Quick Start Guide

Powering Ci40

Ci40 can be powered by a microUSB or 9V DC power supply.
For the purpose of this quick start guide we'll use the microUSB option.
Connect the cable to the microUSB socket next to the reset button as shown in the picture below.

The boot process will start as soon as power is applied, Ci40 will load the factory OpenWrt image from NAND flash.
The power LED next to the 9V socket will come on when the board is powered, and the PWM3 LED will begin to flash when the board has successfully booted.

Note that this connection WILL NOT give and UART serial connection to the board
The next section Serial connection to Ci40 has details on how to establish a serial connection a computer and Ci40.

Serial connection to Ci40

There are several ways to communicate with Ci40, for the purposes of this quick start guide we're going to use the USB serial interface.
To start a command line interface (CLI) over a serial connection using USB you'll need to connect a second microUSB cable between your computer and the socket as shown in the picture below.

If you would prefer to setup a CLI over SSH then you'll find information in the appendix at the bottom of this page.

Starting a serial session

A serial session between your computer and the Ci40 requires a terminal package to be installed. We've included instructions below on connecting to a computer running Windows or Linux.

1 - Windows

Windows will automatically load a serial port driver when the Ci40 serial port is connected.

Connection instructions for Putty:

1. Ensure your board has a dedicated microUSB cable to the Ci40's UART microUSB socket, if you've not read through Serial connection to Ci40 in this document then take a look at the pictures to ensure you've got both power and serial cables connected.
2. Open the Device Manager on your Windows PC and look in the Ports (COM & LPT) section - when you connect and disconnect Ci40 you should see a COM device appear and disappear. Take a note of it's COMx number
3. Open Putty
4. Select the Serial radio button
5. Set the "Speed" to 115200
6. Enter the "COMx" from the 'Device Manager' entry into the Serial line field
7. Click "Open"
8. Tap the ENTER key on your keyboard to start the serial output from the Ci40.

Note: We've found some Windows installations struggle to load the default driver from Microsoft, if your Ci40 COM port device doesn't appear on "Ports (COM & LPT)" section you may can manually download a FDTI driver.

2 - Linux Ubuntu

On Linux Ubuntu you can use a serial terminal program such as miniterm to connect to the board. To determine the address to use you can run the following to list USB-serial devices:

$ ls /dev/ttyU*

After discovering the address of your Ci40, run the following with your address replacing /dev/ttyUSB0 (if it is different):

$ sudo miniterm.py /dev/ttyUSB0 115200 --raw --eol lf

Confirm connection to your board

Type the command ifconfig into your CLI to view the list of network connections and their current state.

Connecting Ci40 to your network

Ci40 supports Ethernet and WiFi for network connectivity.

Option 1 - Ethernet

Ci40 is configured to run a DHCP client automatically in the factory OpenWrt configuration. Connect an Ethernet cable between the socket on your Ci40 and your internet router and the board will establish a connection.

Using the serial console setup in step 2 you can enter the command ifconfig to see the current network status. The eth0 section in the image below shows an example of a successful connection, in this example the Ci40 has been assigned the IP address 192.168.0.114.

Option 2 - WiFi

The first step is to check your current Ci40 software version:

cat /etc/openwrt_version

If the version is just a number i.e. 0.9.x, 0.10.x click here

If the version starts CreatorCi40... click here

Platform Support Image

There are 2 main options available:

1. Connect the board to a network over Ethernet and then use the LuCI setup webpages.
2. Use the CLI (either through SSH or Serial) to manually configure WiFi.

Using the Luci setup webpages over Ethernet

Connect your board to your router via Ethernet. On another device on the same router, you can now access the configuration pages on Ci40 by navigating to it's IP address in your browser. You can find the IP address by running 'ifconfig eth0' on the Ci40 terminal.

Select Network->Wireless. and press the add button.

Scroll down the Luci wireless setup page and fill in the form as shown, with your AP SSID in the first box.

Now select the Wireless Security tab and enter your AP security details and click Save & Apply.

WiFi setup using the CLI

Using the serial connection described earlier in this guide we can configure the WiFi link from a Ci40 to your internet router's WiFi network. This method involves editing the wireless configuration files in OpenWrt, the regular method of editing a file in Linux is using vi. If you're not familiar with vi please read the quick summary in the appendix of this page.

# vi /etc/config/wireless

The section below shows a template of the wireless network settings that should be set in the wireless file.

config wifi-iface
        option device 'radio0'
        option network 'sta'
        option mode 'sta'
        option ssid 'your SSID'
        option encryption 'yourEncryptionType'
        option key 'networkPassword'

1. Replace 'your SSID' with the name of your network that provides a link to the internet - keep the ' ' quotes around your network's name
2. Replace 'yourEncryptionType' with the correct encryption for your network. Encryption type is typically 'psk2' by default, but you can find more details on networks (including a table of encryption types) on OpenWrt here.
3. Replace networkPassword with your WiFi key - again keep the ' ' quotes around your key

In the /etc/config/network file, you need to comment out the 'defaultroute' line under 'sta' as shown here:

# vi /etc/config/network

config 'interface' 'sta'
        option 'proto'    'dhcp'
#        option 'defaultroute' '0'

Once you have edited these files and saved your changes you can restart the Ci40's network connection to apply the new changes by entering the following command:

# /etc/init.d/network restart

Enter the command ifconfig to see the current network status. The wlan0 section in the image below shows an example of a successful connection to an internet router, in this example the Ci40 has been assigned the IP address 192.168.0.105.

Use ping to confirm that your network has connected to the internet correctly

# ping -c 1 google.com

Creator Image

There are 2 main options available:

1. Connect to the board's SoftAP network and configure using Luci.
2. Use the CLI (either through SSH or Serial) to manually configure WiFi.

Using the Luci setup webpages over SoftAP

Using a WiFi enabled device, connect to the WiFi network that is broadcast by your Ci40. The SSID is 'myCi40' and the password is 'awalwm2m'.

Enter http://10.10.10.1 in the URL bar of a browser to view the Luci interface.

• Login and select Network->Wireless from the top bar.
• Click on 'Scan'
• Select the WiFi network you want to connect to
• Enter the network password and click 'submit'
• Click 'save and apply' on the next screen

Your WiFi will now be configured.

Using the CLI

Using the serial (or SSH) connection described earlier in this guide we can configure the WiFi link from a Ci40 to your internet router's WiFi network. This method involves editing the wireless configuration files in OpenWrt, the regular method of editing a file in Linux is using vi. If you're not familiar with vi please read the quick summary in the appendix of this page.

# vi /etc/config/wireless

The section below shows a template of the wireless network settings that should be set in the wireless file. Copy and paste this at the bottom of the file:

config wifi-iface
        option device 'radio0'
        option network 'wwan'
        option mode 'sta'
        option ssid 'your SSID'
        option encryption 'yourEncryptionType'
        option key 'networkPassword'

1. Replace 'your SSID' with the name of your network that provides a link to the internet - keep the ' ' quotes around your network's name
2. Replace 'yourEncryptionType' with the correct encryption for your network. Encryption type is typically 'psk2' by default, but you can find more details on networks (including a table of encryption types) on OpenWrt here.
3. Replace networkPassword with your WiFi key - again keep the ' ' quotes around your key

In the /etc/config/network file, you need to add a wwan section:

# vi /etc/config/network

Paste the following at the bottom of the file:

config interface 'wwan'
        option proto 'dhcp'

Once you have edited these files and saved your changes you can restart the Ci40's network connection to apply the new changes by entering the following command:

# /etc/init.d/network restart

Enter the command ifconfig to see the current network status. The wlan0 section in the image below shows an example of a successful connection to an internet router, in this example the Ci40 has been assigned the IP address 192.168.0.105.

Use ping to confirm that your network has connected to the internet correctly

# ping -c 1 google.com

What's next?

Now that you have Ci40 up and running, you can start creating! Here are a few ideas and links:

• Start building your first IoT project with Workshop 1 - SwitchCounter
• Check out the Platform Guide to learn more about Creator Ci40.
• Look through some example projects and try them yourself.

Appendix

Basic introduction to Vi

Basic text editing in a Linux CLI is normally performed using the text editor vi, if you're not familiar with vi then it can be confusing to know how to use it. A basic overview of the commands that you'll need to edit the files as described in this quick start guide are given below, for a more comprehensive introduction to vi take a read through this page or google for many pages and videos on this topic.

1. Start editing a file in vi by entering the command vi filename replacing filename with the name of the file that you want to edit
2. vi has two modes of operation - a text entry mode and a command mode. To enter command mode at any time hit the escape key on your keyboard. When in command mode you cannot type text into the document until you've switch to text entry mode.
3. To move from command mode to text entry mode you need to press either i on your keyboard to insert text at the cursor position on your screen, or press a to append text immediately after the position of the cursor on your screen.
4. You can quit vi at any time by entering command mode (press escape) then typing :q! and pressing ENTER on your keyboard. Note that this will immediately quit vi and lose any changes that you have made.
5. To save edits to your file enter command mode and type :w then press ENTER. Note that you can save and exit in one action by typing :wq
6. You can delete characters by entering command mode, position the cursor to the point where a deletion is required, then pressing x to delete a character. Repeated presses of x will delete a character for each press.

Ci40 power options

The microUSB option already used in this quick start guide is fine for normal operation of the board, the 9V DC option can be used if you're running your Ci40 with optional extra modules plugged into the board or you want to keep the microUSB port available so that you can use it for its 2nd purpose of being a USB host with a USB on the go (OTG) cable.

You can power the Ci40 with a DC power supply (9V, 400mA -> 3A), for example this unit with a 5.5mm barrel and 2.1mm pin. This is ideal if you need to supply your Ci40 and any plug in modules with more power than your USB supply can provide.

Setup of SoftAP

If you want to set up SoftAP, the easiest way is to add the following to your /etc/config/wireless file (but choosing the SSID that you want):

config wifi-iface 'ap'
        option device radio0
        option network ap
        option mode ap
        option ssid 
        option encryption none

/etc/init.d/network restart

CLI over SSH

There are 2 methods for connecting over SSH, over a SoftAP network from your Ci40 or by connecting your Ci40 to your router.

Over SoftAP

In the normal SoftAP configuration of your Ci40 it will broadcast it's own open WiFi network with the SSID "CreatorAP" and have a default IP address on 10.10.10.1

SSH on Windows
Start Putty, enter the Ci40's SoftAP IP address 10.10.10.1 in the "Host Name" section at the top of the screen, ensure the SSH option is highlighted, and that the Port is shows as 22. Hit the open button and the SSH session will start

SSH on Linux
Connect to computer to this WiFi network and SSH to the board using the following command on Linux:

$ ssh root@10.10.10.1

Over your network

Once your Ci40 is connected to your network, find its IP address and replace the 10.10.10.1 address in the SoftAP examples above with the allocated IP address for your board.