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CHIP Pro

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Re: CHIP Pro

#71

Post by rxseger »

IgorPartola wrote: post #33
platz wrote: post #22

I have the chip, esp8266, rpi, teensies, trinkets, arduinos... I studied electronics principles and built various circuits.. yet I have no idea what I can practically use these devices for in my life. They all sit in a box and I have a hard time justifying buying more of them.

Raspberry Pis and CHIPs: good for a home automation hub of sorts or a thing where you want a portable computer capable of working with video, audio, or large volumes of data. Arduino et al: need to have buttons do more complicated things than buttons can actually do: slowly change light colors, actuate things, CNC, etc. ESP8266: sensors and remote controls for switches and such. Anything Arduino does above, except th…

+1 for using Raspberry Pi for home automation.

I'm just getting into electronics but have found the Pi indispensable for this purpose: without much effort, I now have Pi Zero running Homebridge with plugins and hardware to control an AC power outlet switch, ambient temperature and humidity sensors, three contact sensors, and another Raspberry Pi 3 also running Homebridge with a light sensor, fan speed controller (PWM) / tachometer, motion detector, and camera.

What's great about the Raspberry Pi is it is a complete computer system, so it can run the Homebridge stack (Node.js, mDNS, etc.) for bridging your custom home automation devices (via GPIO) to the rest of your IoT system (I wrote up my experiences here if anyone is interested: https://medium.com/@rxseger/home-automation-with-raspberry-p... Home automation with Raspberry Pi + Homebridge).

However, having a full OS is probably overkill for most home automation sensors/devices, I'm looking into getting an ESP8266 or other low-power wireless microcontroller next as I continue to build out my automation to other parts of the home. An ESP8266 may be better than e.g. a Pi Zero for many of these use cases, having built-in Wi-Fi support versus an add-on USB Wi-Fi adapter. I also want to put an MSP430 to work on home automation, but need to figure out the wireless story. Instead of a heavyweight Wi-Fi stack, probably a lightweight low-data rate protocol on an unlicensed sub-1 GHz or ISM band, bridging the slower RF connection to the rest of your Wi-Fi or Ethernet network (ala ZigBee/802.15.4 and the Philips Hue bridge).

The Wemos D1 Mini (~$5) looks really nice for an ESP8266 board. I went with a NodeMcu on Aliexpress (~$3), hopefully it works well once it arrives, but at these prices not much to lose, and you can buy many for multiple projects: a computer in every room?! Exciting times, more and more companies are developing expensive home automation products to build an ultimate "smart home", but with the explosion of inexpensive single-board computers/microcontrollers for electronics hobbyists there has never been a better time to get into DIY home automation.

Re: CHIP Pro

#72

Post by iamflimflam1 »

platz wrote: post #22

I have the chip, esp8266, rpi, teensies, trinkets, arduinos... I studied electronics principles and built various circuits.. yet I have no idea what I can practically use these devices for in my life. They all sit in a box and I have a hard time justifying buying more of them.

I'm using my Pi to run pihole - https://pi-hole.net/

Re: CHIP Pro

#73

Post by cgrf »

erickhill wrote: post #56
platz wrote: post #22

I have the chip, esp8266, rpi, teensies, trinkets, arduinos... I studied electronics principles and built various circuits.. yet I have no idea what I can practically use these devices for in my life. They all sit in a box and I have a hard time justifying buying more of them.

I recently bought a Wifi Modem for my Commodore 64 that is based off the Arduinos board. OK, that sounds embarrassing when I say it, but I do value it nevertheless. It allows me to connect to some BBSes (!) where like-minded crazy people like me can hang. I think it all has to do with the creativity and/or niche (in my case, a passionate hobby) designers like you can fill.

Awesome! What is it called and where did you get it?

Re: CHIP Pro

#74

Post by biot »

inlined wrote: post #41
stop1234 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean like going to the super market without having a shopping list, buying everything that attracts your attention which all goes out of date in your fridge because you forgot you had all that food and not having any time to plan your house hold duties?

I think that's overly harsh. It's closer to wanting to learn how to make cocktails, taking advice from a friend on how to stock a basic bar, but not really feeling comfortable enough with the domain to experiment beyond fixed recipes.

Not harsh; it's little different than having a stack of books you bought with great intentions but never got around to reading them.

Re: CHIP Pro

#75

Post by aquarin »

gbajson wrote: post #53

Considering the fact that they missed delivery date of the previous one by at least 150% (I am still waiting) announcing new one with "Available Dec 2016" sounds like tasteless joke.

My CHIP still not delivered. They re-scheduled 3 times the delivery. The last was 3 Oct. Today I received the "happy" news this will be shipped at the beginning of Nov. The initial shipment was June when I ordered in March.

Re: CHIP Pro

#78

Post by countingteeth »

wyager wrote: post #47
Animats wrote: post #40

Great hardware, but do you really want to run a full Linux system on low-end IoT devices? That's what made the recent massive DDOS attack possible - lots of little machines with way too much network-side functionality. Linux just has too much attack surface.

Agreed. Bare metal programming is vastly preferable for many, if not most, realistic embedded applications. I hope they have a convenient gcc-arm-none-eabi setup available. It's not just about security; it's also a lot more work to do hard realtime systems with any sort of OS, even an RTOS. We're even starting to see a bit of this on the high-level non-embedded side of things; projects like HaLVM and Mirage OS allow…

No. It would be more accurate to say that is is a lot more work to reimplement a hard realtime embedded RTOS from scratch, when you have a nontrivial application that needs features like tasking, synchronization, IPC, memory virtualization etc.

That is probably not Linux, but going bare target every time you have a new application and platform with hard realtime requirements would be a huge mistake.

> you use standard library abstractions to get features that you would normally get from the OS

They don't come ex nihilo. There are a lot of "standard library" APIs that are dependent on what would ordinarily be called an OS.

> Then, if you want to run a bunch of these things, you run them in efficient hypervisor systems like Xen.

This is often, if not usually, the wrong level of abstract for either application architecture or efficient resource usage.

Re: CHIP Pro

#79

Post by RBerenguel »

aquarin wrote: post #75
gbajson wrote: post #53

Considering the fact that they missed delivery date of the previous one by at least 150% (I am still waiting) announcing new one with "Available Dec 2016" sounds like tasteless joke.

My CHIP still not delivered. They re-scheduled 3 times the delivery. The last was 3 Oct. Today I received the "happy" news this will be shipped at the beginning of Nov. The initial shipment was June when I ordered in March.

I ordered a TextBlade (small-form factor bluetooth keyboard with pretty nifty technology) on March 2015 for delivery on June 2015 (not a Kickstarter, mind you) and I'm still waiting (actually all purchasers are, except for a beta testing group).

Re: CHIP Pro

#80

Post by countingteeth »

Jasper_ wrote: post #3
stuartaxelowen wrote: post #2

What's with the "no NDA required"? Who requires NDAs for their datasheets?

Every chip vendor I've dealt with, from Amlogic to Allwinner to Freescale, requires a signed NDA for full documentation. Public documentation is usually heavily redacted. The GR8 seems to be a rebadged Allwinner chip, and the no-NDA datasheet seems to be next to useless, to be honest.

What do you mean by "full documentation" and "NDA"?

Go to NXP.com, sign up for an online account, and you can download full reference manuals for most of their products. They may hold errata and more low-level/non-user documentation closer to the chest, if your sign-up data is obviously fake or appears to be North Korean your account may not be activated, but it's not the case that you need to have an NDA signed in blood to get manuals.

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