Troubleshooting the Parallella at Startup

[gceline]

[ubii]

For folks using the Adafruit USB to TTL serial cable (http://www.adafruit.com/products/954), connect the following wires to the UART header, starting from the outside edge of the board.

black --> GND
green --> RX
white --> TX

Please note that the red wire should never be used as it draws 5V directly from the USB port.

I highly recommend that folks monitor the temperature of the Zynq chip, at least initially, especially those who are encountering stability issues. This way, the user can see how variables such as ambient temperature, different heatsinks and/or fans, enclosures, and system load affect temperature. The follow two methods can be used to monitor temperature of the Zynq chip.

https://github.com/parallella/parallell ... ster/xtemp

viewtopic.php?f=23&t=930&p=6242#p6242

[Amiejay]

Great - thanks for providing that pinout for the console port. The Adafruit cable is pretty common at this point, given that actual RS232 ports are becoming few & far between.

I'm sure it'll save some time later.

Amiejay

[profmaad]

After finally getting my board up and running, I wanted to share the main issue that I had.

The root FS image, as provided at the moment, contains a lot of history of being used on different boards.
Consequently, due to the way the distribution handles network interface names, the ethernet interface on the board might not be indentified as eth0, but more likely as something like eth4.
This led to me being unable to connect to the board in a headless setup.

The symptoms I kept seing for this is the green power LED coming on, then later the green ethernet LED coming on and blinking (when doing things like a broadcast ping). The amber ethernet LED would never come on, no matter the combination of ethernet cable and switch.

To fix this issue, one has to mount the root FS from the SD card on a machine and edit /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules.
Remove all the existing rules assigning specific interface names to for MAC addresses. Afterwards, the parallellas ethernet interface should be named eth0.
Then it can be configured via /etc/network/interfaces.

I hope this can help people bring up their board headless, without having to use a serial-to-USB adapter.

[shodruk]

[nmalinoski]

[shodruk]

[optimaler]

So, I've observed the same thing that profmaad was experiencing earlier, with eth0 not always coming up at boot (and having to subsequently hit the restart button until it does). This is causing me extra grief because I have 8 boards.

I've tried the fix Shodruky tried, but it seems there's something funny with it. Is there some other reason why the ethernet would not come up, or another location that the MAC address info is being stored for udev? I mean, it's not the end of the world if I need a reboot, but I'd like to have the boards reliably come up if I issue a "reboot".

[shodruk]

[shodruk]

I newly installed ubuntu-lxde-14.03.06-p16g1.img,
just applied these settings,
it booted 20/20 times normally!

(clear udev rules)
viewtopic.php?f=50&p=7076#p6840

(disable serial terminal & enable devtmpfs)
viewtopic.php?f=48&t=844&start=30#p6922