I came across the OpenStick in Issue 1664 (public archive may not be live yet) of The Sizzle, a great Aussie tech newsletter I subscribe to, and it piqued my interest. The idea of a $20 USB powered Linux computer with WiFi and 4G, appealed, especially with the Raspberry Pi being so hard to get at the moment.A
I had a read of the linked article at Hackaday and was sold. After digging around on eBay this seemed to be the lowest price one in Australia with the MSM8916 chipset needed (there are lookalikes that use an older MDM9600 chipset which does not work). It arrived a week or so later, but it does not have the memory card slot that is apparently available on some.
I basically folled the instructions from extrowerk on an old ubuntu laptop I had lying around, but I did need to fiddle with the udev files in order to make the device accessible to adb. First I tried installing android-sdk-platform-tools-common but this wasn;t enough, I also had to put the following content into /etc/udev/rules.d/51-openstick.rules:
# Skip this section below if this device is not connected by USB
SUBSYSTEM!="usb", GOTO="openstick_usb_rules_end"
# Devices listed here in openstick_usb_rules_{begin...end} are connected by USB
LABEL="openstick_usb_rules_begin"
#Qualcomm
SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTR{idVendor}=="05c6", ATTR{idProduct}=="9024", ENV{adb_user}="yes"
SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTR{idVendor}=="05c6", ATTR{idProduct}=="9091", ENV{adb_user}="yes"
# Enable device as a user device if found
ENV{adb_user}=="yes", MODE="0660", GROUP="plugdev", TAG+="uaccess"
LABEL="openstick_usb_rules_end"
Once I had done that I also needed to reload the rules:
sudo udevadm control --reload
Since I've had it up and running I've found it a bit unstable (ssh connections drop and can't be re-established for a while, then come good again). I haven't done any serious troubleshooting to see if I can work out why.
# Links
OpenStick Releases Interesting info from "jgray" who has pulled one apart