Amateur radio and embedded systems
Raise your hand if you have ever used this flow: output some data from an embedded system to a terminal or a CSV file to analyze it later in a spreadsheet. Whether logging traffic latency over a bus, measuring system performance in a climate chamber, logging memory usage over a weekend, to checking GNSS time to first fix across several days. I did this flow sooo many times . I wondered if there is…
I had trouble getting reliable WiFi from my router to my main workstation. All 2.4 GHz channels are totally full in my location. The 5 Ghz connection seemed pretty okay but suffered from random dropouts lasting around 20 seconds. Most of the time I can tolerate low speed but it has to be reliable. I just can not tolerate total dropouts. I could not run new wires so I decided to try powerline…
Even though I don't consider myself a datahoarder and follow the 3-2-1 backup strategy I like to know that I can rely on my hard drives and replace them at the first hint of problems. Of course I learned this the hard way. 😁 All modern drives provide basic health data through SMART but you need to put some effort to read the attributes and figure out yourself if the drive is healthy or not. You…
Watching the file system for changes comes useful from time to time. For example: checking an FTP/SFTP/rsync directory for newly uploaded files from some external system, looking for new core dumps, and detecting new lines in an error log file. Other use cases might include waiting for a process (or pipeline) to complete its job and save the results to a file, or very crude web server hacking…
I wanted to deploy a network of Zigbee sensors in a remote location. The location had no "IT infrastructure" at all. The only connectivity available was LTE so I picked a modern router supported by OpenWRT - the Zyxel LTE3301-PLUS . My favorite Zigbee setup is Zigbee2MQTT and the Sonoff ZBDongle-P as it never caused me any trouble. There are various other Zigbee coordinators with Ethernet…