Although I am nowhere near finishing testing, I thought I would add an update to this thread.
I’ve been working on and off, as Rod has stated previously, on testing TunerStudio in an ARM environment.
I have got the latest debian squeeze image for the raspberry – debian6-19-04-2012 from
http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads - working within an emulated environment. I am using QEMU on a Ubuntu host.
The image is installed with openjkd6 and a full, registered copy of TunerStudio.
There are some “quirks” to using the emulator such as it does not load into a user interface - it loads into command line and the user needs to use the STARTX command to get to the user interface. I'm not sure if this can be overcome.
Because of this I have not been able yet to set a script to open Tunerstudio at startup.
Load times for TunerStudio are at the moment slightly long and the CPU monitor is showing 100% utilisation when Tunerstudio loads, but on load completion the utilisation goes down dramatically.
I have the emulator set to use 192Mb RAM. The Raspberry pi GPU needs a minimum memory of 32Mb, so this gives a bit of leeway.
Although I cannot quote figures – I’m nowhere near the install at the moment and never thought to note exact figures - the debian task manager is showing very low memory usage during TunerSTudio startup and also once it is running - though that will inevitably rise once data starts to flow.
Opening TunerStudio in full screen mode does not seem to make that much difference to speed of opening – at the moment loading the project and dash seem to be causing the biggest delays. That said, it is an emulation and it is running off of a 5 year old laptop with a 5400rpm hard drive, so I guess with the OS on the actual device and running off of an SD card, IO should be much quicker.
The 3 main drawbacks so far with using the raspberry image in QEMU are:
The obvious – it’s only an emulator
The graphics are not what they could be – I’m stuck with a max resolution of 800x600, which makes life painful and it’s only emulating a cirrus graphics card, rather than the Raspberry pi GPU, so there should be a lot of improvement with the real hardware.
I cannot for the life of me get comms into the emulated machine, ie pass through from either the host serial port or a USB serial convertor. I suspect that this is due to my being a novice with all things Linux and especially the QEMU software…
hence, at this point I think I have gone as far as I can with testing in an emulation.
So far with TunerStudio loaded in full screen mode, using one of the pre defined dash layouts, I’ve had “reasonable” results with the gauge demo mode. Not as smooth as would be liked, but again, that’s probably down to the fact it is an emulation.
I have been in contact with Phil via email regarding optimising TunerStudio and he has given me some pointers, but up to now, I have not had time to test them.
I did have problems as suspected with rxtx drivers, but that was easily overcome by download the correct rxtx drivers for the ARM processor.
I say overcome, but I can only go by the fact that TunerStudio started by complaining about not finding rxtx drivers. After downloading and moving the rxtx-2.2pre2 to the correct paths and renaming to rxtxserial.so, TunerStudio loaded happily. But, because I cannot get data from the host serial port, I cannot definitively say that it will work.
Very soon – I hope, we will have a Raspberry pi in hand to continue testing, but for now I thought I would share my findings.
Just as a besides, I have bought a cheap 9” display for testing -
http://eonon.co.uk/Stand%20Alone/L0608.html
The resolution is a bit irregular, 1024 x 600 but I got it for $55 delivered.
I do not have a PC with AV outputs, so I have plugged it into the av port of my blu-ray player for testing and it is actually a lot better than I expected.
So if the physical Raspberry pi plays nicely with TunerStudio, using Rods custom power supply/comms PCB, this should be a rather inexpensive and compact alternative to the myriad of gauges I would otherwise need on my dash.
Anyhow, results look promising at this point.
As said I am a Linux novice, so please feel free to correct me/ give me some pointers if I have anything wrong in any of my assumptions.
Graham