Slow and furious

I know this entry sounds and looks a bit too technical for the normal reader, but, I have tone it down as much as I can. I will give the technical details if there are people interested, and if there are people as geeky, I will take the time to post it on mydebian.blogspot.com at the latest convenience. Besides this entry is not about showing off my technical prowess, but more about how slow things have been progressing with my research.

Over the winter break, my embedded board finally arrived. I was excited to play around with it and hack on the open embedded Linux distribution on it. So as soon as I got back into the lab, I assembled it together. It comes in 2 pieces of embedded sticks that you can clip together with a module to attach the wireless 802.11 module. There was already a loaded kernel on it, and it seems to be able to detect everything nicely. The first thing I did, was booting the kernel through the RS232 port using Kermit and it was like a turn on looking at all the modules being loaded. This device is small, yet packed with a whole lot of sweet goodies that I can play with and savor every moment of the different flavors of potential hacking. I'm like a kid with a whole new pack of candy, and it gave me a similar feeling to being sugar high. It took me about a few minutes to edit /etc/network/interfaces with vi and get wifi working on it. Unfortunately, no emacs on it yet. Which will change soon, once I am able to mount my SD memory card on it, I will get emacs going and i can forget about using the cumbersome "esc-shift-:q!" command that I hate so much on vi.

Simply said, I need to do a lot of non-standard stuff on the embedded board. I needed to do some things on the board which may require me to do a lot more hacking than just getting wifi to work. So, I wasted no time, and downloaded the kernel source code from the svn repository. I've set up the environment, and tried to compile a fresh new kernel image for the embedded board. Unfortunately, the compile was full of errors and hence I am now without an image I can use to boot the board. I thought it was a trivial thing. But after hours spending time reading mailing-list for support, and googling around, I have no answers but just complains about the same problem. Apparently, everybody else are having the same problem. I've been digging around for solutions, but things have been moving really slow. Too slow and its making me pissed off...in fact furious.

My research would also require me to write some device drivers. Mainly for the real-time clock, sensor devices and creating my own real-time applications to compile with an implementation of my own real-time scheduling. So I'm slowly sourcing some of the devices. One of the first devices I got was a RS232 to SDI-12 converter. Unfortunately, I have bricked the first one we got. I think I somehow burned it with a wrong ground input, since it no longer respond to any of my messages. So my supervisor bought another 2 of these just to make sure that if I blow up one, I still have a spare one to work for my project. The moment it arrived, I was excited to get to work again. But my lousy luck again, both of it was not working. I'm pissed, again, how can they shipped over two devices that are not working. I mean, what are the chances to have both of them being faulty. So now, I will have to wait again for a replacement. Which will take me another week. All this delay is making things progressing really slow. So what else can I say about life here, things are just moving slow and furious.