Tsimx6 usb production

Download the latest USB production image here. This is a tarball that contains a rootfs based on Buildroot. It contains the kernel and filesystem, as well as a basic script to tell U-Boot to boot to Linux on the USB drive.

This image will be written to a USB drive. Most USB drives enumerate in under a second and will work, but some USB mass storage devices like external spinning hard drives typically have long initialization around 10-15 seconds. These will not enumerate in time to work from U-Boot.

The blast image and scripts require a minimum of 50 MB. When sizing the USB drive to use, this must be taken in to account along with any images or tarballs that will reside on the USB drive as a part of the production process. The USB drive must have at least 1 partition, with the first partition being formatted ext2/3 or fat32/vfat.

Note:

The ext4 filesystem can be used instead of ext3, but it may require additional options. U-Boot does not support the 64bit addressing added as the default behavior in recent revisions of mkfs.ext4. If using e2fsprogs 1.43 or newer, the options "-O ^64bit,^metadata_csum" must be used with ext4 for proper compatibility. Older versions of e2fsprogs do not need these options passed nor are they needed for ext3.

# This assumes the USB is /dev/sdc:
sudo mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdc1
sudo mkdir /mnt/sd/
sudo mount /dev/sdc1 /mnt/sd/
sudo tar --numeric-owner -xf /path/to/tsimx6_usb_blaster-latest.tar.bz2 -C /mnt/sd/

# Normally, customized images would be copied to the /mnt/sd/, but for
# an example these steps would write our latest Debian image:
sudo wget -O /mnt/sd/emmcimage.tar.bz2 http://ftp.embeddedTS.com/ftp/ts-socket-macrocontrollers/ts-4900-linux/distributions/debian/debian-armhf-jessie-latest.tar.bz2
# A symlink can be used to write the same image to SD
sudo ln -s /mnt/sd/emmcimage.tar.bz2 /mnt/sd/sdimage.tar.bz2
sudo umount /mnt/sd
sync

Note:

This image can be written from a Windows OS, but make sure it is extracted with 7-zip instead of the built in windows zip support or it can break the line formatting of blast.sh

The USB drive boots into a small Buildroot environment with filesystem and partitioning tools. This can be used to format SD, eMMC, SATA, or even rewrite U-Boot and its environment. The Buildroot starts up and calls /blast.sh on the USB device. By default this script is set up to look for a number of of specific files on the USB disk and write to media on the host device. Upon completion of the script, the green or red LEDs will blink to visually indicate a pass or fail of the script. This script can be used without modification to write images from USB with these filenames:

SD Card	sdimage.tar.bz2	Tar of the filesystem. This will partition the SD card to have a single ext4 partition and extract this tar to the filesystem. If the file /md5sums.txt is present in the tarball, it will be used via the md5sum command to check and verify every file on the filesystem after extraction is complete. This /md5sums.txt file is optional and can be omitted, but it must not be blank if present.
	sdimage.dd.bz2	Disk image of the SD card. This will be written to /dev/mmcblk0 directly. If the file /sdimage.dd.md5 is present on the USB drive, the image written to disk will be read back and compared to the md5sum contained in the sdimage.dd.md5 file.
eMMC	emmcimage.tar.bz2	Tar of the filesystem. This will repartition the eMMC to have a single ext4 partition and extract this tar to the filesystem. If the file /md5sums.txt is present in the tarball, it will be used via the md5sum command to check and verify every file on the filesystem after extraction is complete. This /md5sums.txt file is optional and can be omitted, but it must not be blank if present.
	emmcimage.dd.bz2	Disk image of the eMMC. This will be written to /dev/mmcblk1 directly. If the file /emmcimage.dd.md5 is present on the USB drive, the image written to disk will be read back and compared to the md5sum contained in the emmcimage.dd.md5 file.
SATA	sataimage.tar.bz2	Tar of the filesystem. This will repartition the SATA drive to have a single ext4 partition and extract this tar to the filesystem. If the file /md5sums.txt is present in the tarball, it will be used via the md5sum command to check and verify every file on the filesystem after extraction is complete. This /md5sums.txt file is optional and can be omitted, but it must not be blank if present.
	sataimage.dd.bz2	Disk image of the card. This will be written to /dev/sda directly. If the file /sataimage.dd.md5 is present on the USB drive, the image written to disk will be read back and compared to the md5sum contained in the sataimage.dd.md5 file.
SPI	u-boot.imx	This will write U-Boot on the SPI flash. The imx_type variables will be checked before writing any data to ensure the file being written is compatible with the current CPU. If the file /u-boot.imx.md5 is present on the USB drive, the image written to SPI flash will be read back and compared to the md5sum contained in the u-boot.imx.md5 file.

Most users should be able to use the above script without modification, but the Buildroot sources used are available from our github repo. To build the whole setup and create a USB drive, the following commands can be used. This will wipe any data on the specified partition and replace it with an ext2 formatted filesystem. This filesystem will have all of the necessary files written to it to create a bootable USB drive. Note that this must be the first partition of the disk.

# Assuming /dev/sdc1 is the USB drive's first partition
make ts4900_defconfig && make && sudo ./make_usb_prog.sh /dev/sdc1