State of the test farm

[Eric S. Raymond]

Five Pis and an Odroid are now up and running, fully configured, and
ready for test/profiling use.  The mix looks like this:

au         RasPi 2      Blue-wired SKU 424254
cu         RasPi 3      Uputronics GPS HAT
fe         RasPi 3      Adafruit GPS HAT
nd         RasPi 3      Adafruit GPS HAT
ne         RasPi 3      Adafruit GPS HAT
xe         Odroid C2    Adafruit GPS HAT

Important caveat: the Odroid lacks the kernel support to do 1PPS.  Until I
can beat Hardkernel into fixing that, it will be useful mainly as a safe
places to attach GPS pucks.  I have a GR-601W, a GR-701-W, a Garmin 18, and
several SiRF-III and SiRF-IV devices available to be attached on request. 

Accounts on all machines are available now.  Email me for the confidential
access details.

The farm rack isn't built yet; you may want to hold off long-duration
tests until I finish that, but now would be a good time to get
familiarized.  I've found a friend who will be happy to let me
prototype a rack bay with his kids' Legos (so I can know what I need
to order from BrickLink) but not yet scheduled the excursion.

Except for the rack, I think the buildout is done at this point - at least
until we get a BeagleBone cape to work with

This was more work than you might guess.  I had to firm up my
newbie-level skills and become a pretty good hand at light component
soldering to put together the Adafruit HATs.  Phil Salkie and I had to
diagnose and blue-wire around a design fault in the SKU board. Two
cases needed Dremeling.  Thirteen cables, a ten-port USB hub, and an
eight-port Netgear switch were involved - there were cable tangles
worthy of Lovecraft and considerable profanity before I finally figured
out how to organize it controllably.

Followup coming on the state of the HOWTO.
-- 
		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>