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Showing posts from September, 2016

Not a First Impressions Post

Hello! This post was supposed to be the promised "First Impressions" post for the IoT pHAT from RedBear we unboxed recently. Sadly, I will be holding that post off for a little while. Why, you ask? Basically, it comes down to the current setup process. Apparently there are certain issues with the Pi's firmware which are to be fixed in the next release. While the pHAT is currently usable, I know whatever process I'd describe will soon become redundant so I'm holding off for the next Raspbian release (should be out really soon) to do everything all at once. In the meantime, I recently got my hands on an Intel Edison Kit for Arduino, so I should post some stuff about that really soon. Perhaps even do a First Impressions post about that instead? ;-)

Revisiting RF24 on Ubilinux

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[TL;DR: In summary, we need to modify the “configure” script a little bit, then run the configure command with certain arguments, then edit the Makefile (comment three lines out) then run make install –B. Details/specifics below.] Hello! Although this post should be about the first impressions of the IoT pHAT unboxed last time, my attention was recently drawn to major changes in the RF24 compilation process, so I decided to revisit it and leave the IoT pHAT post for next time. As before, the goal is to be able to use nRF24L01+ radios on Intel Galileo boards running the Ubilinux distro. We’ll be focusing on using the MRAA library as the HAL/backend (recall that RF24 can use SPIDEV or the bcm2708 library as well, the latter supported only on Raspberry Pi boards). To get started, MRAA itself must naturally be installed. To do this, you’ll want to have the following installed: clang, cmake, python-dev, build-essential (things like make and all that). A full list of dependencies is prov

Unboxing the RedBearLab IoT pHat

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Hello! Been a while – I hope the winds of fortune have been blowing favorably in your various directions. Been rather busy with work myself, so I apologize for the long silence. As a reparation, today will be my first ever unboxing post! In my never-ending search for cheap yet functional stuff, A few months ago I began following a certain project on Hackaday.io , which combined two of my favorite things at the time – the ESP8266 WiSoc and the Raspberry Pi (Zero). Essentially, the project was exploring a means of using the ESP8266 as a WiFi peripheral for the Pi with full OS support – so theoretically you’d hook up the ESP8266 (specifically the ESP07/12 models as I recall), load up whatever kernel module was needed, and you’d get a wlan0 device which you could use to do awesome. At the end, it ended up working and the board designs and everything needed are up there on Hackaday.io. However that guy ended up with a ~$20 board, which is like 4x the cost of a Pi Zero. Shortly after that,