I got around to set up the 120 GB SSD on the quad. I ended up making my own power cable with header wires to connect to +5 and Ground pins. I could not find a power connector that fit it J12 on the board at the local stores and didn’t want to order a small part online and pay for shipping.  What I have works.

The process was rather painless at first. I followed the procedure for creating a bootable image via OSX as described at the Udoo website. I then booted the board with the newly imaged SD card with the SSD connected to the board. I then installed gparted via

sudo apt-get install gparted

then ran

 sudo gparted

to partition the SSD and also create another partition on the SD card for backing up stuff since I had about 23 GB extra on the card to use.

I liked what another Udoo user suggested and allocated space for u-boot in the event that one day a complete boot from the SSD arrives. I created a partition for root/home and another for the swap as shown below.

Once the partition was complete, I did a quick check with fdisk -l to make sure the device was listed. I then mounted the SSD e.g. sudo mount /dev/sda1 /media/ssd for my environment. Then followed the instructions posted at elinux.org using the wget/tarball approach. The only thing left to prepare u-boot via setenv root… as the stated int the instructions. I noticed that my osx did not recognize the udoo quad plugged in the usb port and concluded I was missing a driver.  I ended up installing the osx version from Silicon Labs. Once that was complete, I proceeded with SerialTools to interrupt the boot process.

I set the root parameter as suggested and resumed the boot process. Under that scenario, I could not get the root system to point to the SSD. It was just booting like there was just an SD card. What I had to do was change the mmcroot to point as follows

mmcroot=/dev/sda1 root wait

rather than /dev/mmcblk0p1

I could not otherwise make the system root/home point to the SSD. I’m not a hard core linux person. This approach was not described as part of the instructions and I ended looking at the boot arguments to make this work.  The last touch was to set up /ect/fstab to deal with the swap partition and my backup space on the SD card.

The stab for my environment is the following:

UUID=332e43b0-97cd-42bb-b6a8-3429d4303bea none swap sw 0 0
UUID=9d07e200-9341-4278-8ad8-28b10212d8c5 /media/backups ext3 defaults 0 2

Note that the UUID is specific to my environment and can be found via the blkid command. I rebooted the board (sudo shutdown -r now) and then ran

df -h

and

swapon -s

and the output shown below.

I then installed mysql server as per standard Ubuntu instructions. What is left to do is to port what I have on my PC to the quad and replicate the SCADA side. Once that works, I will move the arduino code and energy monitoring hardware to the quad as well. Then call this project a day.