2020-01-26
A “little while ago” I bough a Samsung “smart” TV from Costco. It was neither the cheapest nor the most expensive model. I was juuuust right. At that point Samsung’s smart TV shenanigans were well known so I made sure to disable automatic updates and I declined the user agreement during the initial setup. One of the very first annoyances I noticed was this “TV Plus” that would start blaring anytime I turned on the Read more…
2020-01-25
It has been a while since the last update and a whole lot of progress has been made. On the software side everything seems to work. For realsies this time. The full software stack compiles and runs(!) on both Linux and FreeBSD. On Linux it compiles using GCC and Clang. On FreeBSD only Clang is used since that’s the default compiler. To be fair I’ve only tested the client side stuff on FreeBSD, but as Read more…
2019-09-23
In the last post you said “The software is good shape.” I plug both boards into my workstation. Start the software. Error messages start spewing about bad checksums, buffer overflows etc. Narrow it down to a specific serial port. The serial port that’s built into the motherboard works just ducky. The port that’s an add-on card is causing problems. Start investigating. Eliminate cable, IO board, configuration, etc. Both ports work fine in text/human mode, but Read more…
2019-09-22
The hardware design is complete. All of the units that I will assemble have been assembled. The software is good shape. It hasn’t been touched in a few months, but last I worked on it it was in very good shape. The next step is actual physical assembly of the whole thing. Below are a few select pictures of the assembly progress. All taken with PotatoCam II. Where the magic happens, one of two. The Read more…
2019-09-16
Final assembly has begun. While waiting for the parts for the Beagle Bone expansion boards I started assembling the IO boards. I figures four at a time was a good idea. Find all the location on the first board and then copy that to the other boards. One component at a time of course. I was wrong. Five hours into this, my solder paste is getting dry, I’m getting anxious from sitting in one spot Read more…
2019-08-26
The VPSB (Vic’s Serial and Power Board) is functional. Fucking finally! The last function to be tested was the current monitoring of the attached peripherals and I am glad to report that it works. Not flawlessly, unfortunately. I will have to replace the 0.010 ohm resistor current sense resistor with something a bit bigger on “production” boards. Going to try a 1.5 ohm in its place. With two 3 ohm resistors in parallel current sensing Read more…
2019-08-19
How do I put this … the latest revision of the board works. The only thing that I haven’t delved into I2C, but everything that I have tried so far works. Completely. Which is actually extremely rewarding, since this has been a slog for a year plus. Some previous posts to catch you up: So much failure More failure Everyone on the fail train Well all of the problems have been addressed. Vic’s Power and Read more…
2018-12-15
So on a BeagleBone Black running Linux, how can one tell if a device is enabled. Lets say we’re trying to get UART2 and UART4 to work. Those are both serial ports. How can one tell if the serial ports are enabled (or just a singular – serial port)? Well because we pretend to be familiar with Linux we do a ‘dmesg’ and look for a serial something of some sorts, yes? That sounds reasonable. Read more…
2018-12-13
The new VSPB (Vic’s Serial and Power Board – catchy, eh?) is working very well so far. That will be a different post. This is about configuring the BBB (BeagleBone Black) the Vic way. During the development of this project, a new version of Debian was released for the BBB. Since I want to be hip and with the times I decided to upgrade to the latest version. Debian Stretch IoT is my poison of Read more…
2018-08-25
Note: This post a bit of a mess because I kept screwing up and being wrong. I am going to leave it this way because I don’t want to have yet another ‘highlight reel’ of an Internet presence. Learning is a messy endeavor, especially when you’re not some brillient mind that “just gets it”. The impetus behind the last revision of the board was current. Specifically current handling. More specifically issues with current handling. Even Read more…