Hello, I was wondering if there is a way to get a serial connection for the Efika MX board. I am trying to figure out a way to access the CAN bus in a vehicle, and this seems like the best solution if there's a way...

Hi toefraz, we ship all units with a small serial connector board.

R&B :)

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Hi toefraz,

I don't know if it can help but I'm using these RS232/CAN dongles on my laptop via a usb2serial adapter (FTDI ic I believe) driven by a custom software. Knowing that the EfikaMX has 2 usb ports and that linux supports most of the usb2serial devices you should be fine. However I never used them on a vehicle bus directly. It has always been a PC to equipment type of communication.

Unfortunately these CAN dongles aren't cheap. You can probably build your own UART to CAN gateway with one of these dirt cheap MCU (PIC / AVR...) but the final choice here is time vs. money ;-).

Stellae

stellae,

We have all the hardware we need to get CAN working, we just needed a way to connect it to the computer :)

Also, I was wondering if there are any ways to decrease boot time. It's taking about 30-35 seconds to boot, and we would like it closer to 10-15 if possible... Is there any NAND or NOR memory on the board we could load the kernel image on to?

Ok awesome :D
I haven't worked much with my EfikaMX so far unfortunately :-/ but I would say it all depends on what you need in your linux distribution. The minimum being a bare kernel + busybox (I know this is extreme). Have you tried to tinker with the init. scripts and stripped them down to avoid launching unnecessary daemons ? Other users may have better ideas. I've managed to get much better boot times with the Efika 5k2 by just removing most of the default init. scripts under Debian at the time (and by the way the kernel + busybox was < 5+sec. but limited to network servers type of applications).

sorry for not being more helpful here :-/

Stellae

If you have access to the uboot environment, the current time out setting for booting is around 10 or 15 seconds - you can set that lower (but keep in mind that if you need to flash a new image you have to reset the environment.) I've got mine set to 3 seconds here, and the Efika MX is available to ssh in to in ~7 seconds (Gentoo)