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CHIP Pro

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Re: CHIP Pro

#191
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.

Thank you for that.

I posted a reply on an online forum earlier today where I said that 90% of Arduinos, etc. are sitting in someone's desk drawer gathering dust and the other 10% are doing some very trivial task. Then I felt I was being too negative, so I deleted the post.

At least now I feel somewhat vindicated :-)

Re: CHIP Pro

#192
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.

Write a driver to offload interrupt processing of your Ethernet stack or something like that to them. Let's you get more done. Alternatively, the monitor the health or security status of your system with recovery option.

Re: CHIP Pro

#193
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 have 4 RPi's, a couple of BeagleBone Blacks, numerous Arduino and Teensy boards. Disclosure: This stuff happens to be my hobby and profession, and I have extensive experience with embedded systems and microprocessor based electronics design. The smaller boards have been infinitely useful to me. I do a lot of development, using Teensy boards to create peripherals that I can connect via USB to either a PC or a RPi. T…

Yes, small boards are great as GPIOs for PCs.

Another way is to use the FTDI chip directly: http://dangerousprototypes.com/docs/FT2232_breakout_board You can twiddle bits (including SPI and I2C) using their D2XX library.

But you are better off to get one of these: http://www.latticesemi.com/en/Products/DevelopmentBoardsAndK...

You get the FTDI chip plus an FPGA thrown in for free.

Re: CHIP Pro

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its not Linux that was being attacked, it was the apps that were running. From https://blog.cloudflare.com/say-cheese-a-snapshot-of-the-mas... > While it's not possible for us to investigate all the attacking devices, it is fair to say that these attacks came from Internet-of-Things (IoT) category of devices. > There are multiple hints confirming this theory. First, all of the attacking devices have port 23 (telnet)…

Exactly. The best-selling home IP camera on Amazon [1], from a Chinese company, has the following "features": - Default Wifi setup is done through their phone app through the "cloud" (let me tell you how much I trust that one) - Has a webserver listening on port 80 with default u:p admin:admin (to be fair, their instructions are clear that you should change it, but it's not a mandatory part of the setup process) - Ha…

> All of this a disaster waiting to happen because of UPnP (ugh, how many home routers have this enabled...)

The problem is shitty UPnP implementations rather than UPnP itself. If you're pwned you are fucked one way or another, if an online device is vulnerable it's going to be vulnerable wether it exposes itself through UPnP or if it's manually forwarded.

And in the end if you don't like it and want to do your own manual forwarding in a home router, you're free to disable it.

Re: CHIP Pro

#195
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 standar…

There are intermediate steps between bare metal and Linux, and they're widely used in the embedded world. See Wikipedia for a long list.

I just noticed that there's now CapROS for ARM.[1] This is a capability-based secure operating system for small machines. It's a successor to EROS and KeyCOS, which had a good track record for security and reliability. Unfortunately, there's very little documentation. Somebody could bring that up to usability for ARM embedded devices and make money selling support to IoT companies.

[1] http://www.capros.org/

Re: CHIP Pro

#196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have 4 RPi's, a couple of BeagleBone Blacks, numerous Arduino and Teensy boards. Disclosure: This stuff happens to be my hobby and profession, and I have extensive experience with embedded systems and microprocessor based electronics design. The smaller boards have been infinitely useful to me. I do a lot of development, using Teensy boards to create peripherals that I can connect via USB to either a PC or a RPi. T…

Yes, small boards are great as GPIOs for PCs. Another way is to use the FTDI chip directly: http://dangerousprototypes.com/docs/FT2232_breakout_board You can twiddle bits (including SPI and I2C) using their D2XX library. But you are better off to get one of these: http://www.latticesemi.com/en/Products/DevelopmentBoardsAndK... You get the FTDI chip plus an FPGA thrown in for free.

But you are better off to get one of these: http://www.latticesemi.com/en/Products/DevelopmentBoardsAndK....

That looks like fun. I haven't played with a FPGA yet. My preference for using a microcontroller, as opposed to bit banging the FTDI, is that the MCU runs in real time and has peripherals such as SPI, timers, etc. Right now my favorite board du jour is the Teensy 3.2, though I just got a 3.6 to try out.

Re: CHIP Pro

#197
post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I made a similar thing, and I chose wifi because the garage was simply too far for wires. It's a simple build with a relay over wifi.

Why would you use wifi rather than radio? encryption?

Yes, and reliability. TCP gives you a lot of nice things.

Re: CHIP Pro

#198
post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I made a similar thing, and I chose wifi because the garage was simply too far for wires. It's a simple build with a relay over wifi.

Why would you use wifi rather than radio? encryption?

For me: because it requires the least amount of hardware and also works with Amazon Echo for voice control. With a different type of radio, if you still need it on the internet, you have to somehow bridge it, which means more hardware.

Re: CHIP Pro

#199
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.

Here's how it works:

No wifi? Limited use (but still useful!). Make yourself a cool flashlight or something.

Wifi? The possibilities are limitless! They're basically tiny servers.

Even if it doesn't run Linux little wifi devices are loads of fun for making stuff like this:

https://youtu.be/Aakw0DQF6go

Re: CHIP Pro

#200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "I wish there was something ESP8266 like with Ethernet" Perhaps you'll find this useful: http://hackaday.com/2016/04/01/ethernet-controller-discovere...

You can also do real Ethernet with a teensy: https://www.pjrc.com/teensy/td_libs_Ethernet.html

Thanks for that, I like the compactness of the Teensy solution. If we're going with shields it's probably worth mentioning that the Arduino also has one:

https://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/ArduinoEthernetShield

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