Been a while since I did some shopping and year end is approaching, why give it all to the taxman? So I’m purchasing some more nRF24L01+ kit, I’m going to make a bunch of RF24Network devices to dot around – some inside with 5v mains power and new temperature sensors and some outside with larger antenna’s. I was going to buy some SI24R01’s which are supposed to be more powerful Taiwanese ripoffs of the nRF24L01+, but I couldn’t get the pricepoint.

My OEL6 VM ran out of disk space in its root filesystem, so I had to resize the disk. Most of the howto’s are out-of-date or assume if you’re using cryptsetup you’re using LVM or use GParted which doesn’t handle LUKS, or assumes you’re using ext4 not BTRFS. Actually it was pretty easy once you ignore all of those incorrect tutorials. Resize the VirtualBox VDI file to 40Gb: VBoxManage modifyhd oracle62.

I wasted a lot of yesterday playing with my new SparkFun Pro Micro development boards. I ordered some to try to debug all the issues reported to Arduino-Makefile regarding resetting ATmega32u4 boards (e.g. Arduino Leonardo): Upload to Arduino Micro from Raspberry Pi failed with ‘programmer is not responding Makefile does not detect change in com port when Leonardo is resetted Reset of Leonardo boards So the fix I’m currently suggesting is going back to using Python for the reset script like we did before with ard-reset-leonardo, but merging in the functionality of ard-reset-arduino so we still have on script to reset “regular” Arduino’s using DTR twiddling and 32u4’s using the 1200baud open/close routine.

I ordered a 5m strip of 5050 RGB analog LED’s – not the digital individually addressable ones, just the ones that the whole strip changes at once. So I’ve combined my ATtiny85 plus ULN2803 project with my RGB LED project and came up with a tiny LED driver. Essentially we have a 12V power supply that is tapped off into a 7805 to provide 5V to the ATtiny85 and ULN2803, and the raw 12V powers the LED strip:

I’ve redesigned my Arduino weather station to incorporate a P-channel MOSFET to switch power to the peripherals on and off to hopefully save battery life. The ATmega328P always gets 3.3v, but then uses Sleepy() to conserve power anyway, but the DHT11, BMP085, DS18B20 and nRF24L01+ get powered off when not in use. Oddly enough the voltage seems to drop to 0.7v rather than 0v completely, but I guess no current flows.