Over the last few weekends and then some, I have been playing with the Colorific RGB Bulb from Amazon. Inspired by this learn guide https://learn.adafruit.com/reverse-engineering-a-bluetooth-low-energy-light-bulb/explore-gatt I decided to make it reactive to audio. Finally! An excuse to buy the Teensy Audio shield! Here are a few pictures and a short demo of it in action. You can find the code and my notes on the issues with it and where the project is at currently on:https://github.com/FriedCircuits/Jamrific Teensy 3.1 with Audio Shield, TFT connect to RPi Raspberry Pi 2 with BT 4.0 and UART connected to Teensy 3.1. Colorific Bulb in action
Review: Hummingboard
I came across the Hummingboard while reading Engadget. This isn’t your run-of-the-mill Linux board, it’s jam-packed with features that other boards don’t have. The main feature that sets this board apart from the others is that the SOC is socketed and swappable. What a great idea! Need more power for your project or different board features? Just swap out the SOC module or board and now you can have an expanded set of features all while using the same platform. Does this new board look strangely familiar for some reason? This board shares the same footprint and IO layout as the Raspberry PI. Overview: The Hummingboard is made by Solid-Run, a company based in Israel. It comes in three flavors …
Raspberry Pi 2 and Motorola Lapdock
Back in October of 2012, I had tested the Motorola Lapdock with the original 256MB Raspberry Pi. Recently I was able to get my hands on a Raspberry Pi 2 and decided to see if it worked any better. It pretty much works the same in that if the Lapdock doesn’t detect it, it goes to sleep and it won’t try again until it turns itself off. So the only way to get past the point in boot where the display signal is lost for a second, is to power the Pi up from another power source with the HDMI connected. You must wait for it to fully boot. Then disconnect the HDMI, wait for the Lapdock to turn off, …
HA: Living Room Node
Just wanted to do a quick post about the node running in the living room. It’s similar to the other nodes except I am using a Tiny328 and a DHT11 temp/humidity sensor. Currently, this is the only node with humidity. It’s presently being powered from a 5V USB wall adapter using a USB Tester to break out the power – same one that is running the La Crosse gateway! Here is the github link that I am using for all nodes. I have adapted it to support each sensor that a node might have. It’s based on the roomNode by JeeLabs. This sketch assumes the node has been configured already with the JeeLabs rf12demo sketch.
Owncloud
Last year I decided to give freeNAS another try despite the warnings of not having ECC memory and running in a VM. Long story short, it ran great for awhile. I had freeBSD jails setup for CrashPlan and Owncloud – it was heaven! It was all running smoothly until not having ECC memory caught up to me. I began to have checksum errors, so I had to dump the data. Much faster than restoring from backup. I then decided to just fall back to my comfort zone and run Windows Server 2012 as a file server. It would give me a good opportunity to become more intimate with 2012. We just have a few servers at work with 2012, so …
HA: DomotiGa Web Interface
DomotiGa is an open source Linux app written in Gambas which I hadn’t heard about until now. As part of any good home automation or any connected project is a way to control it remotely and easily, otherwise it’s easier just to hit the light switch yourself, right? I am using a Ubuntu Virtual Machine running in VMWare ESXi. VMWare offers ESXi as a free version of there enterprise bare metal hypervisor. ESXi can run on most hardware but if you have trouble there are plenty of guides out there to get drivers working. One of the easiest ways to get a remote interface is a website. It is much easier, universal and platform independent compared to using an app. …
Kickstarter: ArduRF
Today I received a few packages but one of them contained the ArduRF from Kickstarter. This campaign was short and sweet. I received the reward thirty-three days after it ended. You can read about the details from their Kickstarter but it’s an Atmega328p (Arduino Uno) with the RFM69 embedded. One has a USB A connector that can plug directly into your PC. This can act like a base station/receiver. This will replace my node connected to an FTDI cable to my Ubuntu VM. Using the JeeNode library in compatibility mode, the RFM69 should work with the RFM12B radios until I completely transition over. The other is similar to an Arduino Pro Mini but longer with the addition of a JST …
La Crosse Weather Station Gateway
Its alive! Last Christmas (or was it the one before that?), I received a La Crosse wireless weather station from my mom who is obsessed with them. This one has just a small display that can gauge inside and outside temperature. What interested me is that it’s a simple 433Mhz radio link. So sometime between then and a while ago, I got a 433Mhz receiver from Sparkfun with the intention of capturing the binary data from the outside sensor. Stock photo from SFE – CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 Occasionally, I’ve seen blog posts about other people doing the same thing. Thanks to the world of Opensource, I don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Sweet! Well, that is if I could find …
Finally Some Home Automation
With all the busyness of FriedCircuits and with taking a late honeymoon to Europe, there hasn’t been very much time left for other just-for-fun projects. It’s taken a long time to scale up productivity after our trip. A few weeks ago I finally started to dive into getting some sort of a start on home automation, or domotica, as its called across the pond. Since the failure of the Smart Outelet I decided to start on a smaller piece of the home automation beast this time around. Having been following JeeNodes for awhile now, I wanted to make a custom version in which I actually had done last year and never posted about it. I did some testing with his setup …
Wizkers.io Is Live!
Happy New Year! Begin 2015 with Wizkers.io – an easy to use Open Source application that is great for makers and programmers alike. It was designed and is managed by Edouard Lafargue, a fellow maker who has greatly contributed to the USB Tester, which is supported by Wizkers.io. Now that’s Open Source in action! //We look forward to posting projects using Wizkers.io and the USB Tester! Here is his press release: “We are live! After about two years of work, I am very happy to announce the launch of Wizkers.io.What is Wizkers? Wizkers is an Open Source application that gives a web interface to your instruments. And much more. What’s in it for you ? Your measurement instruments often have …