Tachyon 1.1.43 - The Modem Awakens 📡

Tachyon
1

This is it. ITS HAPPENING!

And first, apologies in advance to anyone who doesn’t want to hear a small soapbox rant of my own creation. But indulge me for a moment.

During Tachyon development, I cannot count the number of times we that heard:

  • “The modem isn’t supported upstream.”
  • “Qualcomm doesn’t support that configuration.”
  • “It’ll never suspend properly.”
  • “Ubuntu won’t integrate cleanly.”
  • “Power management won’t work with open source.”

If I had a dollar for every time I heard that, I’d probably be somewhere warm and retired.

Well…

Guess what?

It’s working. It’s here. :woman_dancing::man_dancing:

:package: Tachyon 1.1.43 Enables the Modem

The modem is now enabled in the build.

This is not the final chapter for Tachyon (far from it) but the modem is turned on, integrated, and usable.

What’s Working

  • Fully integrated with ModemManager
  • Accessible via:
    • mmcli
    • qmicli
  • Managed by NetworkManager
    • APN configuration supported
    • Connection enable/disable works properly
  • Ubuntu desktop detects it cleanly
  • Shows up in system networking UI
  • You can select it, configure it, and use it normally

What is not working:

  • the modem takes around 55 seconds to pop up after power on. This is because there are a bunch of delays in the code - we'll improve this now its stable
  • eSIM installation (need to use 20.04 for this still)
  • particle-tachyon-ril - currently disabled as we figure out what to do with this (while mmcli etc... exists)

Many thanks to our module provider Quectel for the final fix to get this to work! (and if your would believe it, it was making sure tftp_server was running... probably the last thing I would have tried).

:desktop_computer: Desktop Update

Also… we tweaked the desktop.

If you hate it, I apologise. If you love it, excellent :slight_smile:

:battery: What’s Coming Next - Syscon Update (Big One)

We’re about to land a major Syscon update.

What It Adds

  • HW watchdog capability
  • Fixes auto power-on behaviour to the point where I only use this now
  • Improves overall power reliability

But most importantly…

:stopwatch: Timed Low-Power Wake (Name TBD)

This is the feature I’m personally most excited about.

You’ll be able to:

  • Shut Tachyon down
  • Have it wake automatically after:
    • N seconds
    • N minutes
    • N hours
  • ...or wake via external wake-up pin
  • Consume nanoamp-level current while asleep
    • Boot
    • Do work
    • Connect to the internet
    • Shut down again

On a single cell, if used periodically, we’re looking at ~30 days of battery life without charging.

That is a killer feature.

I’m currently measuring power figures, but conceptually:

Wake → Work → Sleep → Repeat

This is the product that is going into the tree outside my house. A Linux edge computer that behaves like a microcontroller when asleep power wise, but wakes up as a full Ubuntu system when needed.

:antenna_bars: Next Focus Areas

Now that the modem is alive:

  • LTE performance tuning
  • Wi-Fi performance investigation(Both solid, but we’re seeing reduced throughput in some scenarios - digging in)
  • Finalising SYSCON firmware integration

This is a quick update.

The modem has awakened.

More shortly on Syscon.

Here’s the release link:

NA Build:

https://linux-dist.particle.io/releases/1.1.43/NA/tachyon-ubuntu-24.04-NA-desktop-1.1.43.zip

Row Build:

https://linux-dist.particle.io/releases/1.1.43/RoW/tachyon-ubuntu-24.04-RoW-desktop-1.1.43.zip

Thanks again to everyone building, testing, pushing, and believing this was possible.

Onward. :rocket:

2

:partying_face: Hoooraaaayyy! Good job Nick and rest of Particle Team. Lets go!!

3

Great to hear! Were there any issues with the ModemManager integration that I could help fix? Or has it been pretty smooth?

4

Definitely excited for the syscon stuff coming, I use the tachyon as my homelab/remotely accessible personal cloud.
It's had some rough edges on 24.04 but its getting better every update! The auto power on/restarts should help immensely with reliability. (reboots are fine, staying down until pushing a button is painful)

5

Maybe this is a dumb question but I thought I had flashed the latest release of Tachyon on my board but when I look at the console it shows this version of the os:

Operating system: 1.0.172 (desktop)

Shouldn't it say 1.1.43? I'm wondering if this is why I'm still having issues accessing the modem and other strange things. Is there something specific I should be doing when I run "particle tachyon setup" on my host machine to force the latest firmware? I'm confused.

6

Looks like development of the Tachyon has stalled, 1.1.43 is a few months old now??? What's the status please? I am waiting on the GPS to work for my project and the camera subsystem still needs lots of work.

7

Yep no development for months - I think they have dropped development of 24.04 for the Tachyon yet still selling it!
What is going on???

8

I hope not.
I have hundreds of hours and hundreds of dollars tied up in this prototype and I'm about to test it in the field.

9

Hey James - Well All I know is they used to post regularly then....
Are you using 24.04? Mine unit keeps rebooting at random times on the 24.04 version.
I've done heaps of testing trying to get it stable, codex on device is extremely helpful, here is what it's found...

"Instability is reproducable on Ubuntu 24.04 / Tachyon 1.1.43.
My unit is on Ubuntu 24.04.4 with particle-linux 0.23.0-1, particle-tachyon-syscon 1.0.20-2.

What I’m seeing:

  • On kernel 6.8.0-1058-particle, compile-heavy workloads can trigger hard resets with no useful panic log (pstore empty, previous boot journal often missing after the reset).
  • Reverting to 6.8.0-1056-particle improved things a lot: it can sit idle for hours and pass stress-ng --cpu 8 --timeout 120.
  • But 1056 is still not fully clean. During a full clean libcamera rebuild, I captured a real kernel fault:
    • Internal error: synchronous external abort: 0000000096000010
    • process was cc1plus
    • call trace included clear_page / __alloc_pages / do_anonymous_page
  • So on my board this is not just “bad userspace” or a random app crash. There seems to be a real 24.04 kernel/platform regression here.

Power does affect it: weak USB power makes it worse, but even on a better PD/PPS PSU I could still reproduce the kernel-side fault on 24.04.

For what it’s worth, the same hardware was much more stable for me on 20.04, so I’m leaning toward a 24.04 regression in the low-level Tachyon stack rather than a purely hardware fault."

10

Hey brother, I spent a few weeks trying to get 24.04 working for my project.

I tried in late December / early January before they did the major changes and it was a hard NO.

I came back to it in March but encountered problems.

I anticipated the power issues from the start and use an Anker 240W PD supply and I leave the battery connected 100%.

Not 100% sure that fixes all power issues but I haven't had any weird issues that would make me suspect inadequate power.

  • December / January notes -

### Known Issues

- NPU on 24.04: broken (see cheatsheet for details)

- Venus HW encoder on 24.04: kernel panic with libcamera's software ISP frames

- QMMF stack: not available on 24.04

Later after the big update:

  • March notes -

## Decision: Reflash to Ubuntu 20.04

**Rationale:**

- NPU works on 20.04 (proven Dec 26 session: PoseNet @ 4ms, HRNet @ 6ms)

- QMMF camera stack works on 20.04

- Venus H.265 hardware encoding works on 20.04

- Cellular modem works on 20.04

- 24.04 NPU is broken at the platform level with no community fix

I hate to say it but I'm going to use this one Tachyon for a prototype demo then I may pivot to something else.

I've been looking at the Rubik Pi 3. Same basic hardware minus the 5G / LTE modem.

The advantage is that Qualcomm is behind them (Thundercomm SoM) and their version of 24.04 comes ready to run with full Qualcomm stack.

Camera works out of the box, NPU works out of the box, GPIO works out of the box.

Second advantage? $110 delivered to my door. Add an $80 USB LTE modem and I'm good.

Granted I won't have Particle's back end, which is a big decision but one I may have to live with.

I'm curious to know how the Digi acquisition played a role in this?

The Tachyon project may be fading into oblivion because of that.

I just noticed a hefty bump in price. I paid $299 ($385 delivered). Now I see they are $399.

I can't envision selling my product for $700 to $800 with that price.

Enough Ranting.

11

Yeah that's my take - not looking good at all!
Your take on the takeover is pretty fair from what I'm seeing.
I checked out the Rubik PI 3, very interesting and actually has usable ports like ethernet - very nice and would be perfect for my project, but the price is too steep for me here in Australia!
I'm reflashing 20.04 and see what I can use that.
Best of luck my friend
regards
Glenn