Review: Creator Ci40 IoT Kit

Connecting to the Creator Ci40

Once the board is powered, you can connect to it in various ways. Since all the examples that follow use Ubuntu 1604, it is best to continue on either a PC running Ubuntu or with a virtual machine (VM).

When the board is done booting (in slightly less than a minute) you can connect to it over the serial port. Send something (press a key) to bring up the OpenWRT welcome screen.  Not having all the ingredients handy, we ignore the recipe for a fruity drink and continue with our journey.

 

Following the instructions in the Quick Start Guide we edit the Wi-Fi and network configuration files from within the serial terminal with VI to set the SSID, security type and pass phrase for our network. Having a list of VI commands to refer to is more than useful, and do not forget to save the file (:w). You can also do this in a graphical interface (“Luci”) by connecting to the Ci40’s access point CreatorAP, but that means that you must disconnect from the Internet where all the instructions are (unless you are better equipped than me).

When all is well the Ci40 should now be able to connect to your Wi-Fi network. Run the ifconfig command in the terminal to find out its IP address. When you type it in a browser you will see the Luci console appear.

Let's go workshopping

The next step is to follow the example Workshop 1 because that is where they tell you what you must download and how you must setup your development PC.

Setting up the Ci40 development environment

First we run a script that installs an enormous amount of packages. Many feeds are missing; will that be a problem later on? We’ll see, let’s simply continue for now.

When the script is through downloading we can compile the application. On my PC this took almost one hour (my PC is not a race horse), but the subsequent builds are promised to be faster. We’ll see, once more.

While the PC is busy compiling (ignoring a long list of warnings) we create an account in order to get access to the certificate creation tool. Click “Device Keys” -> “Certificates” tab -> “Get Certificate +” button to create and download a certificate file. This file must be installed on the Ci40, but for that you must wait until the build process has finished. Copying the file using secure copy (scp) results in a security warning that we ignore.