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…
2018-12-16
Looking back at the post history, and it appears that I am quite the Chatty Cathy this month. Lots of progress being made. First order of business: I screwed up the naming in a bunch of places. Instead of referring to the expansion board as VSPB (Vic’s Serial and Power Board) I referred to it as VPSB (Vic’s Power Serial Board). Well it’s easier to rename it than to change all of the references, so Read more…
2018-08-04
Been working on the software side of things. The goal was to put together a logger for all of the sensor data. For that I had to make logic core expose all of its various values. Not a super huge deal, but had to remember the code base from 6 months ago. Document your code, kids. Below are a couple of screen shots of the qtHMI_SHIM which is my playground and reference implementation for all Read more…
2017-10-22
I am a firm believer that the tool a man uses to should conform to the man not the other way around. If, for example, I need to remove a Phillips-head screw I will not take a slotted screwdriver and forge it into a Phillips-head screwdriver. I will take a Phillips-head screwdriver and use that. In other words I will use a tool that is conformed to the me and my current need rather than Read more…
2017-09-02
Note: Last time I did web development was in 2010 or thereabouts. At the time I was up to my ass in JSP, servlets, beans, rice, J2EE, jQuery, etc. So I’ve been out of the game for a bit. I certainly hope that I’m missing something. Some sort of piece of underlying logic that ties all of the nonsense together and converts it from “uhmmm this is kind of bulshit” to “oh ok that makes Read more…
2017-02-17
This update has been a while in the making. Between the last update and this one I accidental adopted a dog. That little shit machine has been a time sink. The Hardware Portion So anyways, the previous objective was to interface the NASA quality 4-20mA current loop simulator with the BBB. Several related and unrelated issues had to be address A bit tangential, but the GPIO pins are high when the BBB is first turned Read more…
2017-01-08
The Software So the next goal for this project was to get the BBB (Beagle Bone Black) to be able to drive digital output and to setup the reading of values from a 4-20mA current loop. Googling on configuring a GPIO pin to output with pull down resistors sent me down the rabbit hole of Device Tree overlays, kernel drivers, subsystems, SysFS, and so forth. Spent two days in the fuckery that is Linux documentation Read more…