Solar Weather Station Listens For Lightning

July 13, 2020 by 28 Comments

Custom weather stations are a common enough project these days, especially based around the ESP8266. Wire a sensor up to the MCU, power it up with an old phone charger, and you’re half way there. But if you want something that’s going to operate remotely on the long term, you’ve got to put a little more thought into it.

Which is exactly what [BuckarewBanzai] did for his solar powered Raspberry Pi weather station. With an industrial NEMA-rated enclosure, a beefy 35 watt photovoltaic panel, and enough lead-acid battery capacity to keep the show going for days, this build is certainly more robust than most. Some might call it overkill, but we think anyone who’s ever deployed hardware outdoors for more than a few days knows you can never be too careful when Mother Nature is involved.

To keep the 18 Ah battery topped off, [BuckarewBanzai] is using a 10 amp Wanderer charge controller. It sounds as though he burned through a few lesser models before settling on this one; something to consider for your own off-grid projects. An LM2596 regulator is then used to provide a stable 5 V for the Raspberry Pi.

In addition to the BME280 environmental sensor that picks up on temperature, humidity, and pressure, there’s also a AS3935 lightning sensor onboard which [BuckarewBanzai] says can pick up strikes up to 40 kilometers away. All of this environmental data is collected and stored in a local SQLite database, and gets pushed offsite every five minutes with a REST API so it can be visualized with Grafana.

Critics in the audience will no doubt pick up on the solderless breadboard located in the center of the weather station, but [BuckarewBanzai] says he’s already on the case. He’s working on a custom PCB that will accept the various modular components. Not only should this make the station more reliable, but he says it will cut down on the “spaghetti” wiring. Though for the record, this is hardly the worst offender we’ve seen in that department.

Back To Basics Hack Chat

July 13, 2020 by 24 Comments

Join us on Wednesday, July 15 at noon Pacific for the Back to Basics Hack Chat with Simplifier!

Stay in the technology business long enough and eventually you’ll have to face an uncomfortable question: “Have I built anything permanent?” Chances are good that most of us will have to answer in the negative. For all the flash and zazzle we put into our projects, and for all the craftsmanship we try to apply to our systems, all of it is built on a very fragile foundation of silicon that will be obsolete within a decade, held together by slender threads of code in a language that may or may not be in fashion in a year’s time, and doesn’t even really exist in anything more tangible than a series of magnetic domains on a hard drive somewhere.

Realizing you’ve built nothing permanent is the engineer’s equivalent of a midlife crisis, and for many of us it sets off a search for an outlet for our creativity that we can use to make things that will outlast us. One hacker, known only as “Simplifier”, turned his search for meaningful expression into a quest to make technology better by making it more accessible and understandable. His website, itself a model of simplicity, catalogs his quest for useful materials and methods and his efforts to employ them. He has built everything from homebrew vacuum tubes to DIY solar cells, with recent forays into telecom tech with his carbon rod microphone and magnetostrictive earphone.

In this Hack Chat, Simplifier will answer your questions about how turning back the technology clock can teach us about where we’re going. Join us as we explore what it takes to build the infrastructure we all take so much for granted, and find out if there’s a way to live simply while still enjoying a technologically rich life.

join-hack-chatOur Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, July 15 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have you down, we have a handy time zone converter.

Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io. You don’t have to wait until Wednesday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.

 

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Home Automation Covers Everything

July 13, 2020 by 29 Comments

When starting out on a project, it’s accepted best practice to try to avoid feature creep. Of course, we can’t all say that we follow this guideline completely every time. In fact, sometimes it can get away from us, and in rare situations it might actually turn out pretty well. That appears to be what happened with [superczar]’s home automation project which now covers basically everything possible in home automation.

The build started in 2013, so we assume that features have been added periodically and that the system wasn’t designed and built all in one furious weekend. Either way, though, it covers a lot: lights, switches, media players in several rooms, includes sensors and logging for temperature, smoke, fire, and power, supports a number of cameras, the doorbell, and the locks. It also includes voice control for most of the systems.

That’s an impressive list, but what really drew our attention to this project is that it used to be based on domoticz, but that community has waned over the years and [superczar] had kept his system patched together with self-built scripts. An accidental upgrade recently broke the entire setup, so rather than rebuild everything a migration was made to home-assistant, an open-source platform that has a more active community. We’ve seen plenty of projects around here that use it as a platform, for ceiling fans, custom remotes, and doorbells.

Thanks to [pradeepmur] for the tip!

Surgery On The Arduino IDE Makes Bigger Serial Buffers

July 13, 2020 by 20 Comments

It is pretty well-known that I’m not a big fan of the Arduino infrastructure. Granted, these days you have more options with the pro IDE and Platform IO, for example. But the original IDE always gives me heartburn. I realized just how much heartburn the other day when I wanted to something very simple: increase the receive buffer on an ATmega32 serial port. The solution I arrived at might help you do some other things, so even if you don’t need that exact feature, you still might find it useful to see what I did.

Following this experience I am genuinely torn. On the one hand, I despise the lackluster editor for hiding too much detail from me and providing little in the way of useful tools. On the other hand, I was impressed with how extensible it was if you can dig out the details of how it works internally.

First, you might wonder why I use the IDE. The short answer is I don’t. But when you produce things for other people to use, you almost can’t ignore it. No matter how you craft your personal environment, the minute your code hits the Internet, someone will try to use it in the IDE. A while back I’d written about the $4 Z80 computer by [Just4Fun]. I rarely have time to build things I write about, but I really wanted to try this little computer. The parts sat partially assembled for a while and then a PCB came out for it. I got the PCB and — you guessed it — it sat some more, partially assembled. But I finally found time to finish it and had CP/M booted up.

The only problem was there were not many good options for transferring data back and forth to the PC. It looked like the best bet was to do Intel hex files and transfer them copy and paste across the terminal. I wanted better, and that sent me down a Saturday morning rabbit hole. What I ended up with is a way to make your own menus in the Arduino IDE to set compiler options based on the target hardware for the project. It’s a trick worth knowing as it will come in handy beyond this single problem.

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Mergers And Acquisitions: Analog Devices Snaps Up Maxim Integrated For $21 B

July 13, 2020 by 25 Comments

Analog Devices will acquire Maxim Integrated for $20.9 billion dollars in stock, as reported by Bloomberg this morning.

Perhaps the confusing part of the news is that the Bloomberg article mentions the acquisition will let Analog Devices better compete with Texas Instruments. Wait, didn’t Texas Instruments acquire Maxim back in 2015? Actually, no. There were rumors (reported then by Bloomberg) that TI was nearing an acquisition deal but it fell through in January of 2016.

You may remember that Analog Devices snapped up Linear Tech in a $30 B acquisition back in 2017. Considering this morning’s news, how will they compare to the might of TI? Looks like 2019 revenue for TI was $14.38 B while Analog reported $5.99 B. Add in Maxim’s revenue of $3.1 B and there’s still a David and Goliath scenario here. Although revenue doesn’t tell the whole story and the proverbial slingshot for Analog may be its existing portfolio of high-margin devices, grown even larger with this acquisition.

Considering how the last half decade played out, this might mark the beginning of another wild cycle of mergers and acquisitions. The consolidation trend continues as we approach a world where just a few gigantic semiconductor companies turn production lines up to eleven to fill the world’s insatiable appetite for more powerful electronics (and more electronics in general).

Build An Everlasting Continuity Tester

July 13, 2020 by 34 Comments

When you need a continuity tester at the bench, what do you reach for? Probably your multimeter, right? It may surprise you to know that the continuity tester in the meter isn’t all that sensitive, even if it’s the yellow expensive kind. [Leo]’s will beep even if there is 50Ω of resistance in the line.

Disgusted by modern commercial testers, [Leo] set out to make the ideal continuity tester in the spirit of old school tools that do one thing and do it really well. It had to be simple to use, always ready to go, and capable of measuring continuity at 5Ω or less resistance (video, embedded below).

There’s no power switch or even labels, because it doesn’t need any. Just put the probes where you want ’em, and it either beeps and lights the LED or it doesn’t. It looks simple, but inside that blast-resistant enclosure are lots of cool features that certainly make it seem like the ideal tester to us.

Our favorite has to be the transient blocking unit that works like a little circuit breaker. They’re used to protect circuits from lighting and electrostatic discharge by way of depletion-mode MOSFETs and switches to protected mode in under a microsecond. Watch [Leo] build this workbench necessity and then abuse test it with mains power after the break.

Making your own tools, however simple or complex is a great experience. If you want to up your speedy prototyping game, [Leo]’s got you covered there with a special scratching tool for hand-scribing copper PCBs. Continue reading “Build An Everlasting Continuity Tester” →

Changing System Architectures And The Complexities Of Apple’s Butterfly Approach To ISAs

July 13, 2020 by 64 Comments

Apple computers will be moving away from Intel chips to its own ARM-based design. An interesting thing about Apple as a company is that it has never felt the need to tie itself to a particular system architecture or ISA. Whereas a company like Microsoft mostly tied its fortunes to Intel’s x86 architecture, and IBM, Sun, HP and other giants preferred vertical integration, Apple is currently moving towards its fifth system architecture for its computers since the company was formed.

What makes this latest change possibly unique, however, is that instead of Apple relying on an external supplier for CPUs and peripheral ICs, they are now targeting a vertical integration approach. Although the ARM ISA is licensed to Apple by Arm Holdings, the ‘Apple Silicon’ design that is used in Apple’s ARM processors is their own, produced by Apple’s own engineers and produced by foundries at the behest of Apple.

In this article I would like to take a look back at Apple’s architectural decisions over the decades and how they made Apple’s move towards vertical integration practically a certainty.

Continue reading “Changing System Architectures And The Complexities Of Apple’s Butterfly Approach To ISAs” →