Introduction
Roughly speaking, the MinnowBoard Max1 is a Raspberry Pi like board based around an Intel Atom. It’s rather more expensive than the Pi, but crucially has a SATA port which allows one to connect a normal disk-drive.
Software
I tried installing the 64-bit versions of both Mint 17 MATE2 and Ubuntu 14.04.01 server3 edition. Both appeared to work, but I’ve not run either in anger yet.
One needs a magic incantation to convert the OS ISO image into a format suitable for a USB stick. On OS X:
hdiutil convert -format UDRW -o out.img in.iso
A new kernel
When playing with hardware the Linux kernel has many useful modules which are not enabled in the stock Ubuntu & Mint builds. So I compiled my own kernel.4
I put a copy of the kernel config5 on GitHub. My kernel tree’s been patched to include notro’s tftfb6 device.
Ethernet
The MAC address7 of the Ethernet adapter was set to 00:00:00:00:00:00 which seemed to break the network.
Happily it’s easy to hack this on a live system, and patch /etc/network/interfaces to solve the problem permanently. Wikibooks tells you all you need to know.8
Patch it in firmware
In principle, I think Intel’s firmware updater9 should allow you to set the MAC address. It didn’t appear to work for me though.
SATA power
I hooked up an old Crucial SSD drive to the SATA port. Experiments suggest that the drive only needs a 5V power rail, and 5V is conveniently available on J2 next to the SATA port.
However:
- The polarity was shown wrongly in some online documentation, so check it yourself before connecting anything up.
- I’ve no idea whether J2 can supply enough current.
- I’ve no idea whether running the SSD with a 12V rail is sensible.
In other words, if you do try this it might, as far as I know, break something.
Luis Montoya pointed out to me that this approach is discussed on the mailing list.10
Online help.
- The main source is at eLinux.11
- There is a helpful mailing list which is archived on nabble.12
- There is useful software on GitHub13
CPU data
I’ve been playing with the dual-core version, which uses an Intel Atom E3825.14 The datasheet15 for the CPU runs to some 5,000 pages, but can be helpful!
References
- 1. http://www.elinux.org/Minnowboard:MinnowMax
- 2. http://www.linuxmint.com/release.php?id=22
- 3. http://www.ubuntu.com/download/server
- 4. ../12/kernel-cookbook.html
- 5. https://github.com/mjoldfield/seabass/blob/master/config
- 6. https://github.com/notro/fbtft
- 7. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAC_address
- 8. http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Changing_Your_MAC_Address
- 9. https://uefidk.com/content/minnowboard-max
- 10. http://minnowboard.57273.x6.nabble.com/MinnowBoard-SATA-Power-Options-td555.html
- 11. http://www.elinux.org/Minnowboard:MinnowMax
- 12. http://minnowboard.57273.x6.nabble.com
- 13. https://github.com/MinnowBoard/minnow-max-extras
- 14. http://ark.intel.com/products/78474/Intel-Atom-Processor-E3825-1M-Cache-1_33-GHz
- 15. http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/datasheets/atom-e3800-family-datasheet.pdf