Terminal 28

Hail, people! Continuing on from last time, I had a little time to muck about with the IoT pHAT to try to get a general idea of how well it worked. What I did was to test out WiFi only, BT only, then WiFi + BT. I’ve described them as Tests 1, 2 and 3 respectively below. These tests were carried out on a Raspberry Pi Model B+ running the 2016-11-25 version of the Raspbian Jessie Lite distribution. Test 1 For the WiFi only test, I placed the pHAT on a B+ and edited the /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf file to (auto)connect to my home WiFi network. Did a reboot, and voila, the ‘raspberrypi’ entry showed up in the router’s DHCP table. I was able to login via SSH and transfer a few files using WinSCP. Overally it performed flawlessly here – the connection was rock solid and performed satisfactorily. I didn’t run any iperf tests though – this is because I don’t intend to use the pHAT for any applications where throughput is an issue anyway. But I don’t expect it to be (signific...

Howdy, folks. Hope everyone has been okay and has had a good week. Its Friday again! So my first proper post of 2017 is about the IoT pHAT from RedBearLab, which (if you can recall) I was supposed to review. Due to issues with the HAT firmware that was not possible for quite some time. In the early hours of January 12th, a firmware update was made available which purportedly fixed the issues. On testing it myself, I found this to be the case. So let’s talk about how to get up and running with it. Typically, you’d want to start at this page , but there’s alot of information in there, some of which (thus far) doesn’t seem necessary anymore, so I’m going to try to keep it as linear as I can. First off, you’ll need an IoT pHAT – not surprisingly. I backed their crowdfunding campaign, but you can now buy one on the RedBearLab store if you don’t already have one. You can get one of two versions – one with headers presoldered and one without headers presoldered. I chose the former version....

Hello! This post was supposed to be the promised "First Impressions" post for the IoT pHAT from RedBear we unboxed recently. Sadly, I will be holding that post off for a little while. Why, you ask? Basically, it comes down to the current setup process. Apparently there are certain issues with the Pi's firmware which are to be fixed in the next release. While the pHAT is currently usable, I know whatever process I'd describe will soon become redundant so I'm holding off for the next Raspbian release (should be out really soon) to do everything all at once. In the meantime, I recently got my hands on an Intel Edison Kit for Arduino, so I should post some stuff about that really soon. Perhaps even do a First Impressions post about that instead? ;-)

Hello! Been a while – I hope the winds of fortune have been blowing favorably in your various directions. Been rather busy with work myself, so I apologize for the long silence. As a reparation, today will be my first ever unboxing post! In my never-ending search for cheap yet functional stuff, A few months ago I began following a certain project on Hackaday.io , which combined two of my favorite things at the time – the ESP8266 WiSoc and the Raspberry Pi (Zero). Essentially, the project was exploring a means of using the ESP8266 as a WiFi peripheral for the Pi with full OS support – so theoretically you’d hook up the ESP8266 (specifically the ESP07/12 models as I recall), load up whatever kernel module was needed, and you’d get a wlan0 device which you could use to do awesome. At the end, it ended up working and the board designs and everything needed are up there on Hackaday.io. However that guy ended up with a ~$20 board, which is like 4x the cost of a Pi Zero. Shortly after that,...