This summer, we had the pleasure of attending a beautiful wedding near Dayton, Ohio. Since many of MobileWill’s family members were also there, we decided to prolong our visit to about a week. One of the things we always like to do before visiting an area is to look up local eateries, coffee shops, museums, and such. A few places stuck out (which is always a plus, especially in the mid-west!), specifically the National Museum of the United States Air Force and a couple of new dining experiences. Yes, we’ve been dreaming about biscuits from Bob Evans. But we must admit, besides those things and just spending time with family, there wasn’t much else to do. That is, until MobileWill’s …
Arduino Zero Has Arrived!
The long awaited Arduino Zero has arrived! This is the version from CC not SRL. Looks like some retailers such as Adafruit has/had the SRL version already. Wonder if they will switch, perhaps since they began manufacturing for Arduino in the U.S.? Shipping via USPS with regular mail was painstakingly slow, especially since they are rolling out phase two of their plan. It arrived five days later than scheduled, but alas, that is my error for not choosing USPS priority mail. I could go on and on about their delivery times and dealings, but it would mean writing another post about it. Anyway, now that rant is out of the way, I can rant about the poor packaging. This is …
STM32 Nucleo and DFU USB Bootloading
Over the last few months I have been playing with the Nucleo development boards from STMicroelectronics. If you’re unfamiliar with them, they are fast, mbed and Arduino (headers) compatible. This makes it easy like an Arduino to program and use. What sets them apart is that they are 32bit and have, depending on the model, tons of memory and flash. The Nucleo boards maintain the Arduino footprint but also have headers for the extra pins which gives this board plenty of GPIO for your projects. In turn, you end up with multiple buses such as SPI, I2C, and UARTs for your consumption. They are priced very well and come in different flavors based on your needs. Each flavor is based …
Maker Faire, Bay Area 2015
This year the Bay Area Maker Faire celebrated ten years. William and I could not believe it! We’ve attended BAMF (as we cheekily call it), for the past eight years. Wow! It feels like only yesterday that we were frantically searching for parking, trying to stand in line before the gates opened. Oh wait, that happens each year. Ha! This year was just as eye opening as ever. It has grown in popularity for sure, but more so it has also grown into a lot more than just garage hacking. From the new 3D Printer tent, to the Start-up area, the BAMF has become a fair that now encompasses so much more and will surely continue to morph. We feel …
Jamrific
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. …