Linux




We’ve been thinking about getting into 3D printing here at the Hammel household.  I’m looking at building small enclosures for the various embedded boards I work on.  My wife is looking at creating components for the designs she works on for Vindicated Vinyl, her small business.  After doing a bit […]

Getting started with the Robo3D printer and OctoPrint



The value of an over-exuberant penchant for experimentation and fiddling should never be underestimated, if only because it helps measure the onset of age-associated mental debilitation. In other words, everyone needs a hobby. Or two. Or ten.

What to do in 2017


Back in October I started work on a new app for PiBox: an XM radio player.  The hardware is an XMPCR, a device sold in the early 2000’s that connected over USB to a PC.  The device didn’t last long.  I think there was some concern that people would steal […]

PiBox: XM radio app (PiXM) and wifi scanning in PNC


It’s official: PiBox will be at the Colorado Springs Maker Faire on October 15th. The Maker Faire will be held at Library 21c which is just North of the Northeast corner of the Chapel Hills Mall.  Last year saw around 6300 attendees and turnout is expected to be even better […]

PiBox @ CS Maker Faire, Oct 15th



I’ve been fiddling with an ESP8266 this week that is being powered by an FTDIBasic board from SparkFun.  The setup is simple enough and it’s easy enough to get a simple web server running on it but I don’t have a power switch so the whole thing is powered through […]

udev rule for FTDIBasic from SparkFun





One of the directions my PiBox project is headed is as a central hub for sensor management.  This implies the ability to communicate between the PiBox and the sensor node using BLE or Wifi.  PiBox can do that already over Wifi (and supports basic BLE communication though lacks a meaningful […]

Embedded project: 4 channel Arduino-based power controller


When I was just getting started with embedded development I found many tutorials on how to perform cross compiles required setting up some shell functions and variables before working on builds.  This is a necessity for embedded work because the embedded build for the target platform won’t use the same […]

cdtools, because who has just one project?


I’ve been working on building custom Debian and Ubuntu distributions for use under VirtualBox.   One advantage that both have over Fedora is debootstrap.  This tool allows you to create a default rootfs from pre-compiled packages inside a directory.  You can then chroot into that directory to install the kernel image, […]

Debian/Ubuntu debootstrap images for VirtualBox