ARM9(mini2440) Embedded Board Linux Setup

Introductions:

After of a long vacations such as holidays, calamities (storm,floods or etc), we're always caught by surprise  about  the drained batteries ,damaged UPS ,hanged servers , overheated power supplies and worst the total malfunctions since the air-conditioning system had been off. The reason was just that we can't anticipate  these occurrence or technical troubles in the 24/7 running Data Center-everybody is on leave and nobody is to blame.Yet,the most things we are worried so much are the cost of purchasing  the replacements for the said equipments ,and that mishap requires a lot of budget requisitions.

So your author decided to design a complete robust yet low cost  Data Center Monitoring System .It will diagnose every client/s and server/s net activity both its hardware and software, the AC connections (power supplies and the DC generator) .It will include monitoring variable parameters such as : smoke,humidity ,temperature and noise inside the server room. The monitoring report would be available via GPRS ,GSM and web, and there is a restrictions to interact the said system.

The second option is whether to use a single board PC(ARM9) or a micro controller (PIC +ENC28j60) .So we needed to weigh the following factors: cost,capability and efficiency , and the choice went to a single embedded PC which is the Arm9 -because of the technology competitions nowadays its price is almost equal to a micro controller yet the capacity had an amazing difference.

So before the author would post in the design of monitoring system , let us first discuss the detail on the Arm 9 board set-up-and here is the detail .

 

Requirements:

Hardware:

ARM9 Evaluation Kit (Samsung chip

-533-633Mhz

Serial Cable

ARM9 JTAG

LCD2VGA 

Sooftwares:

Linux OS (Ubunto ,Fedora ,CentOS)

minicom

ztelnet

Gambas2 

Objectives:

1) Load a bootloader to a target Arm9 board

2) Load a kernel to a a target Arm9 board

3) Load applications to the Arm9 target board

Methodology: 

1) Please do the basic physical setup of ARM9 evaluation board

a) serial cable

b) LAN RJ45 

2) Download  the required software for accessing the board

a)minicom for serial/com  access

b) ztelnet for telnet setup

3) Select "b" in the menu to boot the board in RAM

4) Configure the "eth0" IP setting similar to your LAN

root@FriendlyArm/  cd /etc/

root@FriendlyArm/  cp  eth0-setting eth0-setting.bak

root@FriendlyArm/  vi etho-setting 

5) Explore files in the Arm9 linux shell

 Detail(1) minicom serial interface for Linux

Detail(2) Configuring the minicom settings

Detail(3) Detecting Arm9 via serial com

Detail(4) booting Arm9 via NAND flash

Detail(5) Setting the board's  IP address

Detail(6)Browsing the Arm9 default page

Remarks:

Its another refreshing ideas to level up embedded applications,especially when times suggest a better competitions between a traditional micro-controller/microprocessor and a single board cpu , its  cost, efficiency,capability and rigidity.

Conclusions: