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Showing posts from January, 2017

Testing out the IoT pHAT

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Hail, people! Continuing on from last time, I had a little time to muck about with the IoT pHAT to try to get a general idea of how well it worked. What I did was to test out WiFi only, BT only, then WiFi + BT. I’ve described them as Tests 1, 2 and 3 respectively below. These tests were carried out on a Raspberry Pi Model B+ running the 2016-11-25 version of the Raspbian Jessie Lite distribution. Test 1 For the WiFi only test, I placed the pHAT on a B+ and edited the /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf file to (auto)connect to my home WiFi network. Did a reboot, and voila, the ‘raspberrypi’ entry showed up in the router’s DHCP table. I was able to login via SSH and transfer a few files using WinSCP. Overally it performed flawlessly here – the connection was rock solid and performed satisfactorily. I didn’t run any iperf tests though – this is because I don’t intend to use the pHAT for any applications where throughput is an issue anyway. But I don’t expect it to be (signific

Revisiting The RedBearLab IoT pHAT

Howdy, folks. Hope everyone has been okay and has had a good week. Its Friday again! So my first proper post of 2017 is about the IoT pHAT from RedBearLab, which (if you can recall) I was supposed to review. Due to issues with the HAT firmware that was not possible for quite some time. In the early hours of January 12th, a firmware update was made available which purportedly fixed the issues. On testing it myself, I found this to be the case. So let’s talk about how to get up and running with it. Typically, you’d want to start at this page , but there’s alot of information in there, some of which (thus far) doesn’t seem necessary anymore, so I’m going to try to keep it as linear as I can. First off, you’ll need an IoT pHAT – not surprisingly. I backed their crowdfunding campaign, but you can now buy one on the RedBearLab store if you don’t already have one. You can get one of two versions – one with headers presoldered and one without headers presoldered. I chose the former version.

Happy New Year!

Hello there! Its been a while. Happy New Year everyone! Here’s wishing us all a happy, healthy and prosperous one. I’m sorry I’ve been gone for so long. Got tied up with a thousand and one things, and time just got away from me. As part of my catch-up efforts, The fourth Element14 post is up and is available here . In addition, I have a small hardware project in the works and should be talking about that soon. I’m also expecting some new hardware and will likely be talking about that quite a bit in the weeks to come. All in all, I’m excited about 2017 and I hope you are too. Once again, Happy New Year! See you shortly..