Drones, this is second or third time I started getting into the hobby, this time it seems to have stuck.
Radiomaster pocket is a great intro radio. Cheap, bought it from aliexpress sent from EU with batteries for 65eur. Opensource, well not the hardware, but the software. It runs edgetx which is a FOSS radio software. It has HAL gimbals so it should last a long time. It has two 18650 batteries to power it, so it lasts a long time.
Cheap desk usb-c power supply, or the beauty of 3D printing. About seven years ago I bought Crealities Ender 3. About a year and a half ago I replaced it with an Ender 5S1 which I later modified to a corexy with the Mercury One.1 project, but that is a theme for a different blog post. I took the ender 3 apart to reuse the parts where I can. One of the valuable components you can take out of 3d printers is the power supply. I have created a 240W usbc bench power supply with it.
I used a pcb board from aliexpress.
A friend of mine is in the middle of building his new apartment, and as he knows I have a bit of experience with home automation he asked me for some pointers. I started writing up some parts that I think he needs to address now while building it out to make his life easier. And then I thought if I do it in english, I can make a post out of it so here it goes. We will see how much ends up being general and how much ends up being specific for his apartment.
A couple of years ago I bought a pretty sweet computer from a friend of mine. It became my home server sitting below the TV in the living room. An i7-3770 with 16GB of RAM on a supermicro motherboard in a nice Zalman case. I threw a couple of HDDs I had laying around. Recently I’ve upped the RAM to 32GB. The configuration is now more or less maxed out. I could put a xeon processor and move to ECC ram but it would not bring me much. I am still running that computer as my server, but I made changes over time to the software setup I am running.
I’ve just bought a PinePhone. I’ve ordered the Brave Heart edition, as that one is the only version available at the moment. Currently it seems that the only difference with the “propper” version will be that it is not comming with a usable OS on it.
This is where I would put the picture of my phone, If I had it here :-)
I had a problem with my firefox and I had to restart my firefox profile to be able to start it. Mleh, shit like this sometimes happens. Anyway, I used a generic chromium with just a uBlock origin plugin while trying to debug what was happening, and it came to me how different my UX in Firefox is.
Night look
I thought it would be interesting to do a writeup about which plugins I am using. With all of the changes I made, it makes a pretty different experience than the usual one.
I am currently working on a project using an ESP32. I really the way Espressif has set up the development tools, I’ll probably do a post about my thoughts about it.
The serial port and logging is setup out of the box, so I’ve been using printfs to debug the code. There are a couple of problems with this approach, but one big advantage, it is easy and just works. The downsides are that for every time you want to look at a variable, you add a printf, you build the program and need to upload it to the board, and as it is uploaded through the bootloader operating at 115200baud it takes some time.
I needed a lamp on my table. I needed some backlight when I am working on my computer, and I needed a strong worklight when I am soldering and working on electronics. I found Xiaomi LED wifi lamp in my home town, of all the places. And, actually, that was the cheapest place I was able to find it anywhere, including the Internet.
I brought it home, and it was great. It looked great, it lit up the workplace evenly, and it was easy to control. As it was supposed to be able to be controllable from the wifi I set out to try that.
So, I’ve just had a new project programming a NRF52 and with almost all embedded projects it is great to have a way to easily debug some problems without setting up the whole debugging environment. Using the serial connection is usually how I do it, sometimes a LED is enough. Because of that I have a lot of USB to serial adapters. All of the ones I had had a USB A connector on it which made it hard to connect it to the development board, I had to have a extension cable or have the dongle hanging out directly on the laptop. Anyways it was a bit of a pain in the ass so I decided to buy a few adapters that had a micro USB connectors on the board so I could use the standard mobile phone cables. I decided to order CP2102 modules from ebay because they were really cheap (~1 - 2USD) and were not a FTDI part so I did not need to worry about FTDI bricking them with a driver update if someone deceived me and sold me fake functioning part.
As GNUK documentation says “Gnuk is an implementation of USB cryptographic token for GNU Privacy Guard”. It allows you not to have your private key available on the system, but allow you to use it. There are two ways to update your firmware, to use the script in the repo to do it, if your gnuk is functional or use the programmer to flash the binary.
To build the firmware we need to clone the repository and because a part of it is a submodule we also need to fetch that.