Compiling for the Raspberry Pico on Arch Linux
Posted on January 25, 2021
| Barnaby Gray
The latest microcontroller on the market is the RP2040 in the form of the Raspberry Pico board - a compact SoC with many I/O pin configurations and great documentation – as we’ve come to expect from Raspberry!
Getting compiling for this up and running is simple and I’ve made it even easier for Arch Linux with an AUR package to install the Pico SDK and necessary tools. For more generic instructions see the Raspberry docs.
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Running Tensorflow models on the Raspberry Pi
Posted on November 25, 2020
| Barnaby Gray
One of the features of our smart home is when the doorbell on our house is rung or a letter is posted, a snapshot is taken by a security camera pointed to our front door. The snapshot is then sent to a neural network to identify if it’s the post or not. If it is then house will announce this to us, which is handy to decide if it’s worth getting up from the sofa to pick up letters / answer the door.
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Zappi smart charging
Posted on August 29, 2020
| Barnaby Gray
With the emergence of dynamic ’time of use’ electricity tariffs like Octopus Agile - where the unit price you pay every half hour is tied to wholesale prices and varies throughout the day - there’s the opportunity to charge power hungry devices like electric cars to take advantage of really cheap (and greener!) electricity rates. Under 5p/kWh often, which equates to the under 1p/mile bargain prices.
TLDR: The Zappi charger can be made smarter with a Sonoff smart switch to trigger charging on a programmable schedule.
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Lolin ePaper shield for esp8266
Posted on July 9, 2020
| Barnaby Gray
Just picked up one of these neat ePaper displays from AliExpress for $9.90 for the esp8266. It’s 2.13" in diagonal, has a resolution of 250x122 and is made by Lolin.
Lolin produce a whole bunch of quality esp8266 items - including the ubiquitous Wemos D1 Mini and various I2C sensors. It’s not a shield in that you can sit it on top of an ESP - you need a couple of cables to use the lcd with the esp, you’ll want to get the TFT I2C Connector Shield ($0.
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Making a washing machine smart
Posted on February 9, 2018
| Barnaby Gray
A minor annoyance, but one that plagues me: when you put a wash on, forget about it finishing, only to discover the damp washing hours later festering in the washing machine. There’s only one thing to it - a massively overengineered smart home solution!
Sonoff POW This is a smart device that can be had from Chinese online retailers for ~$9 - bargain. In it there’s a wifi microcontroller, the venerable ESP8266, a mains relay and a current/voltage sensor to measure power usage.
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Kibana baby kick counter - part 2
Posted on May 15, 2017
| Barnaby Gray
This is part 2 of 2 about using Elasticsearch and Kibana to track patterns in baby activity. Part 1 here covers the hardware and setup for tracking baby kicks.
Machine learning Having collected about 6 weeks of baby kicking data, it’s time to test the new toy in the Elasticsearch stack: Machine learning.
Installing this was a straightforward case of following the instructions, and from the ‘Machine Learning’ new menu item in Kibana, I chose ‘Create new job’, and ‘Create a single metric job’:
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Kibana baby kick counter
Posted on April 29, 2017
| Barnaby Gray
This is part 1 of 2 about using Elasticsearch and Kibana to track patterns in baby activity.
Part 2 is here.
Kicking things off According to countthekicks.org “Counting baby kicks is important because changes in your baby’s movement pattern may indicate potential problems with your pregnancy”. Counting and patterns sounds like a technological problem for Elasticsearch and Kibana!
There’s a few apps dedicated to tracking kicks (over 20 apps last count on Android), but they’re mostly crap (lacking detailed history or useful insights) and being a data geek I’m not entirely happy handing over the data without a definite means to export it.
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Pairing Yale Conexis Lock and Openzwave
Posted on April 19, 2017
| Barnaby Gray
I struggled getting the Yale Conexis smart lock working with the Aeotec Z-Stick Gen5. Turns out the issue is it must be a secure pairing - the default method in the instructions (unplug Z-Stick, press button near to the device, initiate pairing), does not perform a secure pairing, and so even though the device will appear in software, you won’t get any state for it or be able to perform an actions.
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Raspberry Pi Zero W and Mi Flora plant monitor
Posted on March 19, 2017
| Barnaby Gray
The new Raspberry Pi Zero W is the perfect pairing to go with the Xiaomi Mi Flora. The Flora is a bluetooth stick you push into the soil next to a plant and can be polled over Bluetooth LE for the sensor data - soil moisture, temperature, light and soil conductivity.
Part list Raspberry Pi Zero W. I used Pimoroni (£9.60 + £2.50 postage) as they’re great and ship fast. You shouldn’t need the Adapters kit if you’ve the necessary adapters already, or you might get away with setting up the Pi headless without them anyway.
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Bluetooth on Archlinux on the Pi Zero W
Posted on March 18, 2017
| Barnaby Gray
Bluetooth doesn’t work out the box for Archlinux but thankfully a helpful user has created packages to support the Pi 3 which also work on the Zero W (see forum post). There’s a couple of caveats to getting them working I’ll step through.
First install bluez and bluez-utils older than 5.44 - you must get them from an archive. The reason being hcitool is required and it’s been dropped from bluez 5.
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