back to the hotel I noticed I wasn’t getting any data connection on the phone. Once back at the hotel I did the usual reboot and apn checks but was completely unable to get any cell data connection. Another call back to ST and was told my account had a “flash” on it and I’d have to call back the next day as that department was closed.

I called back again (call number four for those keeping count) the following morning while on the drive back home and got the normal canned responses. I was less than polite after being told I was being throttled after clearly staying multiple times I had NO data access whatsoever. The csr had me power the phone off while she “checked” things on her end, once I powered back on I had full data access again. I asked what had been changed and she wasn’t able to give me a direct answer, so I can only assume she removed whatever block has been placed on the account.

Since getting home, I’ve moved to using the tmobile $30/mo prepaid plan for the time being and moved my other lines back to AT&T. One upside to all of this is that I was able to get full AT&T service without contract since we weren’t purchasing phones. I may end up moving my line back over as well, but for now I’m enjoying the higher data speeds from tmobile.

Moar XBMC Awesome

Posted by on 5/25/2012 1 comment

Been playing around a bit more with XBMC and came across a few noteworthy add-ons I thought worth sharing.

First off, is BlueCop’s most excellent Hulu plugin. I was familiar with it’s basic usage and commercial skipping abilities, but discovered library integration had been added at some point. Enabling that for my TV show subscriptions (or favorites as Hulu likes to call em now) integrates em into the normal TV library interface within XBMC. There’s also a service plugin that will automatically check for any updates/changes on hulu and update XBMC accordingly.

The other discovery was actually an updated skin. Been using Aeon Nox for quite some time and yesterday they released a massive update to version 3.0. There’s the usual collection of eye candy updates, but the killer new feature for me is the new custom home screen shortcuts. I’ve mapped my most used add-ons already, but almost anything can be added and you can add sub menus for quick access to specific areas (favorites in the Amazon add-on for instance). The flexibility there is awesome, and they succeeded in making it very easy to use which is a big bonus. Till now I’ve viewed skins as simply a way to change the look of XBMC, but this also adds a high level of customization I’ve not seen seen before. Big kudos to the team behind this release.

Moar automation

Posted by on 4/30/2012 No comments

Got a few more bits added this weekend:

GE 45609 Z-Wave Wireless Lighting Control On/Off Switch
GE 45614 Z-Wave Wireless Lighting Control 3-Way Switch Kit
Trane TZEMT400BB3 Remote Energy Management Thermostat

Used the normal switch for our ceiling fan/lighting fixture in the den, was hoping for something to be able to control the fan and lighting separately but the module for that is almost 3x more expensive than the switch so decided it just wasn’t worth it for now. The three way switch I installed in our downstairs hallway. Installation there was slightly trickier than a normal two way, but a few minutes with a multimeter got me up and running.

The thermostat was the most interesting of the three pieces to install, mostly since the installation manual assumes a level of familiarity with home cooling systems that I didn’t have going in. It’s really meant to be installed by a professional, but a little google research filled in the missing pieces. One note here, the thermostat I replaced was modern enough that the wiring was done correctly and was nicely labeled. If not for that, I would have had to spend significant time tracing wires and potentially running a common 24v wire to provide power.

Once installed, all three devices paired easily with my controller and I was able to get em included in a few more scenes without issue. The more I play with this stuff, the better it seems to get…

Initial Automation Success

Posted by on 4/23/2012 No comments

Got my various HA bits in this morning, was able to get the Vera Lite controller set up (dead easy) with my lamp plug and dimmer switch. All paired without issue and was able to set up a few rudimentary scenes to begin playing. The Vera web ui is well laid out, very straight forward and commands executed there are reflected almost instantly.

I’m using the Home Buddy beta app on my android devices (link) which works well. It does both spoken scene commands as well as allowing for control via Tasker (untested, but next on my list).

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