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Building Raspberry Pi Systems with Yocto

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Re: Building Raspberry Pi Systems with Yocto

#3
post #2

Unrelated but when I saw the title I thought it would be about yoctopuce, which are usb environment sensors that are easy to script for in python or other languages. I used them to create a few weather station loggers using raspberry pis. http://www.yoctopuce.com

Those seem like fun products; though the hardware-tinkerer in me is thinking they could be home-made via ESP8266 hardware very very easily.

Re: Building Raspberry Pi Systems with Yocto

#4
post #2

Unrelated but when I saw the title I thought it would be about yoctopuce, which are usb environment sensors that are easy to script for in python or other languages. I used them to create a few weather station loggers using raspberry pis. http://www.yoctopuce.com

Those seem like fun products; though the hardware-tinkerer in me is thinking they could be home-made via ESP8266 hardware very very easily.

Most likely, but they are a good solution for someone like me who is comfortable with software, but doesn’t really want to invest time in the electronic / hardware. They are a bit pricey though (but I guess it’s not a big market).

Re: Building Raspberry Pi Systems with Yocto

#5
I looked into switching to yocto a while back for a rpi project I work on. However, one thing that put me off is the end user's inability to install regular debian (raspbian) packages as they will inevitably expect to. But I think that people have used yocto as a kind of docker hypervisor, the openhab project used to do something like that before moving to HassOS. Does anyone know if you can include a minimal raspbian-based docker image in your yocto system which users could then apt-get install whatever extra packages they want? Does that make sense?

Re: Building Raspberry Pi Systems with Yocto

#6
Although Yocto gets more publicity, I always prefer BuildRoot myself.

Yocto's 'layer' abstraction seems overly complicated and difficult to use (especially in a headless situation where you can't use a nice GUI tool to manage them).

BuildRoot is much more like the Kernel Configuration... Just choose your options from a hierarchical menu.

Much easier IMO.

(https://buildroot.org/)

Also, building a minimal system is much easier in BuildRoot than in Yocto... just deselect the options rather than trying to remove layers and the contents of layers.

Re: Building Raspberry Pi Systems with Yocto

#7

Although Yocto gets more publicity, I always prefer BuildRoot myself. Yocto's 'layer' abstraction seems overly complicated and difficult to use (especially in a headless situation where you can't use a nice GUI tool to manage them). BuildRoot is much more like the Kernel Configuration... Just choose your options from a hierarchical menu. Much easier IMO. ( https://buildroot.org/ ) Also, building a minimal system is m…

I found creating a layer of my own that extended the one in the OP with a couple of things extra was “easy” (in terms of what I would expect from the HN crowd. For a beginner it would not be easy), but I will agree that removing things will probably be more complicated.

Here are a couple of photos of my Raspberry Pi 3 with said Yocto image running some graphical applications without X11 (nor Wayland):

gstreamer videotestsrc ! glimagesink https://i.imgur.com/dPQqgRX.jpg

tspress https://i.imgur.com/CLx1RrD.jpg

Re: Building Raspberry Pi Systems with Yocto

#8

I looked into switching to yocto a while back for a rpi project I work on. However, one thing that put me off is the end user's inability to install regular debian (raspbian) packages as they will inevitably expect to. But I think that people have used yocto as a kind of docker hypervisor, the openhab project used to do something like that before moving to HassOS. Does anyone know if you can include a minimal raspbia…

Not tried this myself but this is probably what you are looking for

http://layers.openembedded.org/layerindex/branch/master/laye...

Even without meta-debian, you can configure yocto to use the apt package management tools, and then you can point this at the relevant repositories. Read the manual for more information.

Re: Building Raspberry Pi Systems with Yocto

#9

I looked into switching to yocto a while back for a rpi project I work on. However, one thing that put me off is the end user's inability to install regular debian (raspbian) packages as they will inevitably expect to. But I think that people have used yocto as a kind of docker hypervisor, the openhab project used to do something like that before moving to HassOS. Does anyone know if you can include a minimal raspbia…

I recently ran into that issue - I have a nice fine-tuned yocto image and now a customer wants to "log in via ssh and install a custom raspbian package". I was thinking of the docker solution as well.

Re: Building Raspberry Pi Systems with Yocto

#10
Just a quick tip, if you are interested in Yocto, and especially Yocto on the Raspberry Pi: there's a layer called meta-updater[1], originally developed for Automotive Grade Linux, that lets you add over-the-air updates to your Yocto-built systems, and it supports Raspberry Pi. It uses OSTree[2] to give you atomic updates and nice, small update sizes. (The whole filesystem is a content-addressed object store that's hard-linked into the actual directory structure at boot time.)

There's also a guide[3] for doing this using HERE's servers for delivering your updates. It's free to use, but if you prefer a free-as-in-speech solution, you can either ignore the update client and run the updates yourself from a bare OSTree repo, or run the open-source community edition[4] of HERE's server software.

(Full disclosure: I work for HERE, and wrote the quickstart guide[3] I'm linking.)

[1] https://github.com/advancedtelematic/meta-updater/

[2] https://ostree.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

[3] https://docs.atsgarage.com/quickstarts/raspberry-pi.html

[4] https://github.com/advancedtelematic/ota-community-edition/

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