Arduino

ESP8266 WeMos D1 Mini WIFI

For less than AU$10 I picked up ESP8266 ESP-12 ESP-12F CH340G CH340 V2 USB WeMos D1 Mini WIFI Development Board for curiosity.

Deployment turns out to be fairly easy … the hardest bit was fixing the Arduino IDE on OS X Big Sur … and with 11 IO pins it could quickly become a useful device Read More...

DFRobot Xhouse

DFRobot (www.dfrobot.com) have a demonstration iPhone App and software for their Xboard series of devices. Apart from a small issue with a cable the Xhouse demo project was a fun little diversion - easily built and potentially useful. Read More...

Low cost LeoStick based Serial Switch

The farm is connected to the Internet by a WiMax based wireless service which occasionally has a problem which needs the WiMax modem / router to be rebooted.

A low cost USB powered switch connected to one of the computers at the farm solved the problem nicely.

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Legacy FreeBSD serial IO with Freetronics Leostick

Freetronics (www.freetronics.com) builds an Arduino Leonardo compatible device called the Leostick (www.freetronics.com/collections/arduino/products/leostick) that plugs in to a USB port and provides a builtin serial, keyboard and mouse emulation. Unfortunately, versions of FreeBSD before 9.0 don’t recognise the serial port. A hacked version of the FreeBSD modem driver can be created to allow communication with the Leostick. Read More...

Legacy FreeBSD Eleven and Etherten Serial Support

Freetronics (www.freetronics.com) builds a range of Arduino compatible devices in particular the Etherten and the Eleven. FreeBSD’s (www.freebsd.org) does not natively support the serial interface of these devices. Fortunately the uarduno (mrp3.com/uarduno-1.02.tar.gz) port does and I am happy to report that this works on FreeBSD 5.4 and works at least with Etherten and probably with the Eleven with a trivial addition to its configuration file. Read More...