I’ve been playing recently with using a MCP4921 as an audio DAC on a Raspberry Pi Zero W, although a MCP4922 would be equivalent (the ’22 is a two channel DAC, the ’21 is a single channel DAC). This post is my notes on where I got to before I decided that thing wasn’t going to work out for me.
My basic requirement was to be able to play sounds on a raspberry pi which already has two SPI buses in use. Thus, adding a SPI DAC seemed like a logical choice. The basic circuit looked like this:
MCP4921 SPI DAC circuit
Driving this circuit looked like this (noting that this code was a prototype and isn’t the best ever). The bit that took a while there was realising that the CS line needs to be toggled between 16 bit writes. Once that had been done (which meant moving to a different spidev call), things were on the up and up.
This was the point I realised that I was at a dead end. I can’t find a way to send the data to the DAC in a way which respects the timing of the audio file. Before I had to do small writes to get the CS line to toggle I could do things fast enough, but not afterwards. Perhaps there’s a DMA option instead, but I haven’t found one yet.
Instead, I think I’m going to go and try PWM based audio. If that doesn’t work, it will be a MAX219 i2c DAC for me!
I was also a bit confused when the relay didn’t work initially, but that turns out because I’d misunderstood the wiring. The relay needs to be powered from the 3.3v pin on the 40 pin header, as there is a PCB error which puts 5v on the pins labelled as 3.3v on the GPIO header. I ended up with jumper wires which looked like this:
Cabling the relay
1-Wire issues
Following on the tutorial instructions worked well from then on until I tried to get 1-Wire setup. The owfs2mqtt bridge plugin was logging this:
2019-04-08 19:23:55.075: /opt/OWFS-MQTT-Bridge/lib/Daemon/OneWire.pm:148:Daemon::logError(): Connection to owserver failed: Can't connect owserver: Address not available
Debugging that involved connecting to the owfs2mqtt docker container (hint: ssh to the Orange Pi, do a docker ps, and then run bash inside the docker container for the addon). Running owserver with debug produces this:
owserver fails
Sorry to post that as an image, cut and paste for the hassos ssh server doesn’t like me for some reason. I suspect I have a defective DS2482, but I’ll have to wait and see what Allistair says.
I didn’t get much of a chance to work through the home automation tutorial at linux.conf.au 2019 because I ended up helping others in the room get their Orange Pi is booting. Now that things have settled down after the conference, I’ve had a chance to actually do some of the tutorial myself. These are my notes so I can remember what I did later…
Pre-tutorial setup
You need to do the pre-tutorial setup first. I use Ubuntu, which means its important that I use 18.10 or greater so that st-link is packaged. Apart from that the instructions as written just worked.
You also need to download the image for the SD card, which was provided on the day at the conference. The URL for that is from github. Download that image, decompress it, and then flash it to an SD card using something like Balena Etcher. The tutorial used 32gb SD cards, but the image will fit on something smaller than that.
hassos also doesn’t put anything on the Orange Pi HDMI port when it boots, so your machine is going to look like it didn’t boot. That’s expected. For the tutorial we provided a mapping from board number (mac address effectively) to IP address allocated in the tutorial. At home if you’re using an Orange Pi that isn’t from the conference you’re going to have to find another way to determine the IP address of your Orange Pi.
The way we determined MAC addresses and so forth for the boards used at the conference was to boot an Armbian image and then run a simple python script which performed some simple checks of each board by logging into the board over serial. The MAC addresses for the boards handed out on the day are on github.
An Aside: Serial on the Orange Pi Prime
As an aside, the serial on the Orange Pi Prime is really handy, especially with the hassos image. Serial is exposed by a three pin header on the board, which is sort of labelled:
The Orange Pi Prime Serial Port
Noting that you’ll need to bend the pins of the serial header a little if you’re using the shield from the conference:
Serial port connected to a USB to serial converter
The advantage being that suddenly you get useful debugging information! The serial connection is 115200 baud 8N1 (8 data bits, no parity, 1 stop bit) by the way.
Serial debug information from an hassos boot
The hassos image used for the conference allows login as root with no password over serial, which dumps you into a hass interface. Type “login” to get a bash prompt, even though its not in the list of commands available. At this point you can use the “ip address” command to work out what address DHCP handed the board.
The actual on-the-day work
So at this point we’re about as ready as people were meant to be when they walked into the room for the tutorial. I’ll write more notes when I complete the actual tutorial.
As some of you might know, I am a Scout Leader. One of the things I do for Scouts is I assist in a minor role with the running of Canberra Gang Show, a theatre production for young people.
One of the things Gang Show cares about is that they need to be able to do rapid roll calls and reporting on who is present at any given time — this is used for working out who is absent before a performance (and therefore needs an understudy), as well as ensuring we know where everyone is in an environment that sometimes has its fire suppression systems isolated.
Before I came along, Canberra Gang Show was doing this with a Windows based attendance tracking application, and 125kHz RFID tags. This system worked just fine, except that the software was clunky and there was only one badge reader — we struggled explaining to youth that they need to press the “out” button when logging out, and we wanted to be able to have attendance trackers at other locations in the theatre instead of forcing everyone to flow through a single door.
So, I got thinking. How hard can it be to build something a bit better?
Let’s start with some requirements: simple to deploy and manage; free software (both cost and freedom); more badge readers than what we have now; and low cost.
My basic proposal for such a thing is a Raspberry Pi Zero W, with a small LCD screen and a RFID reader. The device scans badges, and displays a confirmation of scan to the user. If the device can talk to a central server it streams events to it; otherwise it queues them until the server is available and then streams them.
Sourcing a simple SPI LCD screen and SPI RFID reader from ebay wasn’t too hard, and we were off! The only real wart was that I wanted to use 13.56mHz RFID cards, because then I could store some interesting (up to 1kb) data on the card itself. The first version was simply a ribbon cable:
v0.0, a ribbon cable
Which then led to me having my first PCB ever made. Let’s ignore that its the wrong size shall we?
v0.1, an incorrectly sized PCB
I’m now at the point where the software for the scanner is reasonable, and there is a bare bones server that does enough roll call that it should be functional. I am sure there’s more to be done, but it works enough to demo. One thing I learned while showing off the device at coffee the other day is that it really needs to make a noise when you scan a badge. I’ve ordered a SPI DAC to play with, which might be the solution there. Other next steps include a newer version of the PCB, and some sort of case solution. I’ll do another post when things progress further.
Oh yes, and I’ll eventually release the software too once its in a more workable state.
The basic procedure for OTA flashing was the same as flashing the globes, except that you hold down the button on the device for five seconds to put it into flash mode. That all worked brilliantly, until I appear to have fat fingered my wifi details in Tasmota — when I rebooted the device it never appeared on my network.
That would be much more annoying on the globes, but it turns out these smart plugs are really easy to open and that Tuya has documented the pin out of the controlling microprocessor. So, I ended up temporarily soldering some cables to the microprocessor to debug what had gone wrong. It should be noted that as a soldering person I make a great software engineer:
Jumper wires soldered to the serial port.
Once you’ve connected with a serial console, its pretty obvious who can’t be trusted to type their wifi password correctly:
I can’t have nice things.
At this point I was in the process of working out how to use esptool to re-flash the plug when I got super lucky. However, first… Where the hell is GPIO0 (the way you turn on flashing mode)? Its not broken out on the pins for the MCU, but as a kind redditor pointed out, it is exposed on a pad on the back of the board:
The cunningly hidden GPIO0.
…and then I got lucky. You see, to put the MCU into flashing mode you short GPIO0 to ground. I was having trouble getting that to work with esptool, so I had a serial console attached to see what was happening. There I was, shorting GPIO0 out over and over trying to get the magic to work. However, Tasmota also setups up a button on GPIO0 by default, because the sonoffs have a hardware button on that pin. If you hit that button with four short presses, you put the device back into captive portal configuration mode…
Once I was back in that mode I could just use a laptop over wifi to re-enter the wifi password and I’m good to go. In hindsight I didn’t need the serial port if I could have powered the device and shorted that pin four times, but it sure was nice to be told what was happening on the serial console while poking around.
Not the book of the movie, but the collection of short stories by Isaac Asimov. I’ve read this book several times before and enjoyed it, although this time I found it to be more dated than I remembered, both in its characterisations of technology as well as it’s handling of gender. Still enjoyable, but not the best book I’ve read recently.
I, Robot
Isaac Asimov
Fiction
Spectra
2004
224
The development of robot technology to a state of perfection by future civilizations is explored in nine science fiction stories.
One of the things I like about Home Assistant is that it allows you to take hardware from a bunch of various vendors and stitch it together into a single consistent interface. So for example I now have five home automation vendor apps on my phone, but don’t use any of them because Home Assistant manages everything.
A concrete example — we have Philips Hue lights, but they’re not perfect. They’re expensive, require a hub, and need to talk to a Philips data centre to function (i.e. the internet needs to work at my house, which isn’t always true thanks to the failings of the Liberal Party).
I’d been meaning to look at the cheapo smart lights from Kmart for a while, and finally got around to it this week. For $15 you can pickup a dimmable white globe, and for $29 you can have a RGB one. That’s heaps cheaper than the Hue options. Even better, the globes are flashable to run the open source Tasmota stack, which means no web services required!
So here are some instructions on flashing these globes to be useful:
Flash to tasmota. This was a little bit fiddly, but was mostly about getting the sequence to put the globes into config mode right (turn off for 10 seconds, turn on, turn off, turn on, turn off, turn on). Wait a few seconds and then expect the lamp to blink rapidly indicating its in config mode. For Canberra people I now have a raspberry pi setup to do this easily, so we can run a flashing session sometime if people want.
Configure tasmota. This is really up to you, but the globes need to know local wifi details, where your MQTT server is, and stuff like that.
More correctly titled “you die horribly and it probably involves plasma”, this light hearted and fun read explores serious answers to silly scientific questions. The footnotes are definitely the best bit. A really enjoyable read.
What If?
Randall Munroe
Humor
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
September 2, 2014
320
The creator of the incredibly popular webcomic xkcd presents his heavily researched answers to his fans' oddest questions, including “What if I took a swim in a spent-nuclear-fuel pool?” and “Could you build a jetpack using downward-firing machine guns?”
This site is hosted at Dreamhost, and for reasons I can’t explain right now isn’t accessible from large chunks of Australia. It seems to work fine from elsewhere though. Dreamhost certainly has an explaination — they allege in their emails that take 24 hours that you can’t reply to that its because wordpress is using too much RAM.
However, they don’t explain why that’s suddenly happened when its been previously fine for years, and they certainly don’t explain why it works from some places but not others and why other Dreamhost sites are also offline from the sites having issues.
Its time for a new hosting solution I think, although not bothering to have hosting might also be that solution.
This is the third book in the Leviathan Wakes series by James SA Corey. Just as good as the first two, this is a story about how much a daughter loves her father, perhaps beyond reason, moral choices, and politics — just as much as it is the continuation of the story arc around the alien visitor.
Another excellent book, with a bit more emphasis on space battles than previously and an overall enjoyable plot line. Worth a read, to be honest I think the series is getting better.
Abaddon's Gate
James S. A. Corey
Fiction
Hachette UK
June 4, 2013
560
The third book in the New York Times bestselling Expanse series. NOW A MAJOR TV SERIES FROM NETFLIX For generations, the solar system - Mars, the Moon, the Asteroid Belt - was humanity's great frontier. Until now. The alien artefact working through its program under the clouds of Venus has emerged to build a massive structure outside the orbit of Uranus: a gate that leads into a starless dark. Jim Holden and the crew of the Rocinante are part of a vast flotilla of scientific and military ships going out to examine the artefact. But behind the scenes, a complex plot is unfolding, with the destruction of Holden at its core. As the emissaries of the human race try to find whether the gate is an opportunity or a threat, the greatest danger is the one they brought with them.
