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Getting started with PCU#

Overview#

Reference: PCU Setup Guide

This instruction explains how to boot up Ubuntu on PCU and access it from host PC.

  • If you are using onboard 64G EMMC as boot device, it's already been pre-installed with Ubuntu 20.04, and you can skip this step;
  • If you would like to boot from SD card, you could either request a Micro SD card with pre-installed system or flash by yourself under instructions in below section.
    ✅ Ubuntu 20.04 is preferred.

Hardware Setup#

The minimum recommended External Micro SD card size is 64GB, and the speed should be at least class 10 A1, it is strongly recommended to use high speed SD card, e.g. class U3, A2.

To boot from SD card, "SW1" should be set as: ON, and SD card should be plugged in. PCU Interfaces Top

For blank SD card, the system image need to be flashed first using another PC.

Get MPU image#

Official images with recommended OS are available on PCU Resource Download page.

Resource Download Page

For PCU 2.0 hardware, please download the MPU image file for SD card as marked red to your local storage.

Resources

Flash MPU image#

To flash MPU image on SD card, you will need a PC with a micro SD card reader.

This step could be done on either Windows or Linux PC with different flash tools.

Linux will be used in this instruction as example:

  1. Insert card reader with target micro SD card to host PC.

  2. Find out device name for the SD card.

    sudo lsblk
NAME   MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
...
sda      8:0    0 238.5G  0 disk
├─sda1   8:1    0   512M  0 part /boot/efi
└─sda2   8:2    0   238G  0 part /
sdb      8:16   0 447.1G  0 disk
├─sdb1   8:17   0 428.4G  0 part
├─sdb2   8:18   0   513M  0 part
└─sdb3   8:19   0  18.2G  0 part
sdc      8:32   1  14.9G  0 disk
└─sdc1   8:33   1  14.9G  0 part /media/adlink/B4A1-62CD

    💬 In this case, sdc is the device name

  3. Flash image to SD card.

    sudo gzip -dc YOUR-DOWNLOAD-PATH/xxx.gz |sudo dd of=/dev/YOUR-DEVICE

    For example;

    sudo gzip -dc ~/Downloads/autocore-1046-ubuntu20.04-sd-pcu2.0-sw0.5.0-20201210.gz |sudo dd of=/dev/sdc

    Wait patiently until the flash process finishes, this may take up to half hour.

  4. Boot up.

    Now you can plug in the SD card to PCU and power up. The system should be ready to work.

Connect To PCU via SSH#

You could connect to PCU via SSh either by ethernet or serial port.

The default username, password and IP address of PCU is as below: PCU Label

SSH through ethernet#

  1. Cable connection

    Connect host PC to RJ45 2 / RJ45 3 / RJ45 4 Eth port (Blue) on PCU board with Ethernet cable (GbE, need Cat.5e or above).

    PCU Interface Front

  2. Configure static IP for host PC
    You need to manually configure static IP for PC in order to connect with PCU, as there is no DHCP server running on PCU. The static IP should be different with PCU and within the same network segment. (e.g. 192.168.1.200)

    Network Settings

  3. SSH login

    ssh user@192.168.1.239

SSH through Serial Port#

  1. Cable connection

    As an alternative, you could also choose to connect to PCU by micro USB (ttyUSB port in figure blow).

    PCU Interface Front

  2. ttyUSB Settings

    For Linux users, you could use "cutecom" to connect to PCU.

    sudo apt install cutecom
cutecom

    Please set parameters as follows, Device shall be chosen based on your host PC.

    PCU Interface Front

    For other system users, the parameters are:

    Parameter Value
    Baudrate 115200
    Data 8
    Stop bit 1
    Parity None
    Hardware flow control no
    Software flow control no

  3. Reset PCU and Login

    Press reset button and wait until login.

    ssh user@192.168.1.239

Check PCU public IP Address#

Connect PCU to internet via RJ45 1 Eth port (Red), this Eth port is configured to obtain IP address automatically from DHCP by default.

From section above, you can SSH connect to PCU, and you can look for IP address of the public ethernet port(fm1-mac5).

ifconfig fm1-mac5
fm1-mac5: flags=4163<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,MULTICAST>  mtu 1500
  inet 192.168.10.221  netmask 255.255.255.0  broadcast 192.168.10.255
  inet6 fe80::204:7cff:fe2e:191  prefixlen 64  scopeid 0x20<link>
  ether 00:04:7c:2e:01:91  txqueuelen 1000  (Ethernet)
  RX packets 2806  bytes 3665212 (3.6 MB)
  RX errors 0  dropped 0  overruns 0  frame 0
  TX packets 2238  bytes 175964 (175.9 KB)
  TX errors 0  dropped 0 overruns 0  carrier 0  collisions 0
  device memory 0x1ae8000-1ae8fff

💬 You can find IP address of PCU such as 192.168.10.221.