Yearly Archives: 2015

My first PCBs arrived in early December, but due to the holidays I haven’t done anything with them yet. I just wanted to show what they look like. There are 5 small boards attached to my PCB: An FTDI Basic from Sparkfun for connecting a USB cable to my Linux […]

APC PCBs

Sun December 27, 2015 in Arduino / Hardware / Linux / PiBox / Raspberry Pi tagged arduino / cable / FTDI Basic / Linux / PCB / PCB layout / USB connector

What do you get when an old software geek tries to learn about electricity? The same thing you get when you teach a 5 year old not to put their hands on the red coils on the stove. Experience through interactivity. Today’s lesson: fat wires vs thin wires. I’ve been […]

Learning about power

Thu December 24, 2015 in Arduino / General / Hardware / Holiday lighting / PiBox / Raspberry Pi tagged amazon / custom boards / gauge wire / Geek / graphics / thin wires

So my little aeroponics project is growing beyond its real needs, but once you start assembling legos it’s hard to stop. I’ve added an ESP8266 for wireless connectivity and a really small OLED LCD display. The latter will let me monitor the system without either serial (FTDI Basic) or wireless […]

Adruino updates: APC w/ESP8266 and OLED LCD

Fri November 20, 2015 in Arduino tagged 4 channel relay / adafruit / arduino / FTDI Basic / PCB / prototype (updated 3092 days ago)

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

Thu November 05, 2015 in Arduino / Hardware / Holiday lighting / Raspberry Pi tagged 4 channel relay / adafruit / arduino / Linux / PiBox / sda/scl / signals / timer / wifi (updated 3107 days ago)

One of the longterm goals for PiBox is to integrate it into the home. I want to see the PiBox Server provide centralized communication for an array of IoT devices. One way to do this is with Bluetooth Low-Energy, aka BLE, aka Bluetooth 4.0. This specification allows very low power […]

PiBox: bluetooth for video means no omxplayer

Mon July 27, 2015 in Audio / Hardware / Linux / PiBox / Raspberry Pi / Software Development / Video tagged crosstool-ng / gcc / kernel / Linaro / mplayer / PiBox / Raspberry Pi / toolchain / Video / video player

This past weekend I took PiBox out in the trailer for a field trial. The box was mounted under a cabinet with power and HDMI wrapped around to a 7″ HDMI-input monitor. Power on worked fine and the system came right up. But not everything worked as expected. Here is […]

PiBox field trial results

Thu July 02, 2015 in General / PiBox tagged Android / BUI / digital TV / GTK+ / HDMI / HDMI cables / HDMI switch / Media Player / Media Server / PiBox / wifi

It’s taken more than 2 years but I’ve finally finished the first versions of the PiBox Media Server and Media Player. The cases are stained wood boxes from a hobby store but they provide me with information on how to deal with layout in a 3D printed case. It also […]

PiBox prototype cases

Thu June 11, 2015 in PiBox tagged Android / custom boards / digital TV / HDMI / Media Player / Media Server / PiBox / projector / prototype / toolchain

I’ve been using Apache 2.2 for quite some time. Lately I’ve noticed CentOS and other distros using Apache 2.4. The new Apache breaks a bunch of stuff, as does newer php. One thing that needed changing is a switch in directory listing tools. I have an archive on my web […]

Apache 2.4 changes

Wed June 10, 2015 in General (updated 3256 days ago)

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?

Mon April 06, 2015 in General / Linux / Raspberry Pi / Software Development tagged angstrom / ARM / buildroot / embedded development / Fedora / git / java / kernel / Linux / metabuild / Metabuilds / OpenEmbedded / packaging / PiBox / rpm / toolchain / yocto (updated 3256 days ago)

Networking in QEMU I’ve recently had a need to test UEFI booting for a disk image. I stumbled upon OVMF, a bios that will handle UEFI booting. It works pretty well but doesn’t remember its config sometimes. But that’s not why I’m writing this. In my disk image I need […]

Networking with QEMU and KVM speedup

Mon April 06, 2015 in Fedora / Hardware / Linux / virtualization tagged BIOS / Fedora / Kernel-based Virtual Machine / kvm / libvirtd / qemu / ssh port / TUN/TAP / Unified Extensible Firmware Interface / virtualization

I can no longer push to gitorious so I tried to run the import of all my repos (and there are alot) into GitHub. This failed miserably. Only two of 34 repos were imported. Some of the repos actually got created on GitLab but there is nothing in them. So […]

Migrating from gitorious – it sucks.

Wed April 01, 2015 in General (updated 3326 days ago)

I was trying to set up a directory index via a named vhost under Apache today. Typically all you need to do for this scenario is something like this in an apache conf file. <VirtualHost *:80> ServerName files.gfxmuse.org DocumentRoot /home/httpd/files <directory "="" home="" <span="" class="hiddenSpellError" pre="" data-mce-bogus="1">httpd/files"> Options +Indexes </Directory> […]

apache 2.4/Fedora quirk in welcome.conf

Tue March 10, 2015 in Fedora / Linux / Software Development / Ubuntu tagged Apache HTTP Server / directory index / Fedora / ubuntu / web server / Webserver directory index

Michael J. Hammel

Building a better today…because tomorrow is in question…