Rust Running On The Realtek RTL8710: ESP8266 Alternative?

January 4, 2017 by Elliot Williams 26 Comments

For simply getting your project connected to WiFi, a least among hacker circles, nothing beats the ESP8266. But it’s not the only player out there, and we love to see diversity in the parts and languages that we use. One of the big shortcomings of the ESP8266 is the slightly-oddball Xtensa CPU. It’s just not as widely supported by various toolchains as its ARM-based brethren.

And so, when [Zach] wanted to do some embedded work in Rust, the ESP8266 was out of the picture. He turned to the RTL8710, a very similar WiFi module made by Realtek. Documentation for the RTL8710 is, at the moment, crappy, much as the ESP8266 documentation was before the hacker community had at it. But in trade for this shortcoming, [Zach] got to use the LLVM compiler, which supports the ARM architecture, and that means he can code in Rust.

In the end, the setup that [Zach] describes is a mix of FreeRTOS and some of the mbed libraries, which should be more than enough to get you up and running fairly painlessly on the chip. We’ve actually ordered a couple of these modules ourselves, and were looking to get started in straight C, but having Rust examples working doesn’t hurt, and doesn’t look all that different.

Is anyone else using the RTL8710? An ARM-based, cheap WiFi chip should be interesting.

SST Is A Very Tidy ESP8266 Smart Thermostat

January 1, 2017 by Jenny List 15 Comments

The smart thermostat has become in a way the public face of the Internet of Things. It’s a demonstration that technological uptake by the general public is driven not by how clever the technology is, but by how much use they can see in it. A fridge that offers your recipes or orders more eggs may be a very neat idea, but at street level a device allowing you to turn your heating on at home before you leave work is much cooler. Products like Nest or Hive have started to become part of normal suburban life.

There is no reason though for an IoT thermostat to be a commercial product like the two mentioned. Our subject today demonstrates this; SST is a Wi-Fi smart thermostat using an ESP8266 that can be controlled by an app, thanks to its use of the open-source Souliss IoT Framework.

The build is very well finished, with PCBs, colour display and other components in a neat 3D-printed box. It’s a project that you could put in front of an end-user, it’s finished to such a high standard. Physical entity files are available from the hackaday.io page linked above, while its firmware is available in a GitHub repository. THere is a video showing some of the device’s capabilities, which we’ve put below the break.

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IoT-ifying An Old LED Signboard

December 26, 2016 by Dan Maloney 16 Comments

Scrolling LED signs were pretty keen back in the day, and now they’re pretty easy to come by on the cheap. Getting a signboard configured for IoT duty can be tricky, but as [kripthor] shows us, it’s not that bad as long as security isn’t your top concern and you can tweak a serial interface.

[kripthor] chanced upon an Amplus AM03127 signboard that hails from the days when tri-color LEDs were the big thing. The unit came with a defunct remote thanks to leaking batteries, but a built-in serial interface offered a way to connect. Unfortunately, the RS-232 standard on the signboard wants both positive and negative voltages with respect to ground to represent the 1s and 0s, and that wouldn’t work with the ESP8266 [kripthor] was targeting. The ubiquitous MAX-232 transceiver was enlisted to convert logic levels to RS-232 signals and a small buck converter was added to power the ESP. A little scripting and the signboard is online and ready for use and abuse by the interwebz — [kripthor] says he’ll regret this, but we’re pleased with the way the first remote access turned out. Feel free to check out the live video feed and see what the current message is.

Personally, we don’t have much use for a signboard, but getting RS-232 devices working in the Arduino ecosystem is definitely a trick we’ll keep in mind. If asynchronous serial protocols aren’t your strong suit, you might want to check out this guide to what can go wrong by our own [Elliot Williams].

These Ornaments Measure Christmas Cheer

December 24, 2016 by Rich Hawkes 9 Comments

The ornament projects we post around here tend to be simple, stand-alone projects. We are, however, well into the era of the Internet of Things (like it or not) and holiday ornaments need not be single, unconnected blinking objects. For Christmas this year, [Sean Hodgins] came up with some connected DIY ornaments that respond to Christmas cheer.

[Sean Hodgins] had some beautiful PCBs done up in festive shapes and he hand-pastes and oven-solders the SMD components on both sides. Each one is battery powered and controlled by an ESP8266. LEDs and a button on the front of each ornament comprise the user interface. When the button is pressed, data is sent to a Phant server and a “Christmas Cheer” counter is incremented. Other ornaments, so long as they can connect to the Phant server, will periodically check the counter. If the Christmas Cheer has increased, the ornaments will play a tune and flash some lights.

The ornaments are open-source — [Sean Hodgins] posted the code and PCB designs on GitHub. They look great, and would be a good way to let people know you’re thinking of them over the holidays. Check out this light-up menorah or these lighted acrylic ornaments for more holiday fun!

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Interactive ESP8266 Development With PunyForth

December 23, 2016 by Al Williams 17 Comments

Forth is one of those interesting languages that has a cult-like following. If you’ve never looked into it, its strength is that it is dead simple to put on most CPUs, yet it is very powerful and productive. There are two main principles that make this possible. First, parsing is easy because any sequence of non-space characters makes up a legitimate Forth word. So while words like “double” and “solve” are legal Forth words, so is “#$#” if that’s what you want to define.

The other thing that makes Forth both simple and powerful is that it is stack-based. If you are used to a slide rule or an HP calculator, it is very natural to think of “5+2*3” as “5 2 3 * +” but it is also very simple for the computer to interpret.

[Zeroflag] created PunyForth–a Forth-like language for the ESP8266. You can also run PunyForth for cross development purposes on Linux (including the Raspberry Pi). The system isn’t quite proper Forth, but it is close enough that if you know Forth, you’ll have no trouble.

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Arduino Lighting Controller With Remote Twist

December 15, 2016 by Bryan Cockfield 5 Comments

The time for putting up festive lights all around your house is nigh, and this is a very popular time for those of us who use the holiday season as an excuse to buy a few WiFi chips and Arduinos to automate all of our decorations. The latest in this great tradition is [Real Time Logic]’s cloud-based Christmas light setup.

In order to give public access to the Christmas light setup, a ESP8266 WiFi Four Relay board was configured with NodeMCU. This allows for four channels for lights, which are controlled through the Light Controller Server software. Once this is setup through a domain, all anyone has to do to change the lighting display is open up a web browser and head to the website. The creators had homeowners, restaurants, and church displays in mind, but it’s not too big of a leap to see how this could get some non-holiday use as well.

The holidays are a great time to get into the hacking spirit. From laser-projected lighting displays to drunk, animatronic Santas, there’s almost no end to the holiday fun, and you’ve still got a week! (Or 53!)

More Blinky = More Better – The WS2812FX Library

December 12, 2016 by Lewin Day 16 Comments

The WS2812 is an amazing piece of technology. 30 years ago, high brightness LEDs didn’t even exist yet. Now, you can score RGB LEDs that even take all the hard work out of controlling and addressing them! But as ever, we can do better.

Riffing on the ever popular Adafruit NeoPixel library, [Harm] created the WS2812FX library. The library has a whole laundry list of effects to run on your blinkenlights – from the exciting Hyper Sparkle to the calming Breathe inspired by Apple devices. The fantastic thing about this library is that it can greatly shorten development time of your garden-variety blinkables – hook up your WS2812s, pick your effect, and you’re done.

[Harm]’s gone and done the hard yards, porting this to a bevy of platforms – testing it on the Arduino Nano, Uno, Micro and ESP8266. As a proof of concept, they’ve also put together a great demonstration of the software – building some cute and stylish Christmas decorations from wood, aluminium, and hacked up Christmas light housings. Combining it with an ESP8266 & an app, the effects can be controlled from a smartphone over WiFi. The assembly video on YouTube shows the build process, using screws and nails to create an attractive frame using aluminium sheet.

This project is a great example of how libraries and modern hardware allow us to stand on the shoulders of giants. It’s quicker than ever to build amazingly capable projects with more LEDs than ever. Over the years we’ve seen plenty great WS2812 projects, like this sunrise alarm clock or this portable rave staff.
As always, blink hard, or go home. Video after the break.

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