Only a few minor changes required to run on Le Potato

[N7ILK]

I'd been running on an ancient RPI B+ and really needed more horsepower with less power consumption. It was taking 2-3 hours to generate the timelapse and the UI was (almost) painfully slow to respond.
With what the prices for new PIs are running these days, I thought I'd give Le Potato a shot. For $35 on Amazon, it seemed like a no-brainer.
Installing the O/S is well covered on their site. I chose a headless install of 2022-09-22-raspbian-bullseye-arm64-lite+aml-s905x-cc.

For the AllSky install, here's what differs from the RPi setup:

• Needed to write a replacement for vcgencmd since it's not supported on the Potato. It only recognizes the get_throttled command and has no way of monitoring voltage, but does get current and historical throttling plus current over temperature data and returns the hex values associated with each. It is provided as-is on my repo.
• I had to change the "shutdown" command (in system.php) to use -H (instead of -h) and also the sudoers file to reflect that change.
• I needed to get the GPIO libraries from libretech with: sudo apt install libretech-gpio libretech-dtoverlay

I was able to run all night last night on a small-ish power bank (with plenty to spare) which the Pi could never do and ffmpeg only took 4 minutes to run. Now I'm just waiting for a clear night to get a decent looking timelapse.

allsky-20230709.mp4

[EricClaeys]

@N7ILK. Thad, thanks for the info. Someone else got the Le Potato to run a couple months ago but he never said what he had to do, so I am glad you did.

Can you attach whatever changes you made?

Would you please run:

uname -a
cat /etc/os-release # I think that’s the name.

Have you found a way to tell with 100% certainty if you are running on a Le Potao?

[N7ILK]

The (very few) changes I had to make are in my original post.
I do know "for certain" that I'm running on Le Potato because right now it's sitting next to me until I take it out for this evening's heavenly capture.
I'll upload the vcgencmd emulator to my repo.

pi@PotatoAllsky:~ $ uname -a
Linux PotatoAllsky 6.0.12-00858-gb98721ea4575 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Thu Dec 8 19:08:19 UTC 2022 aarch64 GNU/Linux
pi@PotatoAllsky:~ $ cat /etc/os-release
PRETTY_NAME="Debian GNU/Linux 11 (bullseye)"
NAME="Debian GNU/Linux"
VERSION_ID="11"
VERSION="11 (bullseye)"
VERSION_CODENAME=bullseye
ID=debian
HOME_URL="https://www.debian.org/"
SUPPORT_URL="https://www.debian.org/support"
BUG_REPORT_URL="https://bugs.debian.org/"
pi@PotatoAllsky:~ $

[N7ILK]

Hello Eric,
After viewing your profile, I believe I misunderstood the intent of your question.
This is how system.php pulls the hardware info:
pi@PotatoAllsky:~ $ cat /proc/device-tree/model
Libre Computer AML-S905X-CC
Here are the changes I had to make:

• A minimal vcgencmd replacement (bash script) for /usr/bin. It's here.
• ~/allsky/html/includes/system.php (line 424) Change -h to -H in shutdown command
• /etc/sudoers.d/allsky (line 17) Same change as above
• sudo apt install libretech-gpio libretech-dtoverlay to fix repeating "Import Error" in /var/log/allskyperiodic.log

I hope the above is helpful.

[EricClaeys]

@N7ILK perfect. proc/device-tree/model should tell us all we need.
Is the Le Potato is made by Libre Computer and S950-X the model?

[N7ILK]

The full model is AML-S905X-CC which identifies the Amlogic processor as well as the form-factor (Cred Card in this case)
The platform is S905X
Here's the lowdown