Luckfox Lyra on PicoCalc

kowloonjew · August 6, 2025, 6:30am

any chance someone could compile most of the WIFI drivers on the Ubuntu release ? I can’t get it to work on my end.

Ben · August 6, 2025, 1:06pm

What’s your wifi chip?

I was able to compile the module for the rt5370 (rt2800usb) using the large “developper” ubuntu image. It contains the full kernel source where you can do make menuconfig and select the module for your chip. You can do everything on device.

Tootles · August 9, 2025, 2:28pm

So I can’t just write the image to the SD card (for use on a Lyra without NAND), plug it in, and go? I’ve tried to write the “raw” SD image to a card with balena-etcher and it’s failed to even write the image fully. It’ll get to nearly finishing verifying after writing, and then crap out with no explanation, just “something went wrong”.

cjstoddard · August 9, 2025, 3:17pm

I doubt you will get a response from hisptoot, he has not responded to anything in this thread in a very long time, I suspect he has moved on to other projects. I do not recommend his image anyway, It is too limited and difficult to work with, the Ubuntu image is better in every regard.

Tootles · August 9, 2025, 7:38pm

For the Luckfox? I must have missed that one - could you point me to the image?

Will it run on the same hardware? I’ve got a plain basic Luckfox Lyra, no SPI and no W, just an SD card.

cjstoddard · August 9, 2025, 9:44pm

Yes, it will run on the same hardware

This will help you get it up and running.

github.com/cjstoddard/PicoCalc-uf2

Luckfox-Lyra/Luckfox%20Ubuntu.md

main

# Luckfox Ubuntu

Since I got my second PicoCalc, I have been using a Luckfox Lyra in it. Originally I used the Hisptoot image. This image is a serious pain in the butt to get working the way I wanted it to work. It lacks just about everything I needed to have a usable hand terminal. Most software needed to be compiled from source and the image had a very lackluster set of tools to do that forcing me to use a couple of work a arounds. On top of that, I had to jailbreak it out of a command-launcher and that just anooyed me. A couple of weeks ago a new image was realsed by Markbliss, which solved all the issues I had with the first image. If you are going to use a Luckfox Lyra in a PicoCalc, the Ubuntu image is the way to go.

You can get the image for Ubuntu Image for a Luckfox Lyra, installed in a Pico Calc, here;

https://github.com/markbirss/ubuntu-24.04.2-picocalc

Username: lyra Password: luckfox

Unfortunately, this image does not come with much in the way of wifi drivers, the board does not even have wireless to begin with. This is a very solvable problem. These two items will allow you to provide both wireless and bluetooth to the device. This fits nicely inside the case and does not require any soldering.

[MX1.25 4Pin to USB Cable](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DRD5792W?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_fed_asin_title)

[TP-Link Nano](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BJ7XJ27X?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_fed_asin_title&th=1)

Once you have installed the cable and wifi dongle, you will need to compile and install the driver. In the lyra user folder, there is a wireless folder which contains what you need. First you will need to get the kernel headers and some sym links into the right place, is done by the following;

> cd /usr/src/linux-6.1.99
>

This file has been truncated. show original

Tootles · August 9, 2025, 10:48pm

OK, I’ll have a play with that. Thanks.

Though I’m curious why it’s a 50GB image distributed in an archive split into 306 pieces that extracts to 16GB SD card. I always thought a disk image was a disk image was a disk image. Not gonna bother with WiFi anyway, it’s just for re-learning some languages and shell-scripting. That I’ll probably do is extract it to the SD card and then make a new image with dd or something like.

DigitalDreams · August 10, 2025, 7:58am

How to get this image onto a sd card via windows10 ?. Any preparation needed on the Lyra ?.

Tootles · August 10, 2025, 9:58am

Just what I was thinking. There isn’t an image I can just grab and put on an SD card, I’ve got to download 20GB of images and then use some mystery software that the person who made the image set appears to just assume everyone has. That’s after installing git and frigging about with an entirely unnecessary installation of mingw which I’m only going to get rid of once I’ve made an SD card I can make a copy of.

Open source developers are the bane of my life with their interminable obfuscation of processes which could and should be simple for the user. Especially when their “instructions” are just a printout of when they did it, with no explanations of what software environment you need.

Edit: it’s not even an image, for cryin’ out loud. It’s an installer which assumes I’ve got everything plugged in and I’m using the Luckfox as a peripheral device and I’m actually flashing it. Would making a flat image of an installed environment have been such a challenge for the guy who did this? Gordon Bennet.

cjstoddard · August 10, 2025, 12:52pm

Here is the Luckfox wiki page, the instructions for SD cards is at the bottom. The SDDiskTool defaults to Chinese, but you can change it to English by opening the config.ini file and changing Selected=1 to Selected=2.

0xd61 · August 11, 2025, 12:28am

Hi guys, I’ve created a yocto layer for the picocalc based on the luckfox lyra board. Feel free to check it out. It currently is still barebones and tailored to my usecase, but feel free to fork and adjust it to your needs.

beapig · August 11, 2025, 5:56pm

Hello guys,sharing a nice mono Bitmap fonts after days of testing,the extreme 8px(it means Latin alphabet is 4x8) size make it possible to achieve the 80 column of Linux Terminal to avoid unneccesary word warping and get the CJK glyph support,I run it with fbterm, and it looks Clear and Sharp on PicoCalc,(I am using the 6x12 size actually)
https://github.com/TakWolf/fusion-pixel-font

markbirss · August 11, 2025, 7:50pm

your local folder grows with a .git folder same size as the total download and you need to extract the 7z

Tootles · August 11, 2025, 9:52pm

Cool. A long time ago I had a Ben NanoNote (with a 320x240px screen) and installed a similar font that used sub-pixel rendering to make an 80x26chr terminal possible.

Tootles · August 11, 2025, 9:54pm

Yes, I know how multi-volume archives work. I’m just saying, it’s a ballache. This stuff is why I sacked off software development and write fiction instead.

kowloonjew · August 15, 2025, 12:24am

Ben, my wifi chip is MT7610U

markbirss · August 16, 2025, 9:19pm

beapig · August 17, 2025, 6:50pm

Ar ha ! This is really something I dream of , with this shell script and the lyra Linux build，you can now chat with Google Genimi on picoCalc !
https://github.com/Smthbig/gemini-cli.git
https://youtube.com/shorts/uXduU2B0bZ4

0xd61 · August 19, 2025, 11:32am

With the latest firmware (1.4) you can send an i2c command to poweroff to the MCU. In the keyboard driver you can add a notifier which listens for the poweroff event. With that you can fully poweroff the device, when running “poweroff“. I have implemented that here (based on @hisptoot ‘s driver):

github.com/0xd61/meta-picocalc

meta-picocalc-bsp-rockchip/recipes-kernel/linux/files/picocalc/picocalc_kbd/picocalc_kbd.c

main


      
          
          void sysfs_shutdown(struct i2c_client* i2c_client)
          {
              // Remove sysfs entry
              if (picocalc_kobj) {
                  kobject_put(picocalc_kobj);
                  picocalc_kobj = NULL;
              }
          }
          
          static int picocalc_kbd_reboot_notifier(struct notifier_block *nb,
                                        unsigned long action, void *data)
          {
              if (action == SYS_POWER_OFF || action  == SYS_HALT) {
                  dev_info(&g_ctx->i2c_client->dev,
                           "%s sending poweroff event\n", __func__);
          
                  // Register REG_ID_OFF
                  kbd_write_i2c_u8(g_ctx->i2c_client, 0x0e, KBD_POWEROFF_SEC);
              }
              return NOTIFY_DONE;

Schmitty · August 22, 2025, 7:23pm

Is there any tutorials on how to flash a functional PicoCalc image to the Lyra? I’ve flashed what I could fine on both the onboard and external SD cards.

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