Max Glenister

This page is a changing document. I’ll probably add more notes to it in the future.

These are just some notes that I’ve put together in the past about flashing and upgrading the CHIP (and Pocket CHIP) computer.

This device doesn’t have any first party support any more, and it’s not as powerful as Raspberry Pi, but it’s quite fun and the Pocket CHIP form-factor is great. If you can get hold of one, you should!

Erasing and re-flashing the CHIP

You can erase and factory flash a CHIP from your computer using this repo. It will completely erase the CHIP, so make sure you have anything important backed up.

First you need to jumper the CHIP in FEL mode. You can do this by connecting the FEL pin to any GND pin:

Next you can clone the repo and run the Flash.sh:

git clone https://github.com/Thore-Krug/Flash-CHIP.git
cd Flash-CHIP
sudo chmod +x Flash.sh
./Flash.sh

Making APT work with a mirror of the NTC APT repository

This will replace the now defunct nextthing.co APT repositories with a mirror provided by chip.jfpossibilities.com

1. Open /etc/apt/sources.list in your editor

    sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list
   

2. replace all instances of opensource.nextthing.co with chip.jfpossibilities.com
3. remove jessie-updates repositories
4. change jessie-backports to:

    deb http://deb.debian.org/debian jessie-backports main contrib non-free
    deb-src http://deb.debian.org/debian jessie-backports main contrib non-free
   

5. Disable apt valid check:

    echo 'Acquire::Check-Valid-Until "0";' | sudo tee /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/10-no-check-valid
   

6. In /etc/apt/preferences replace opensource.nextthing.co with chip.jfpossibilities.com
7. Lastly, make sure everything is up to date

    sudo apt update
    sudo apt upgrade
   

Making APT work with a mainline Debian APT repository

This will replace all of the APT repositories with mainline Debian mirrors. This is best done on a fresh install.

1. Open /etc/apt/sources.list in your editor

    sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list
   

2. Replace all lines of sources.list with the following (you can use a more local mirror rather than the ftp.uk.debian.org if you prefer):

    deb http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/ jessie main contrib non-free
    deb-src http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/ jessie main contrib non-free
   
    deb http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/ jessie-updates main contrib non-free
    deb-src http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/ jessie-updates main contrib non-free
   
    deb http://security.debian.org/ jessie/updates main contrib non-free
    deb-src http://security.debian.org/ jessie/updates main contrib non-free
   

3. Make sure everything is up to date and install apt-transport-https as it will likely be missing

    sudo apt update
    sudo apt upgrade
    sudo apt install apt-transport-https
   

4. Generate missing locales:

    sudo apt install locales
    sudo locale-gen en_US en_US.UTF-8 
    sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales          
    sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata    
   

Don’t bother trying to dist-upgrade to a newer Debian version as it tends to break stuff. 🤷

Installing a newer (> 3.7) version of Cmake on the CHIP

1. Remove any version of cmake installed from apt

    sudo apt remove --purge --auto-remove cmake
   

2. Download the “Unix/Linux Source” tar.gz from https://cmake.org/download/ (I’ve used the 3.15.0-rc1 — so long as it’s newer than 3.7 you should be fine)
3. Decompress the tar.gz somewhere and cd to it.
4. Start the initial bootstrap

    ./bootstrap
   

5. Set up a swapfile so that we can run make with our limited resources on the CHIP

    sudo su -
    dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/swapfile bs=1024 count=1048576 # 1gb swap file
    mkswap /tmp/swapfile
    chmod 600 /tmp/swapfile
    losetup /dev/loop0 /tmp/swapfile # create a loopback so we can use it
    swapon /dev/loop0
   
    #double check that it is mounted
    cat /proc/swaps
   

6. Start the build

    make -j2 # j4 caused the CHIP to hang
    # will take a couple of hours...
    sudo make install
   

7. After that, check that the new version of cmake is installed and working

    cmake --version