I’ve been playing with the rewritten RF24 and RF24Network librariy forks and am impressed. The RF24Network library is a much more reliable way of using multiple nodes than just using the same channel/pipe and hoping you won’t get timing conflicts with RF24 e.g. I’d find the data from 2 nodes would merge! Also hardware SPI finally works on the Raspberry Pi.

I’ve updated my weather station scripts, I now have the RPi as the master receiving node0 (with a new 17dBm antenna!); the MOSFET-based Arduino as node1 in the shed, but with the BMP085 pressure/altitude disabled as it was returning absolute rubbish, I think its a hardware issue and not the Adafruit lib; and the older non-MOSFET Arduino as node2 in my office, just reporting its DS18B20 readings in an attempt to prolong battery life – I’ve desoldered the DHT11/BMP085 to see if that helps.

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 Most of the howto’s are out-of-date or assume if you’re using cryptsetup you’re using LVM or use GParted which doesn’t handle LUKS, or assumes you’re using ext4 not BTRFS.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.

1. Resize the VirtualBox VDI file to 40Gb:

VBoxManage modifyhd oracle62.vdi --resize 40000

2. Boot into a Fedora20 LiveCD:

fdisk /dev/sda
delete partition 2 (d)
create new partition 2 (n)
write & quit (w)
reboot

3. When booted back into your VM, resize the BTRFS filesystem to fill you newly grown partition:

btrfs filesystem resize max /
btrfs filesystem defragment /

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: