Use an ODROID-C1 to drive your wall dashboard

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Código Banana: El blog de Platanus

5 min readFeb 9, 2015

Here at platanus he have a 42” tv screen with some metrics about our products, our resources and some fun and usefull info. The software we are using behind it is Dashing, a really cool sinatra based application to create dashboards with different widgets of information.

I originally wrote this as a guide to get the dashboard working with a raspberry-pi. The problem was that I wanted to run my dashboard with the chromium browser to have all the props a modern browser has. But the raspberry-pi wasn’t up the task. The dashboard with the pi was unstable and very slow.

As a second alternative the pi, I tryied a android stick. The advantages were that you can find dual or quad core stick with android that support full hardware acceleration. May be I picked to wrong one, but at the end the kernel was limited to 720p and our dashboard was 1080p and it look really awefull. Also android is not as nearly tweakeable as a bare linux OS.

Finally I went to the brand new ODROID-C1, is small, cheap (US$35, plus all the necessary accesories), it has a quad core processor, 1GB ram, and hardkernel, the compeny behind, provide a special version of Ubuntu 14.04 that runs very smooth on it, all hardware accelerated by the way. And, for now, is working very well.

Here is what I did to have a autostart, no desktop, full screen dashboard.

You’ll need

Odroid C1 with ubuntu/linux SD or MMC card
Wifi stick (optional)

Connect your odroid to the screen and to the network. You can use a keyboard and mouse but you can also do everything thought an ssh connection.

ssh odroid@<odroid-ip>
odroid@<odroid-ip>s password: odroid

Use odroid utility for increase your partition size

Once you flashed your memory (sd or mmc), you’ll get a 4.6GB partition aprox., regarles the size of your memory. We can increase the partition size, and that way be able to use the full size of your memory.

Run the odroid utility
shell
sudo odroid-utility.sh

Then choose, the resize partition option.

Setting up NTP

This will sync the time time with ubuntu ntp server

sudo apt-get install ntpdate
sudo ntpdate -u ntp.ubuntu.com# Change your timezone if necessary
echo "America/Santiago" | sudo tee /etc/timezone
sudo dpkg-reconfigure --frontend noninteractive tzdata

Update the OS

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get -y upgrade

Change the name of your device

echo "dashboard" | sudo tee /etc/hostname
echo "127.0.0.1  dashboard" | sudo tee -a /etc/hosts

Disable lightdm desktop manager

We want to boot directly to our dashboard, for that we will disable the default desktop manarger with the following command

echo "manual" | sudo tee -a /etc/init/lightdm.override

Configure your monitor resolution

Uncomment the resolution you want in the /media/boot/boot.ini file

# setenv m "vga"          # VGA 640x480
# setenv m "480p"         # 480p 720x480
# setenv m "576p"         # 576p 720x576
# setenv m "800x480p60hz" # WVGA 800x480
# setenv m "svga"         # Super VGA 800x600
# setenv m "xga"          # XGA 1024x768
# setenv m "720p"         # 720p 1280x720
# setenv m "800p"         # 800p(WXGA) 1280x800
# setenv m "sxga"         # SXGA 1280x1024
setenv m "1080p"          # 1080P 1920x1080
# setenv m "1920x1200"    # 1920x1200

If you have problems with the overscan, black lines on the edges of the screen that may produce that your images gets cropped.
The best solution is disable overscan in the tv. Check the display menu options (it may be called “just scan”, “screen fit”, “HD size”, “full pixel”, “unscaled”, “dot by dot”, “native” or “1:1)

Configure Lan

Run this command to get the name of you network interfaces. In my odroid I got eth1 for the wired ethernet port and wlan2 for my wifi USB stick.

ifconfig

Using ethernet

Add the following to /etc/network/interfaces.d/eth1

auto eth1
iface eth1 inet dhcp

Using wifi

You’ll need a wifi stick for this. Plug the stick and run the following command to check if the stick was detected.

This will list your network interfaces, and you should search for one named like wlan2

Now you need to edit the configuration to setup dhcp and wich SSDI and password use to connect to the network

Create a file name wlan2 into /etc/network/interfaces.d and add the following code at the end

auto wlan2
allow-hotplug wlan2
iface wlan2 inet dhcp
        wpa-ssid "ssid"
        wpa-psk "password"

Finally remove the network manager, this is to be able to configure our network interfaces from the command line, instead of the ubuntu ui.

sudo apt-get remove network-manager

Start the browser on boot

Install Chromium

First, you’ll want to install Chromium.

sudo apt-get install -y chromium-browser

Configure chromium so it start maximized to the size of our tv

Edit ~/.config/chromium/Default/Preferences and edit the following section

...
"browser": {
  ...,
  "window_placement": {
     "bottom": 1080,
     "left": 0,
     "maximized": true,
     "right": 1920,
     "top": 0,
     "work_area_bottom": 1080,
     "work_area_left": 0,
     "work_area_right": 1920,
     "work_area_top": 0
  }
  ...
}

X server

Install x11 server utils to control video parameters and unclutter to remove the mouse from over our dashboard

sudo apt-get install -y x11-xserver-utils unclutter

Create a script in /home/odroid/dashboard with the code that will run chromium in kiosk mode

#!/bin/sh
chromium-browser \
--kiosk \
--disable-restore-session-state \
--start-maximized \
--incognito \
http://dash.platan.us

Add execution permition to the script

chmod +x /home/odroid/dashboard

Add this code to your ~/.xinitrc

unclutter &xset s off         # don't activate screensaver
xset -dpms         # disable DPMS (Energy Star) features.
xset s noblank     # don't blank the video deviceexec /home/odroid/dashboard

To start on boot we will create a init script in /etc/init.d/dashboard

sudo touch /etc/init.d/dashboard
sudo chmod 755 /etc/init.d/dashboard

Now add this code to the script

#! /bin/sh
# /etc/init.d/dashboard
case "$1" in
  start)
    echo "Starting dashboard"
    # run application you want to start
    /bin/su odroid -c xinit
    ;;
  stop)
    echo "Stopping dashboard"
    # kill application you want to stop
    killall xinit
    ;;
  *)
    echo "Usage: /etc/init.d/dashboard {start|stop}"
    exit 1
    ;;
esacexit 0

We need to register the script to start on boot as kiosk

sudo update-rc.d dashboard defaults

Now you need to give any user permision to run an x application, edit the file /etc/X11/Xwrapper.config and change the value there to anybody

allowed_users=anybody

Troubleshooting

Your ethernet connection is too slow

There is a problem using a 1000 link with some switches. Odroid kernel v1.2 defaults to 100mbps, but you can limit this in 1.1 adding this line to your /etc/rc.local

ethtool -s eth0 speed 100 duplex full autoneg off