Tag Archives: software

MRF24J40 driver for STM32

Posted by KarlP on 3 May, 2012 None comments

A while ago I put together a C driver for the MRF24J40 802.15.4 modules from microchip. I had been using them as a cheap alternative to xbees in some AVR projects. As I’ve been moving on to STM32 parts for hobby projects, (more power, cheaper) I started off porting my driver code from AVR over to cortex m3.

This has been quite an experience. The arm toolchain experience, and particularly the libc support and general documentation is completely different to, say, avr-libc (AVR-libc is a great project, reallly solid)

However, with lots of learning, and lots of mistakes, I’ve got it all working. It’s a first cut, but the basic features are there. There’s no magic for DMA, and you have to do a lot of the pin setup yourself, but this is Cortex M3, there’s so many pins you could be using for this! I’ve tried to reduce the required function calls as much as possible, but there’s still room for improvement.

    // Required by the user code
    extern void mrf_select(void);  // Chip select, if necessary
    extern void mrf_deselect(void);  // chip deselect, if necessary
    extern uint8_t spi_tx(uint8_t cData);
    extern void _delay_ms(int);  // only used at init time.

This still needs to move to a clear sub project, currently it’s a separate code base to the AVR code.

Get the code now!

More to come, as it gets tidied up and put into use!

Pachube dashboard brewery, with pygame and stomp

Posted by KarlP on 22 January, 2011 None comments

I send a bunch of data from my sensor network _to_ pachube, but this post is about using pachube as a data _source_ They have this app called a dashboard, which basically gives you some knobs and switches, that are hooked up as live inputs to a pachube data stream.

So, that got me thinking, here was a process control GUI pretty much done for me. The permissions are a bit wonky, so I’ll only include a picture here, but basically I get a knob for a set temperature, and a button to turn an alarm on or off. (I can add lots more, but this is all I’ve got set up so far)
Pachube Dashboard control panel

Neat, but now what? Well, the pachube api is pretty easy, so I just hooked up yet another consumer to my local network, (sensor data is dumped into a stomp/activemq message bus here, so that I can have infinite consumers of the data, without ever having to touch the code on my sensor nodes) that pulls data not just from the local network, but also from this pachube dashboard’s feed.

Add a little bit of pygame hackery so I can play sounds, and now I have a heating/cooling warning system for the kettle in the kitchen.

Example output

2011-01-22 11:05:08,649 INFO main - Current temp on probe is 31
2011-01-22 11:05:08,650 DEBUG main - threshold is 74, mode: heating
2011-01-22 11:05:08,650 INFO main - Turning music off.... we're below the threshold
2011-01-22 11:05:13,364 INFO main - Current temp on probe is 32
2011-01-22 11:05:13,365 DEBUG main - threshold is 74, mode: heating
2011-01-22 11:05:13,365 INFO main - Turning music off.... we're below the threshold
2011-01-22 11:07:01,408 INFO main - Current temp on probe is 33
2011-01-22 11:07:01,409 DEBUG main - threshold is 74, mode: heating
2011-01-22 11:07:01,409 INFO main - Turning music off.... we're below the threshold
2011-01-22 11:07:01,409 INFO main - Fetching current dashboard values from pachube, incase they've changed

This is far from any sort of automatic brewery, and was more an experiment in what was possible, and how easily. And it’s still a lot better than having me walk over to the kitchen every 5 minutes to check the current temperature. Now I can just turn the stove on, and get back to serious time wasting on the internet!

Source is over at github, https://github.com/karlp/karlnet/blob/master/consumers/pachube/consumer.pachube.dashboard.py

Things I found:

  • Pachube dashboard only updates if you drag the knobs. Using direct entry doesn’t update the datastream
  • Playing sounds from python is easy, but only when you find the right library, and only when you guess at the documentation a lot. I’ve no idea if this works on windows or osx. I tried a lot of other ways first, all of which failed miserably.

Version Control of scriptlets/single file programs

Posted by KarlP on 8 July, 2010 None comments

I have my ~/bin directory under version control, which is fine, and all well and good. But some of those scriptlets, I’d like to make public, and share them on github, or somewhere similar. Then they could get tickets opened and closed, and better? documentation. But, version control systems seem to consider a directory to be the smallest managed unit possible.

How does one reconcile these? I don’t want all my scriptlets public. (Some of them are both far too ugly, and contain far too much hardcoding) But I don’t want a directory for each scriptlet and have to manage paths. I DO still want to have all scriptlets under version control. Essentially, these are _all_ unique software “projects” but with just a single file per utility, it seems heavy handed to have to have an install wrapper to handle putting it into a single bin dir for actual usage. And having to have separate repositories for each one?

I can have a public and a private repository, but how does one “promote” code from private to public? (I’m only really interested in svn/git/hg) Gist’s at github seem to offer versioned single files, but how can that easily be integrated into my ~/bin directory? I want some sort of easy way of saying “update all these utilities”

Really, how does one manage this at all? Or do we all just stick it in a single directory, and live with the cruft?