Q Light Controller+

Hello- I saw Massimo's post on the ODROID-C1, and it looked like such a neat deal I ordered one. I got it in and put the provided Ubuntu 14.04 image from the Hardkernel web site on a 16G SD, updated all software, pulled down the QLC 4.8.3 source and got it built.

It's now running a single Wizard generated chaser, cycling colors on a single ADJ Mega Tri Par light.

Very cool!

ODROID-C specs:
* Amlogic ARM® Cortex®-A5(ARMv7) 1.5Ghz quad core CPUs
* Mali™-450 MP2 GPU (OpenGL ES 2.0/1.1 enabled for Linux and Android)
* 1Gbyte DDR3 SDRAM
* Gigabit Ethernet
* 40pin GPIOs
* eMMC4.5 HS200 Flash Storage slot / UHS-1 SDR50 MicroSD Card slot
* USB 2.0 Host x 4, USB OTG x 1,
* Infrared(IR) Receiver
* Ubuntu 14.04 or Android KitKat

Running the single sequence with a VNC window open to my desktop machine, I get a CPU usage of 10-20% on the four cores.

But my clock rate is off- I have a 1 second Common Fade In, with a 3s Common Hold, but I see about 10s go by as it counts down the 4s time in the Virtual Console display.

Not a big deal, but I'm concerned enough to ask if there is anything I can tweak to make that work better?

I'm running a Kedsum USB to DMX adapter from Amazon, configured as a ENTTEC DMX USB Pro RX/TX.

Next up for me is a miniKORG or MIDI foot pedal set. I want to run this headless on-stage, with foot pedals set for blackout, strobe and sequence up/down.

Thanks-

Zeph

Since it took a bunch of research to get a system together, I'll post some links in the hopes it may help someone else:

ODROID-C1: http://hardkernel.com/main/products/prdt_info.php
I bough the C1, a case and a power supply.
I was too cheap to buy the pre-loaded SD, so I bought two Kingston SDs from Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00DYQYLQQ

The Ubuntu image for the C1 is on this page, along with the windows tool to write it out: http://com.odroid.com/sigong/nf_file_bo ... _board.php

I also bought a micro-HDMI cable: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00B9H6VT2
and the Kedsum USB to DMX controller: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B009UQZ7A8

Warning, that one is the 5 pin model, so I had to get a 5pin to 3pin converter for my lights: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0013XWB14


Setup sequence:
Download the Ubuntu image from above, and unzip it to a 4.8G file.
Use Win32 Disk Imager for ODROID V1.1 to write the file to the SD.
Plug in the SD, HDMI and keyboard/mouse and power up the system. If you get a blue LED next to the red one, then it recognized the image and is booting. In about 30s you will get the desktop. I saw nothing on my monitor until the desktop came up, which is a little concerning the first few times.

Run the ODROID Utility, and reboot.
The root image resizer didn't work, so I did it by hand with gparted. I also added in a 2G swap file. Note that Chrome kept crashing with an out of memory error, so I used Firefox, which worked fine.

Run the software updater and let it finish. Then install these packages in order to build QLC+:
apt-get install libftdi-dev pkg-config libqt4-dev libftdi-dev liblo-dev

Reboot again, and then pull down the QLC+ source code, and build it.
I also installed tightvnc:
apt-get install tightvncserver
then configured it to auto-start on boot: http://www.hiddentao.com/archives/2013/ ... ntu-12-04/

And that's about it. As mentioned above, I want to go headless and hands-off for a typical bar band portable setup. I may put the ODROID right on the light bar and only run a USB cable down to a nanoKONTROL2 by my side. Or I may get a USB to MIDI and run a KORG five switch multi-function MIDI pedal like this one: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0012SO47E

Or maybe both.

Long term, if this works out I'll buy another complete ODROID-C1 setup, and have a hot-spare in my case for about $50 in parts.

I'm also looking at this so your research will help a lot, thank you. Is the processor maybe running hot? Do you have the heat-sink on? I'm wondering if it isn't perhaps throttling - I saw a few references about cpu throttling due to heat on the website. Not sure what QLC+ uses for timing, so this may not apply.

Good idea, but the CPU is less than 90F. Not hot at all yet. It's sitting open on the desk, without the top plastic cover on it.

I'm still a bit worried- I've got five lights going now, and it's a little hurky-jerky. Don't know if it is the ODROID, or the USB to DMX.

Got a MIDI adapter today, but QLC+ is not seeing it yet.

Anyone know if there is anything I have to install to get it to work? I've rebooted and all...

odroid@odroid:~$ lsusb
Bus 001 Device 005: ID 1a86:752d QinHeng Electronics CH345 MIDI adapter

odroid@odroid:~$ aconnect -i
ALSA lib seq_hw.c:457:(snd_seq_hw_open) open /dev/snd/seq failed: No such file or directory
can't open sequencer

I get this in syslog:
Dec 31 19:02:20 odroid pulseaudio[3140]: [pulseaudio] module.c: Failed to load module "module-alsa-card" (argument: "device_id="1" name="usb-1a86_USB2.0-MIDI-00-USB20MIDI" card_name="alsa_card.usb-1a86_USB2.0-MIDI-00-USB20MIDI" namereg_fail=false tsched=no fixed_latency_range=no ignore_dB=no deferred_volume=yes use_ucm=yes card_properties="module-udev-detect.discovered=1""): initialization failed.

hey, replying to private message here...

Who said I've got a C1 ? I purchased one but it still hasn't arrived yet.
You have a generic linux issue, not specifically related to QLC+.
Have you tried the adapter on a Linux computer first ?
If it works, then it's probably a kernel or ALSA related problem.
Maybe missing package or missing support in the kernel.
In the second case you should recompile the kernel with the support for your device. Strongly not recommended.

In general, before buying a new hardware, you should check the compatibility with Linux.
Since lots of manufacturers don't care about Linux, you might end up wasting your money or getting crazy with kernel stuff and configuration issues.

Thanks Massimo- Can you tell me which driver QLC+ looks for to use MIDI? lsmod says that there is a raw driver loaded, but I take it that is not the one QLC+ is looking for?

root@odroid:/opt/qlcplus-4.8.3/fixtures# lsmod | grep usb
snd_usb_audio 120249 0
snd_hwdep 5429 1 snd_usb_audio
snd_usbmidi_lib 17098 1 snd_usb_audio
snd_rawmidi 17595 1 snd_usbmidi_lib

OK, so I also got the C1 but opted for the eMMC module with the OS (ubuntu 14.04) pre-installed. I ran the ODROID utility but have not yet checke if my root partition has been expanded.

I also followed the normal build instructions for QLC+ for Linux using qt4. The build went through with a perl locale warning on every file but it compiled fine.

QLC+ seems to run fine - I have not yet connected the DMX device. I just set up a few rgb generic fixtures, created 2 scenes set the in & out fade times to 5 seconds and created a virtual console 2 solo buttons. Crossfades seem to work in the correct expected time.

I also added the real time clock backup battery, as I am going to test this for another project where some of the work is off-line.

In addition I also got their HDMI 9" multi-touch monitor. This works fine with multi-touch becoming single touch mouse emulator. A bit weird as I could not easily "grab" a slider.

One thing that seems very slow is the network connection. I do not know why but software updates and installs literally crawls along taking hours, and that is on a LAN connection. Must still investigate this.

Will report further here.

Interesting- I've not noticed a slow network port, but I've not benchmarked it either.

I'm having major problems with the unit not booting on a cold boot. A real PITA that I have to power-cycle it several times to get it to boot. I'm going to order a serial adapter so I can see what it is doing, and maybe an eMMC too.

Still trying to compile a new kernel with MIDI support. Making progress, but not there yet. Bought a KORG NanoKontrol2 thinking it would work via USB, but it's a USB MIDI device, and no support for MIDI in the stock kernel, so still no luck.

BTW- I get the perl Setting local failed warning too. I've not been able to suppress it yet. If you figure it out, please share...

Got mine few days back, and i have to say gently, that this board is probably ok, but software is in bad need of fixing.
The slow network is discussed in [odroid forum's](http://forum.odroid.com/viewtopic.php?f ... =50#p65851) and the temporarry fix is to remap some IRQ's to get it running somewhat ok.
For locale errors just google ubuntu perl locales, it's common problem.

So finally I got mine **yesterday** (damn italian post)
Again, no custom expenses, which is good, so it truly costs 40$
BUT

- it has a custom power plug. You **cannot** power it up with the micro USB OTG port, so you need to buy a 5$ power adapter
- it has a micro HDMI connector, so to see something on a TV you need to buy an extra cable

Basically you need to add 10$/10€ of accessories before you can do anything on it.
Once again, the Raspberry Pi wins over this device for the simple reason that they stick with standard connectors.

Especially I don't really like the power plug when everyone is going to micro USB, even phones.
As for HDMI...to save 10mm of board they went on the most uncommon connector ever (tablets normally have mini HDMI)

I'll keep you posted on my software analysis, especially the MIDI part, since I have a nanoKONTROL too.

I successfully used mine to run a show last weekend. I used VNC on an iPad to talk to the device, though a wireless router. Worked OK, but not yet ideal. I still don't have Midi working, will try again this week.

One thing I noticed, it won't boot without a keyboard attached. I left my keyboard at home and when I got to the gig the device would not boot. I suspect it was saying something like "Keyboard not detected, press F1 to continue."

So on Friday night I had static lights. Saturday I figured out the problem and got it working, and had a decent show Saturday night.

The device did great running the lights, no issues at all, no lag.

I bought one as well. Yesterday I was able to start plain desktop, didn't have time to play with it more.

For Ubuntu image from 4.2 (release 1.3) they say USB MIDI is included and they solved the gigabit problem.

Finally got my C1 up and running.
I confirm what Jano said: image 1.3 includes all the necessary driver for USB MIDI devices. Connected my nanoKONTROL 2 and it is recognized.

I haven't built QLC+ yet for 2 reasons:
- no time for it
- the 1.3 image is missing the MALI DRM kernel module, so xorg rendering is crap and got me disgusted to proceed further on. I started a thread in the hardkernel forum: http://forum.odroid.com/viewtopic.php?f=112&t=9289
Let's see if they reply