Postings on electronics and other things
Recentely my electricity and gas meters were replaced with smart meters. I already had an energy monitoring system in place (originaly a openenergymonitor system but later modified to put data into grafana rather than their emoncms software). But with the new meters installed I wondered if their smart functionality would allow me to gather any… Read More »
This blog post has been written in collaboration with Mohit Gupta whose blog covers cybersecurity and other random technical things. For our home labs, we have a number of internal systems shared between the two of us including a number of web services. Originally, these were accessed over plaintext HTTP connections, or bypassing any certificate… Read More »
This is part two of a two part writeup on building POE (power over ethernet) devices. This part gathers together the information I discovered when going through this process with the aim to be a useful starting point for others looking to add POE functionality to a device. The previous part covered the design and… Read More »
This is part one of a two part writeup on building POE (power over ethernet) devices. This section covers the design and build of the project, a network controlled stack light, and part two will go into more detail on how to add POE functionality to a device. The idea for the project came when… Read More »
Reports are coming in that a fixed version of the raspberry pi 4 in the 4GB version has started to come through via distributors and this has been confirmed by the raspberry pi foundation. While some people have encountered this version as far back as november they are now becoming more comonplace. The new version… Read More »
Over the last few years I have been volunteering at a couple of autonomous robotics competitions for sixthform students. One called student robotics which runs over six months and a one week spinoff summer school called sourcebots. In these events the student teams design and build a fully autonomous robot to compete in a game,… Read More »
Since my previous post on they issues with the pi I have been doing some more experimenting with the USB-C port on the pi as a Linux gadget interface. As the pi4 has both host and client USB simultaneously (unlike previous versions) it makes it much easier alter the gadget code between tests. In doing… Read More »
The new pi has been released and it has a USB Type-C connector for power however people are finding some chargers are not working with it (notably macbook chargers). Some have speculated that this is due to a manufacturer limitation on the power supplies however it is actually due to the incorrect detection circuitry on… Read More »
When making custom electronics, producing a quality enclosure for the boards can make any project look more professional. There are a large range of enclosures which use end panels, such as the Hammond 1593 series, which can be replaced by custom panels fabricated using standard PCB production techniques. The result is a good looking enclosure… Read More »
The new Type-C USB connector is the latest addition to the USB connector standards. It offers reversible plugs, direction independent cables, USB3.1 speeds, and 3A charging in a connector only a little bigger than the USB 2.0 MicroB connector. In order to add these capabilities the plugs and connectors have additional configuration pins to allow… Read More »