Recent content in Blog on JF's dev blog
TL;DR OpenClaw is promising but not ready for mainstream use yet. It requires technical know-how, has security considerations, and needs constant babysitting—the agents hallucinate, break configs, and don’t always report back. The real value was learning, not automating . I didn’t find killer use cases, but I gained hands-on experience with LLMs, agents, and the current limitations of…
Pine64 offers a LoRa gateway built around their Pine A64-LTS SBC. I was fortunate enough to receive an engineering sample from Pine64, allowing me to test the gateway and provide a custom OS image before it became available for purchase. RTP ( @RTP on Fosstodon ) later created a custom image based on Armbian, which worked well. I’ve been running one of RTP’s early image for a few years…
I’ve already tried in the past to run some NVRs to monitor surveillance camera on ARM SBC, but the performances were a bit underwhelming : it was too slow, it would miss events while it was recording the previous ones, and the CPU would be maxed out all of the time. But I reconsidered this with the RK3588 since it’s way more powerful than the other SBCs I had the opportunity to use so…
Introduction I’ve been using ARM based SBCs (RaspberryPi, Odroid, Quartz64, NanoPi) as home servers for quite some time now. I use them to host my NAS, backups, Home-Assistant, MQTT broker, Matrix home server… ARM CPUs are becoming more and more powerful, support more and more memory and provide more and more I/Os, which enable new use-cases and functionalities. The Rockchip RK3588 is…
This blog post is part of a series of posts: Part 1 : Introduction Part 2 : From prototypes to V1.0 Part 3 : Hardware design Part 4 : Software Part 5 : Integration with TTN, Node-RED and Home-Assistant Now that the device is built and the firmware is running as expected, let’s see how to actually use it and get the measurements out of the sensor! As a reminder, the device counts pulses from the…
This blog post is part of a series of posts: Part 1 : Introduction Part 2 : From prototypes to V1.0 Part 3 : Hardware design Part 4 : Software Part 5 : Integration with TTN, Node-RED and Home-Assistant Software The code is fully open source and available on my Codeberg account . The firmware is written in C, and mostly relies on two 3rd party libraries : LoRaMac-node and LittleFS. LoRaMac-node is…
This blog post is part of a series of posts: Part 1 : Introduction Part 2 : From prototypes to V1.0 Part 3 : Hardware design Part 4 : Software Part 5 : Integration with TTN, Node-RED and Home-Assistant Hardware design Important notice : I’m a software engineer, and I have very limited knowledge and experience in anything related to hardware design and electronics. I can read a datasheet and a…
This blog post is part of a series of posts: Part 1 : Introduction Part 2 : From prototypes to V1.0 Part 3 : Hardware design Part 4 : Software Part 5 : Integration with TTN, Node-RED and Home-Assistant As I previously said, I started this project more than 2 years ago. I obviously didn’t work on it full time since then, but I nevertheless tried many solutions to implement my idea. I’ll introduce…
This blog post is part of a series of posts: Part 1 : Introduction Part 2 : From prototypes to V1.0 Part 3 : Hardware design Part 4 : Software Part 5 : Integration with TTN, Node-RED and Home-Assistant Introduction My water consumption increased by a lot (+20%) in 2020-2021. Even if water isn’t the most expensive of my utility bills, I was still a bit concerned : maybe there’s leak in my…
In the previous article , I detailed all the steps I took to get started with the QuartzPro64, and I ended up with a Linux system running on kernel 6.1 ( this commit from neggles’ linux-quartz64 branch ). In this article, I would like to go into more details on the current status of the software in (nearly) mainline Linux. Note that things related to the RK3588 and the QuartzPro64 are moving…