Windows 7 on a Raspberry Pi - No f*cking way!

SANY0388 Here at the shackspace we love pointing our 50W lazor towards all kinds of materials for fun, more benefit and no profit … yet! The only slight downside is that the laser can (at the moment) only be controlled through a quirky Windows software - the reverse engineering job is still pending. Also there’s a lot of people around which just had to buy “a few” Raspberry Pies when it came out as new - ultra-affordable mini-PC last year.

While looking for use cases for the new toy we discovered that it makes an awesome (literally) thin client. It has a very low power consumption ~2W and manages to handle remote desktop applications reasonably fast.

To combine both pain (Windows Krepelsoftware) and pleasure (RasPI) the motivation for this project is to provide a means to control the laser cutter - and since the software for controlling it only runs on Windows - without requiring a native Windows computer (which concerns most people around here).

IMG_20130105_031135 (1)The first thing we did was to set up a Windows 7 OS in a KVM instance on one of the servers of shackspace’s data center.
Next we had to find a way to boot directly to that machine which lead us to using xtightvncviewer - which gives the impression of running Windows 7 natively (fullscreen with the resolution of the TFT Screen). For setup instructions please check the shackspace wiki.

Now we were faced with the challenge to forward the USB port of the Raspberry Pi - to which we were planning to connect the laser cutter to - to our virtual Windows machine. This creates the ‘physical link from the laser cutter to the virtual host.

The solution we stumbled across was the USBIP project.
Since the USBIP modules are only in available in staging we needed to build a whole new Linux kernel for the Raspberry Pi as the module is not natively included into the current baseline kernel. It took about two days to make it work - mainly because we didn’t have much experience building kernels beforehand. You can find detailed instructions on USBIP on the shackspace wiki. The result is a clean Raspberry Pi image with the loadable USBIP module included. We started out building only the required modules and such mischiefs - instructions for building a kernel that lets you actually load the modules you built (as usip-host in our case) will follow shortly.

In addition to that there is at the moment a mismatch of the USB packet headers sent between the USBIP Linux server and Windows client. This caused far more head-ache than expected - partly because of our combined lack of knowledge of the Windows platform. Fortunately our Google-Fu was strong and we were able to find a Windows client which is working with the current USBIP release somewhere on the internet.

After quite a few non-booting Linux images, tons of blue screens and kernel panics the results were satisfying and we remotely lazored the no-fucking sign:

IMG_20130105_052653

We were asked to make some pictures or a video - and since we don’t take ourselves too serious - we came up with the idea of doing it with one of the mascots hanging out in our hackerspace (next up shaqueline?!).

So here we go: Pedro the bear explains how he got Windows 7 running on an Raspberry Pi to control the 50W Lazor of shackspace:

Software used: