Clara Yocto Linux build for Kobo Clara HD and Home Assistant dashboard

[OrangeWindies]

It has taken quite a few months since I asked whether anyone had already tried making a Yocto build for the Clara HD but I've finally got it working and in a state that's close enough to respectable to show other people.

The Yocto layer is at https://github.com/kevinior/meta-kobo-clara-hd It's built on top of NXP's imx-linux Yocto stuff, I'm planning to try to get rid of that and just use a standard Yocto release. That should allow upgrading to a current Yocto version too.

The main purpose for all this was to build my own Home Assistant dashboard running on the Clara, without any leftover Kobo software getting in the way. You can find HAslate here: https://github.com/kevinior/haslate

Many thanks to andi45 for his patched kernels with Clara HD support.

[NiMa]

Originally Posted by OrangeWindies

It has taken quite a few months since I asked whether anyone had already tried making a Yocto build for the Clara HD but I've finally got it working and in a state that's close enough to respectable to show other people.

The Yocto layer is at https://github.com/kevinior/meta-kobo-clara-hd It's built on top of NXP's imx-linux Yocto stuff, I'm planning to try to get rid of that and just use a standard Yocto release. That should allow upgrading to a current Yocto version too.

The main purpose for all this was to build my own Home Assistant dashboard running on the Clara, without any leftover Kobo software getting in the way. You can find HAslate here: https://github.com/kevinior/haslate

Many thanks to andi45 for his patched kernels with Clara HD support.

Nice! I tried to build Yocto a while ago for the Mini and hadn't had much success. I may look at what you've done and see if I can learn things from there.
I find out though that native Alpine is enough on my Mini for InkBox.

[OrangeWindies]

Originally Posted by NiMa

Nice! I tried to build Yocto a while ago for the Mini and hadn't had much success. I may look at what you've done and see if I can learn things from there.
I find out though that native Alpine is enough on my Mini for InkBox.

Yes, I ended up using Yocto because I'm familiar with it and wanted to play around with it a bit more.

Being able to use an almost stock kernel was a big help. Once I've got some time I want to try to get rid of the special version of U-boot.

[andi45]

Originally Posted by OrangeWindies

It has taken quite a few months since I asked whether anyone had already tried making a Yocto build for the Clara HD but I've finally got it working and in a state that's close enough to respectable to show other people.

The Yocto layer is at https://github.com/kevinior/meta-kobo-clara-hd It's built on top of NXP's imx-linux Yocto stuff, I'm planning to try to get rid of that and just use a standard Yocto release. That should allow upgrading to a current Yocto version too.

The main purpose for all this was to build my own Home Assistant dashboard running on the Clara, without any leftover Kobo software getting in the way. You can find HAslate here: https://github.com/kevinior/haslate

Many thanks to andi45 for his patched kernels with Clara HD support.

Interesting project. Nice to see some progress. Basically what is new on my side:
There is a kobo/merged-5.11 branch now, a basic charger/fuel gauge driver is upstreamed, I am working on replacing the fbdev driver with a drm driver. Then it can use standard interfaces for updating contents and does not need the special nxp one. For now it works well with some IMX6SL readers, for the Kobo Clara HD it needs some tweaking.

[OrangeWindies]

Originally Posted by andi45

Interesting project. Nice to see some progress. Basically what is new on my side:
There is a kobo/merged-5.11 branch now, a basic charger/fuel gauge driver is upstreamed, I am working on replacing the fbdev driver with a drm driver. Then it can use standard interfaces for updating contents and does not need the special nxp one. For now it works well with some IMX6SL readers, for the Kobo Clara HD it needs some tweaking.

The fbdev driver is working fine for me just now, but the less special NXP stuff the better.

I really need to improve the documentation in the project in git and I should also do some tidying up of the Yocto metadata. Apparently you shouldn't have a single layer that's both a BSP and a distro and I'm not declaring the dependencies on other layers correctly.