Knowledge Base

Kreeti Foundation has put together the components required to use an Embedded System as the core system for use as a Video Server for Khan Academy Lessons. The KreetiLab can be used in Android or GNU/Linux mode. A lot of different software like of GCC, Python, Ruby and Python can be loaded. It is also a nice platform for teaching RDBMS concepts using MySQL.

Here in the Knowledge Base we plan to put together all the information that you may require to support KreetiLab in any school or at home for students who wishes to use it as their learning platform. We will be putiing topics related, hardware, OS, installation and elarning tutorials. This is a collaborative approach and will pool in resources from many Open Source tutorials also.

We will also include some guidelines on how to fix some problems.

Important note: we plan to use Radxa, designed by Tom Cubie in China and marketed by his company as the core platform for our KreetiLab. Like many others we also started this journey with Raspberry Pi, the great simple $35 system that is very popular in UK. Unfortunately, the computing power of Raspberry Pi was not adequate to be used as a platform for Khan Academy lessons. So, looking at the merits of a higher powered system both for ICT lessons as well as Khan Academy server, we decided on the Radxa Rock system.  Visit: http://radxa.com/specification

How to build your own Radxa system:

1. Scout for information on how to place order for Radxa Rock. The new models do come with “Dual Boot” capability. That is, initially it will boot into Android and using one of the icons there you can switch to Ubuntu Linux system. After switching it will keep booting in the new platform, say Linux. If you need to get back to Android, you need to invoke a switching again.
2. There is anough documents to show how to assemble the case and test it. But first you need a good 5v 2A power supply. This is critical and don’t cut costs and buy a cheap 1A 5V supply, as sometimes it will fail to load USB devices if it has inadequate power.
3. You need a good USB hub for connecting a Mouse, Keyboard and anyother USB pendrive or other storage devices. We normally use Logitech Keyboard and Mouse and it works well.
4. You need a good LED HDMI TV/Monitor. I prefer a good Samsung LED TV 23” onwards. You need a good HDMI cable to connect from the Radxa board to the TV. Currently there are some light weight cables available from FlipKart.
5. If you need additional storage use a SanDisk Class10 32GB or 64GB card. They are good and could hold lot of data.

In these sections we will post articles on how to install and configure various software tools.