1. Unboxing

This amazing board gets the power directly from the USB, so it comes with no external power supply.

This is what the box looks like

_images/unboxing_close.jpg

And this is the content of box

_images/unboxing_open.jpg
The board itself has been programmed to boot to a Linux console of a really tiny distribution,
custom tailored to fit the 10MB of internal ram of Renesas’s SoC.
First of all, make sure the board can boot from the pen drive by setting the jumpers J4 short pin2-3, J5 short pin1-2, J6 short pin1-2, J7 short pin 2-3 and J8 short pin2-3 with this configuration:
_images/boot_jumpers.jpg

Shall we power on the board for the first time? Of course!

On Hachiko there is the dedicated serial console connector CN2

_images/board-cn2.jpg

which you can connect, by means of a mini-USB cable, to your personal computer.

Note

Every operating system has its own killer application to give you a serial terminal interface. In this guide, we are assuming your host operating system is Ubuntu.

On a Linux (Ubuntu) host machine, the console is seen as a ttyUSBX device and you can access to it by means of an application like minicom.

Minicom needs to know the name of the serial device. The simplest way for you to discover the name of the device is by looking to the kernel messages, so:

  1. clean the kernel messages

Host

sudo dmesg -c

  1. connect the mini-USB cable to the board
  2. display the kernel messages

Host

dmesg

  1. read the output
  Host    select
[ 2912.634893] usb 3-4: >new full-speed USB device number 6 using xhci_hcd
[ 2912.658153] usb 3-4: >New USB device found, idVendor=0403, idProduct=6001
[ 2912.658160] usb 3-4: >New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
[ 2912.658164] usb 3-4: >Product: Hachiko Rev. B
[ 2912.658167] usb 3-4: >Manufacturer: AVNET EMG ITALY
[ 2912.658169] usb 3-4: >SerialNumber: A6XGP6WP
[ 2912.660753] ftdi_sio 3-4:1.0: >FTDI USB Serial Device converter detected
[ 2912.660801] usb 3-4: >Detected FT232RL
[ 2912.660805] usb 3-4: >Number of endpoints 2
[ 2912.660809] usb 3-4: >Endpoint 1 MaxPacketSize 64
[ 2912.660812] usb 3-4: >Endpoint 2 MaxPacketSize 64
[ 2912.660815] usb 3-4: >Setting MaxPacketSize 64
[ 2912.661102] usb 3-4: >FTDI USB Serial Device converter now attached to ttyUSB0

As you can see, here the device has been recognized as ttyUSB0.

Now that you know the device name, run minicom:

Host

sudo minicom -ws

If minicom is not installed, you can install it with:

Host

sudo apt-get install minicom

then you can setup your port with these parameters:

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------+
| A -    Serial Device      : /dev/ttyUSB0                              |
| B - Lockfile Location     : /var/lock                                 |
| C -   Callin Program      :                                           |
| D -  Callout Program      :                                           |
| E -    Bps/Par/Bits       : 115200 8N1                                |
| F - Hardware Flow Control : No                                        |
| G - Software Flow Control : No                                        |
|                                                                       |
|    Change which setting?                                              |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------+
        | Screen and keyboard      |
        | Save setup as dfl        |
        | Save setup as..          |
        | Exit                     |
        | Exit from Minicom        |
        +--------------------------+

If on your system the device has not been recognized as ttyUSB0, just replace ttyUSB0 with the proper device.

Once you are done configuring the serial port, you are back to minicom main menu and you can select exit.

Give root to the login prompt:

Board

hachiko login: root

and press Enter.

Note

Sometimes, the time you spend setting up minicom makes you miss all the output that leads to the login and you see just a black screen, press Enter then to get the login prompt.

Enjoy!