LabVIEW OpenSUSE Leap15.5 on a LattePanda V1

[swatts]

Hello LabVIEW Linux Lovers,

Got a bit of a treat for you all, today we are loading LabVIEW 2023 Pro on a LattePanda V1 

This has the potential to be a basis for our embedded platform, these little embedded computers are widely available, fanless and inexpensive.

Details about it in here

It has a  Intel Atom x5-Z8350 giving it a score of 894 which is pretty weedy.

Why would you use OpenSUSE?

The flavour of Linux I'm going to use is OpenSUSE Leap 15.5, and the reason being is that it is light and it is not too strict on using root. And this is useful when dealing with hardware.

It can be downloaded here - https://get.opensuse.org/leap/15.5/?type=desktop#download

I plugged in the keyboard, mouse, HDMI screen, ethernet if you have it and Ventoy USB with OpenSUSE Leap 15.5 ISO on it. (Don't connect it to the ethernet yet...)

By default it needs a button press to start-up, this can be turned off in the BIOS (press ESC on when power is applied).

While you are in the BIOS push your ventoy USB to the top of the boot choices and save and exit.

It should now show you the ventoy menu and you can select OpenSUSE.

Grub in normal mode and install.

The Linux install process is quite nice now and OpenSUSE is pretty standard, I activate online repositories and ask for Xfce Desktop as it's the lightweight option.

Set your administrator account password and name it root and create any other users you want (if you are remoting in you shouldn't use or allow root)

I set-up a user name and password, but will do most of my testing and setting up as root. (and I'm not gonna apologize either)

After lots of progress bars ... Full disclosure getting SUSE to install took some effort, I think the little board was overheating... Think about sticking a heatsink on it. 

One other oddity is that it installs with 2 screens, the HDMI one and the MIPI-DSI Display (Mobile Industry Processor Interface - Display Serial interface). Even if not connected it will default to the MIPI-DSI one, turn it off in Display Settings and things will make sense.

All screens etc can be set-up by right-clicking and messing with desktop settings, also useful are the panel settings found by right-clicking Applications>>Settings>>Panel Profiles. I went for Redmond for that windows familiarity.

When it is all installed and set-up, make sure the time is correct. The best way is to connect the internet and start up the NTP server. On my install it was all installed but not switched on as a service. If the time is wrong Firefox may moan about certificates being wrong and will then start policing what you see!!!

Systemctl status systemd-timesyncd

The will tell you if it is active(running), if it isn't.

timedatectl set-ntp true

This enables and starts the network synchronization service.

Open Firefox and go to NI.com/downloads and login into your NI user account, select the flavour of LabVIEW and Linux.

Download and open file location

Extract the package files from the zip archive.

Select the repository registration file that suits your distro and open it in YaST

Leap 15.5 is a bit new for LabVIEW 2023 Q3, so I selected "ni-labview-2023-pro-23.3.2.49153-0+f1-opensuse154.noarch.rpm". It worked OK.

YaST stands for Yet another Setup Tool and does a nice job of installing software. The package manager engine that powers YaST is Zypp (Zen/YaST Packages Patches Patterns Products) and the command line interface is Zypper (SUSE version of yum, apt etc).

zypper install ni-labview-2023-pro

Next we want to download the device drivers, mainly we are interested NI-VISA.

From Firefox look for "Linux NI Device Drivers" and it should take you to https://www.ni.com/en/support/downloads/drivers/download.ni-linux-device-drivers.html#521765

I advise you check out the View Readme link and from there check out NI Linux Device Driver Compatibility

This page gives you the package names for all the device drivers available. We want VISA, because we want this device to talk to Eurotherm controllers.

zypper install ni-visa

This will install all the LabVIEW VIs and some useful configuration and interaction tools (very useful for finding serial ports!)

Always worth installing this

zypper install ni-hwcfg-utility

It came up with a warning with an instruction to do this command

dkms autoinstall

This stands for Dynamic Kernel Module Support and the autoinstall command rebuilds all the modules for the currently running kernel. Which is nice.

This made the warning go away.

And that was it, the video below shows me playing with our CTI hardware. The emulator was built on the device as an executable and that took a couple of minutes. it's a bit sluggish because I was using teamviewer and that was taxing the lil board a bit.

What's next? Installers, seeing if OpenSUSE on a VM will create stuff that runs on this device. SSDC is very into templates, so we would like to load an image onto the board and it has all we need to make a project.

Arduino drivers for this board (it has an on-board Arduino)

Lots of Love