So as you may know (if you've been keeping up), one of the devices I'm using in this project is a Vocore I got back in 2014.

This is a version 1 vocore, and the dock it comes with a microsd card slot for some external storage.

I figured I'd give that a go, since right now I've got a usb dongle stuck into it and it adds a lot of bulk that doesn't need to be there. (You can take a look here)

I got my hands on a nice cheap microsd card and I figured I'd get to work.

Well I started working, and I realized that the creator of the Vocore had quite a lot of trouble getting the sd card to work with SPI with OpenWrt. With the help of a community member, he was able to get it working with some adjusted config files and some patched driver code I found here... cool!

I did what the instructions said and uploaded my new openwrt image aaaannnndddddd

"kmodloader panic"

and we had a boot loop... oh dear

as it turns out, this (right here) is the method the community member used to get the microsd working.

I'm using bleeding edge chaos calmer, and according to this wiki page

"This mod does not work on the new trunk and Chaos Calmer 15.05 (since the revision r47045)."

Fantastic... So now I have a choice... I can pull that revision of the source down and use that as my baseline to get that sdcard hack to work... but before that, let's take a look at what is actually in that patch...

"kernel: backport some SPI layer improvements from 4.1 to 3.18, significantly improves flash speed on ramips"

Ramips happens to be the architecture I'm using... fantastic.

So for now I think I'm going to keep the usb dongle plugged in for some extra storage. I'd rather keep the flash access speed (the vocore has spi attached flash) than the ability to read and write to an sd card.

The speeds would've been rather awful keep in mind... the speeds over spi would've been around 100kB/s.

However here's the whole backwards progress of the entire process.

Like a moron I didn't back up my wireless config files... and that was a hell of a process.

I need to get the wireless on the device working again so I can ssh in to continue my work.

I guess that's life teaching me a lesson to back things up before diving in headfirst :P

Oh well... I need to get that reconfigured and the gpio and uart hooked back up to the vocore.

By the time I post another log I SHOULD see some forward progress graphing some of the speed and latency I'll see over different send speeds and packet sizes... lest I get any other brilliant ideas to try out.

EDIT:

Turns out it's not as hard the second time you do it. Both platforms and radios are back in business. Fingers crossed I'll get some time to work on this tomorrow!