Quick Network Bridge Gets Off-grid Home Back Online

December 9, 2015 by Dan Maloney 40 Comments

Off-grid living isn’t for everyone, but it has gotten easier in recent years. Cheap solar panels and wind turbines let you generate your own power, and there are plenty of strategies to deal with fuel, water and sanitation. But the one thing many folks find hard to do without – high-speed internet access – has few options for the really remote homestead. [tlankford01] wants to fix that and is working on an open-source mesh network to provide high-speed internet access to off-grid communities.

But first he had to deal with a major problem. With high-speed access provided by a Clearwire wireless network, streaming content to his two flat-screen TVs wasn’t a problem. At least until Sprint bought Clearwire and shut down the service in early November. Another ISP covered his area, but his house lies in a depression out of line of sight of their tower. So he rigged up a bridge between the WiMAX network and his lab. The bridge sits on a hill in sight of the ISP’s tower 3.5 miles away. Solar panels, a charge controller and deep-cycle batteries power everything, and a wireless link down the hill rounds out the build.

This is obviously a temporary solution, and probably wouldn’t last long in winter weather. But it’s working for now, and more importantly it’s acting as proof of concept for a larger mesh system [tlankford01] has in mind. There are plenty of details on what that would look like on his project page (linked above), and it’s worth a look too if you’re interested in off-grid connectivity.

More ESP32 Info Dribbles Out

December 8, 2015 by Elliot Williams 29 Comments

In case you’ve been hiding under a virtual rock over the last two years, you might have missed it when Espressif turned the IoT game on its head by releasing a chip with WiFi and a decent embedded processor for under $1 in bulk, and costing not much more than that in a module.

They’re looking to repeat the success of the ESP8266 with the ESP32, that should be coming out any time now. As we get closer to the release date, details start to dribble out. [Alberto], who makes very nice-looking pinout diagrams for a number of our favorite chips and modules, has already made us an ESP32 module pinout diagram.

And [Rudi] has been digging up nearly every crumb of info on the ESP32 that’s publicly available. For instance, it was through his website that we learned that the new RTOS SDK source is already up on GitHub.

There’s also a source of official information in the ESP32 forum, but there’s not much news there just yet. We expect this to change as more beta units make it out into the wild.

We covered the announcement of the forthcoming ESP32 last month, and we have to say that we’re looking forward to getting a module or two in our hands. Twin cores, BTLE support, and better DMA are tops on our list of neat features.

Light Up Your Day With This LED Clock

December 5, 2015 by Kevin Dady 12 Comments

We love clocks, and [Chris] got our attention with the internet enabled Light Clock. Time is displayed via RGB LED strip in a number of different ways around a 3D printed white disk. All the modes are based on two selectable colors to indicate hours and minutes, either in a gradient fashion or a hard stop.

Light is provided by a 144 LED neopixel strip and is powered by a beefy 4 amp 5 volt power supply, which also powers the controller. Brains are provided by a ESP8266 powered NodeMCU-12E board, and software is written using ESP8266 for Arduino core.

Being a WiFi enabled micro controller it is a simple matter of connecting to the clock using WiFi and using the embedded web pages to select your local timezone, color palette, and display mode. The correct time is set by network and will never be wrong. While there is a Kickstarter for selling the finished project, instructions and software are provided for making your own if you wish.

Join us after the break for the promotional Kickstarter and demonstration video

Continue reading “Light Up Your Day With This LED Clock” →

Office Dog Triangulation Keeps Spot Accounted For

November 29, 2015 by James Hobson 40 Comments

[Matt Reed] works at a pet friendly work-space, where his pooch called [Bean] loves to wander around and disappear. She’s not getting in trouble, but nonetheless, [Matt] worries about her. So he took the creepy stalker route and put a beacon on her collar to track her every move.

He’s using a small BLE beacon that will poll a signal every second, sending out a unique ID code and a RSSI value (Received Signal Strength Indicator). Normally beacons are placed in a stationary location to help people navigate — but this time, it’s on a moving dog.

In order to better understand [Bean’s] location in the office, [Matt] set up three Raspberry Pi’s with Bluetooth adapters around the office. Using Noble, Node.js listens for the RSSI values and triangulates [Bean’s] position, much like a cellphone can be located using different ping times from cellular towers.

Continue reading “Office Dog Triangulation Keeps Spot Accounted For” →

Building Custom Integrated Circuits

November 29, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 40 Comments

The first integrated circuits weren’t tiny flecks of silicon mounted to metal carriers and embedded in epoxy or ceramic. The first integrated circuits, albeit a looser definition of such, were just a few transistors, resistors, and diodes mashed together in the same package. With this in mind, [Rupert] created his own custom IC. It’s an IR ~~receiver~~ transmitter constructed out of a transistor, resistor, and an LED.

The attentive reader should be asking, “wait, can’t you just buy an IR ~~receiver~~ transmitter?” Yes, yes you can. But that’s not a hack™, and would otherwise be very uninteresting.

[Rupert]’s IC is just three parts, a 2n2222 transistor, a 220Ω resistor and an IR LED. With a good bit of deadbug soldering, these three parts were melded into something that resembled, and had the same pinout of, a Vishay TSOP4838 IR receiver. The epoxy used to encapsulate this integrated circuit is a standard 2-part epoxy and laser printer toner. Once everything is mixed up into a gooey slurry, it’s dripped over the IC producing a blob of an integrated circuit. It’s functionally identical to the standard commercial version, and looks good enough for a really cool project [Rupert]’s been working on.

Thanks [foehammer] for the tip.

First Raspberry Pi Zero Hack – Piggy-Back WiFi.

November 28, 2015 by Rud Merriam 122 Comments

And we have the first Raspberry Pi Zero hack! In less than 72 hours from the official release announcement [Shintaro] attached an Edimax WiFi USB Adapter directly to the USB solder pads on the Pi Zero. He couldn’t bear to disturb the small dimensions of the Pi Zero by using the USB On-the-Go (OTG). The OTG is needed to convert the micro-USB connector on the board to a full USB-A connector.

The case was removed from the Edimax and the device and Zero wrapped in Kapton to insulate the exposed solder points. Power was taken from the PP1 and PP6 points on the back of the board. These are the unregulated inputs from the USB power so should be used with caution. Some cheap USB power supplies can put out more that 5 volts when first connected and that might let the smoke out of a device.

The data wires were connected to PP22 and PP23, also on the back, and behind the USB data connector. Since USB is a differential signal these wires were carefully kept of equal length to avoid distorting the signal.

An SD card was created and edited on a Raspberry Pi B 2 to set the WiFi credentials. Inserted into the Zero it booted fine and started up the WiFi network connection.

Congratulations, [Shintaro] for the first Hackaday Raspberry Pi Zero hack. Is that a Hack-a-Zero-Day hack?

ESP8266 BASIC WiFi Thermostat Is Child’s Play

November 28, 2015 by Elliot Williams 15 Comments

If you’ve read any of our posts in the last couple years, you’ll have noted that our community is stoked about bringing the Internet to their devices on the cheap with the ESP8266 modules. Why? This forum post that details making a WiFi thermostat really brings the point home: it’s so easy and cheap to build Internet-enabled devices that you almost can’t resist.

When the ESP8266 first came out, there very little documentation, much less code support. Since then Espressif’s SDK has improved, the NodeMCU project brought Lua support, and there’s even Arduino support. Most recently, BASIC has been added to the ESP stable, and that really lowers the barriers to creating a simple WiFi widget, like the thermostat example here that uses a Dallas DS18B20 temperature sensor and an LED as a stand-in for the heater element.

The hardware for this project, a re-build of this demo code from the ESP8266 BASIC docs, is nothing more than a few off-the-shelf parts soldered together. No schematic required.

What makes the project work behind the scenes is some clever code-reuse by [Rotohammer] on the ESP8266 forums. Essentially, he wrapped the Arduino’s one-wire library, giving it simple BASIC bindings. Then all that’s left for the BASIC coder is to read the value and print it out to a webpage.

There’s all sorts of details swept under the rug here, and those of you out there who are used to bare-metal programming will surely huff and puff. But there’s a time for building your own injection-molder to make DIY Lego bricks, and there’s a time to just put blocks together. This project, and the BASIC interpreter that made it possible, demonstrate how much joy someone can get from just putting the parts together.