Repurpose Post

I’ve modified my “electronics projects blog” to be just a day to day journal. Static sites are awesome and this amount has been up for more than a year for free so why not? I could possibly still blog about electronics projects although I’ve been busy with school lately.

What to expect now

I’m typing out thoughts, experiences, and things I want to study. I am a bit involved in the local San Diego Church of Christ and I don’t expect that to go away, so there are also religious Christian ideas up here.

How to manage it

Jekyll sets me up with a _posts folder for the posts. I just write out new posts in markdown format in that folder to start and save them with the date in yyyy-mm-dd- format.

The downside

I’ve lost my Linux setup for checking out posts with Jekyll before I push them onto github. Also github complains about my dependencies. Using newer versions of nokogiri and yajl-ruby cease the complaints. I have no idea what they do.

Laziness these days

I cheat on Windows and just use SourceTree instead of command lines.

How to blog on GitHub

I told myself to make this post three months ago

Jekyll sets me up with a _posts folder for the posts. I just write out new posts in markdown format in that folder to start and save them with the date in 2016-5-26- format.

Useful formatting Markdown for posts

Posts should start with layout and title in this format:

---
layout: post
title: How to blog on GitHub
---

Tips found here: Markdown Cheatsheet

That was just [text](url.com)

Adding a “!” in front makes an image.

Can upload with { {site.url} }/public/image.jpg without the spaces.

See? http://davidpottingerdesign.github.io

Look at it

I made a script for this already back in “Linux Shell Scripting 1”. And once that goes through, I can ctrl+c out and use the shell to put the post on GitHub.

And then put it on GitHub

This is the easy part, if I can remember the commands!

Start off with a git add .

Then proceed to git commit -m "message"

And then a git push origin master

And at this point I give my github username and password.

Piece of cake! Works for me. Wouldn’t script this though, too much input.

More ESP8266 and Screen

Screen skill

The one screen command that kept me from using it for everything was the one to disconnect

screen /dev/ttyUSB0 9600
screen -ls
screen -r 3200 -X kill

Where 3200 is the example reply from the -ls command.

Some more ESP8266

Lua comments are “–” (double hyphen), so I can use that in init.lua to save a bunch maybe.

It looks like other products connect over USB and have a GUI to ask for SSID and password. It’d be nice to be able to set those by commandline on startup.

Arduino?

Lots of example stuff using arduino. Sparkfun has its “Thing” but I’d like to try my cheaper one first.

Programs just fine with blinky. Only visible LED by default is on TX on GPIO2.

More to come.

First Time ESP8266

OK, here’s an actual weekend thing to do

Play with something well-understood, with lots of internet tutorials and free-opensource code for fun.

This tutorial from whomever CNX Software, among all the others on the internet, was particularly helpful to me.

I bought the LoLin NodeMCU v3, which may not be legitimate. Too big for a breadboard. Works, but others could be just as cheap.

Things to remember about it

I used the ESP8266 web service to get a firmware image and loaded it with esptool, not much trouble. The architecture with the real microcode separated from customization stuff in a lua file might really grow on me.

The main thing is that the lua on the ESP8266 needs to be kicked off with a “dofile(“main.lua”)” from serial, dunno why. Do all the setups do this?

Turn off the other serial connection when using some pyserial to load.

Other stuff

putty still acts like a windows program and doesn’t work so well with the console.

I’m a little worried that my router password is stored on my machine in a file now. Please don’t hack me.

I need to think of a real project for it.

Electronic Ink Display Test 1

Here’s the idea – a fun weekend project

I wanted to fool around with hardware for displays a little bit. A couple people made some projects with eink that looked really neat. See essentialscrap and spritesmods for those inspiring projects. They both use microcontrollers instead of FPGAs to drive their eink displays and it looked like the firmware for it wasn’t too complex. The SpritesMods one even had some oscilloscope images to go by.

So I thought I’d put together a fun KiCAD layout and write some firmware. Not a huge deal as I put together schematics for work sometimes and work closely with the layout guy. Boards can be had for kinda cheap these days, a 4 layer board of 10cm x 10cm was really overkill (and only 50$!). Of course I made mistakes, but nothing I couldn’t fix. They say Eagle is great because you get huge libraries of packages but I tend to comb through that stuff and I was glad to not have errors on that part this time. I tend to work with Microchip people and I haven’t used their PIC32 in a while, so I thought I’d try that, too. Add some RAM memory in case I could try some kind of animating and a microSD card slot to maybe store images and a LiPo battery charger and the +/- 20, 15 v stuff from a reference design for the display’s setup.

One of the reference projects connected his to the internet, but I was more interested in just bringing the thing to conferences or shows or meetups and showing off some project there.

It’s on github

I have the first iteration of the project here.

It looks like this right now:

Not working though

I’m having some trouble. It goes through one row nicely but then something is stuck and it displays that row continually. So for example, if I tried to make the top half of the display white and the bottom half black, then it would flash white briefly before going all dark. Been like this for a while now and I don’t get it based on what I’ve seen from the two example projects.

One says to drive CKV high for a short time to go to the next row, the other project says to pull it down to go on. I’m confused and frustrated at the mess. Maybe put more time into sorting it out later or see if anyone wants to help or explain.