Do you have some old laptops sitting around that aren't quite good enough to run a full desktop? Do you also have a good enough PC that could run some virtualisation platform? Then there is hope yet!
As I am writing this article I am using a rather old laptop with an Intel Atom with 2GB of RAM and everything is running pretty smoothly.
I have just renewed my home server running ESXi 6 on which I have installed Windows 7 in a VM. I then acquired 5 free VNC licences of RealVNC and installed a VNC server on the Windows box.
The laptop runs a light version of Linux, in my case Elementary.
I have set the resolution of the Windows box to match the one of my laptop and simply run VNC viewer from my laptop to the Windows box in full screen.
The result is actually quite good!
There are enterprise level protocols that can serve the purpose in a much better way; smoother video refresh, better compression, multimedia support but for most of what I do VNC is absolutely fine.
I have no audio support, the videos are not very fluid but in general the experience is very good.
Also my session always stays there where I left it which is a good bonus because I can take that same session from pretty much any device I have in the house including my tablet.
Once you have one desktop floating in the house nobody will stop me from having two three more, no need for a beefy laptop, no need for dual boot, simply switch your session!
As I am writing about the upgrade process of my ESXi server in a bit more detail I will also go through what I did to setup the Desktop Virtualisation (strictly speaking this is not VDI in fact) so stay tuned!
During the Black Friday and Cyber Monday I got hold of a few good deals from a few shops, one that I was particularly curious about was Ryanteck and I bought a couple of items which I have reviewed, build and tested in the videos below.
I really had fun with the Motor Controller and found the USB Charger Doctor to be a really useful tool.
Being able to connect to a server somewhere out in the wild or in the neighbourhood of your local network is certainly something that has been going on for decades.
The most common activities that one would want to perform on a remote server are:
Issue commands
Transfer files
Commands needs User Interfaces which can either be:
Text based aka terminals
Graphical User Interface aka GUI
All of this have to be complimented with a number of protocols that allow the act of remoting from a client to a server.
Let's see what happens in the most frequent cases.
SSH
Issuing commands to a remote server is mostly done by using the SSH protocol. The Raspbian OS comes with an SSH server enabled by default so all we need to do is to get the right client for the platform from which we want to connect from.
On Windows the best know is PuTTY which in its basic incarnation looks like this
and it is an incredibly great tool to issue commands in a very versatile terminal window.
Somebody else built on top of PuTTY and tried to get to grips with the clatter caused by the need of having to deal with many sessions all opened at once.
The tool is MTPuTTY which is what it says on the tin: Multi-Tabbed PuTTY !
Fantastic, but if you are really hard core and you live in an era where virtual machines had not been invented, you can still use the never ageing Cygwin (although you might actually have good reasons to use it in favour of a VM)
SFTP and SCP
Of course one of the most important things to do on an operating system which revolves all around files is to be able to move them back and forth, around and about via SFTP or SCP whenever this last one might be preferred.
SFTP on Raspbian come as part of the SSH server and also in this case there is nothing to be done on the Pi.
My favourite tools are Filezilla and WinSCP although the humble PSFTP installed with PuTTY can still do a great job if nothing else is available.
A great thing of WinSCP is that it will be able to import all your PuTTY sessions as you install it and it supports SCP along with SFTP. In many instances I have seen people preferring WinSCP to Filezilla.
Filezilla though has my preference as it still supports FTP which is still somewhat handy for the likes of uploading content to websites.
There is of course more to see and discuss about these two great clients but it is time to move on to the next set of tools.
VNC
Text based terminals are great but we live in an extremely visual world and Graphical User Interfaces are preferred by many with good cause. One of the obvious desires then is to be able to interact directly with the Raspbian desktop and this can be achieved using some form of Virtual Network Computing based software.
There are quite a few incarnations of VNC servers and clients and although Rasbian doesn't come with a specific one the Raspberry Pi foundation seems to point to TightVNC which can be installed fairly easily following their simple guide.
As for the client side ... well there are quite a few but I use RealVNC which covers quite a few platforms and does the job excellently. Remember that your display will be display 1 and that to indicate to the VNC client that you are not connecting to the default screen 0 you will have to write <IP Address>:1 e.g. 10.42.0.53:1
X and the rest
If you feel more adventurous you can try the ways of the X server. The X Window System is based on the X11 protocol and has been on the scene for many years.
The advantage of this approach is the possibility to run programs that need a graphical interface from you terminal session. If for example you would need to quickly run the Pi's browser whilst working via PuTTY, you can simply invoke epiphany and an X windows displaying the browser will come up on your screen.
Counterintuitively the X server will have to be installed on your "from" location.
I have always used Xming as it installs really easily and integrates perfectly with PuTTY.
Just remember to enable X forwarding in your PuTTY session before connecting.
As you run Xming nothing will seem to happen but the program's icon will be displayed in the notification area.
Running a command from PuTTY that will open up in X will result in an X icon being shown in your taskbar and that is for all matters and purposes a window within your client system.
Of course the best way to go to a Linux box is with a Linux box and this can be achieved in a number of ways. All of the above can be done from an Ubuntu machine whether it is your default operating system or you are running an instance as a virtual machine of your Windows host. The software to use will be rather different for the majority but the mechanisms described are the same.
One strange beast to mention in this realm is Cygwin which, as they say on its website, "is a large collection of GNU and Open Source tools which provide functionality similar to a Linux distribution on Windows"
and that in fact will allow to work on your Windows box in a "Linuxy" way. One thing we could obviously do is to connect to a Pi from a Cygwin terminal. We can type in xinit and the following whitish window will pop up to indicate that an X server is available! Fantastic
Let's type in a few lines to connect to our Pi and in my case the command is:
ssh -X pi@10.42.0.53
This means that I am using the SSH client in Cygwin on which I am enabling X forwarding (-X) to my Cygwin X server and connect as the user pi to 10.42.0.53
Once I give the password I am in my Pi as shown by the green prompt. From there I can launch lxtask and get my graphical task manager displayed via Cygwin. Isn't that the most useless thing? :)
Jokes apart though this shows probably one of the many coolest ways to connect to a remote Linux box and it is as close as native Linux as you can get on a Windows computer.
That's all folks
These tools covered most of the use cases that you will ever encounter but bare in mind that what I have listed here are only some of the tools that are available. Also the majority of what I described applies only to Windows. There is of course much more, there is also Apple stuff and one and a million way to do things in Linux.
Note that some of these softwares are also distributed as executable instead of full install. This is great when you want to carry your tools around on a USB key or when the administrators of the systems on which you need to work aren't too lenient on you installing new software. So when downloading check which type you are getting hold of.
Mostly if you can spare some money for those projects that accept donations you can play an important role in promoting what's good out there, right?
This closes "all the tools you'll ever need to remote into your Pi".
Have fun
In this video playlist I am going through the steps needed to connect remotely to a Raspberry Pi terminal session.
In a nutshell the videos will show the following:
You bought yourself a shiny new Raspberry Pi, maybe the brand new Pi Zero and now you are really fidgety about doing something exciting with it but ... there are a few things that need to be done first.
I have provided three complementary videos that you can watch to go through the entire process or if you prefer you can go through the following brief instructions
This is in a nutshell what needs to happen:
Get an SD card
Format the SD card
Transfer NOOOBS onto the card
Boot your Raspberry Pi with NOOBS
Select and install the Operating System
The first thing you need to do is to get yourself an SD card with a suitable Operating System installed on it so that the Raspberry Pi can run all the basic software that is needed for it to do anything.
At this point NOOBS is your friend!
NOOBS is a piece of software that will help you installing the Operating System onto the SD card.
This can go either of two ways:
Buy a card with a preloaded NOOBS on it
Reuse one you already own and prepare it with NOOBS yourself.
The preferred Operating System for the Pi is Raspbian and its latest incarnation is called Jessie. The names of the versions of this OS are coming from Toys Story, the previous one in fact was called Wheezy!
Now Wheezy's character was a bit chubby and Jessie's was quite slim in the cartoon but despite this you will need a bigger SD card to store Jessie than you would have with Wheezy as the OS Jessie is a bit bigger than its predecessor. With this in mind make sure you use at least an 8 GB SD card for your Pi.
Follow this section only if you are reusing you card
If you are going to reuse your card you have to first format it or in other words prepare it to be able to transfer NOOBS onto it, to do so you can use a software called SDFormatter. It is a really easy install to perform and you can use the videos provided if in doubt.
Make sure to backup the contents of your SD card before proceeding as the tool will delete all files in it
Select the right drive letter corresponding to your SD card and click on Format. You will have to accept a couple of alert messages and you card will be ready shortly after.
Once the card is formatted you will need to transfer NOOBS on it. First of all let's get hold of NOOBS.
Once downloaded (it will take a while) it will have to be unpacked in a temporary folder of your choice.
With the content unpacked you will now have to select all the files and copy/paste them onto the SD card you have just formatted (that also will take a while).
The card is now ready to be ejected from the card reader and plugged into the Raspberry Pi.
Whether you have used your own card or purchased one with NOOBS pre-installed this is what needs to happen next
Make all the necessary connections to the video, the network, the mouse and keyboard and finally plug the power supply in.
After a short while you should lend onto this page
Select install near to Raspbian and ... after a while and a few rather useful information displayed during the installation, the process will terminate and prompt you for restarting into Rasbpian for the very first time.
Great! You made it, your Raspberry Pi is now ready for many adventures to come
Here are the embedded videos mentioned above
HW preparations to get started
Prepare the SD card, get hold of Noobs and transfer it onto the card
I have been very surprised time and time again every time I would go to the recycling centre by the amount of good quality things that get thrown away on a regular basis. Each time I would visit to dump I have always find time to have a peek at the electric and electronic appliances skip.
It is a win!, win^2! loose?
It is a win for me as I get something for free.
It is a double win for the environment as the item doesn't need to be created again just for me and doesn't need to be destroyed. Destroying is the counterpart of creating and it is the counterpart of the costs that are not quite taken into account when giving a value to an item as it hits the market. Destroying or in the best case recycling costs money in the act of collecting and transforming our "garbage" and worse of it all, leaves a heritage to the future generations that will have to find a way to deal with it, most probably with additional costs.
It is a loose for industry maybe. Well industry needs to modernise itself and find a different way to survive, why not re-purposing items and reselling them?
Rant apart, here is the video of what I found at the recycling centre and the hurdles I had to overcome to get my bounty.
Every Tuesday morning a volunteer helps the local charity shop to PAT test all electrical donations. On Tuesday afternoon I would be visiting the shop to see what goodies has the generous community given away.
In October I found a nice Kensignton laptop stand which came connected to a WiFi USB card from Netgear.
In the video below I went through this £5 purchase to see what could be salvaged and what could be chucked away.
A pinch of pygame, a hint of scapy and the Halloween concoction is ready!
This year's automated scarer was a bit more challenging than last. I stitched this together in a couple of days and ... it worked mostly as I wanted it to be. The most important thing is that children and parents enjoyed being scared by a few monstrous pumpkins and a bunch of my son's very horrific (but beautifully made) drawings.
Raspberry thirsty Vampire
Scary Witch of the South East
I wanted the animation to be easy to be activated and yes, I could have used other methods to detect people to be scared (which from now on I will refer to as scarables: a person suitable for the scarer) but I was curious about scapy and the possibility of detecting mobiles passing by.
I also found quite interesting digging through the enormous amount of information available on pygame which served perfectly the purpose of displaying the pictures and playing the sounds all of this without needing to drop into X leaving ample resources available on my RPi B It is also entertaining to lookup the MAC addresses I collected to establish if we live in a posh area or not. The amount of Apple devices wasn't so many in the end, I will consider selling and buy elsewhere. Ah and don't worry, the MACs I collected will be handed over to TalkTalk for safe keeping.
The Python script revolves mainly around the scapy command sniff which I used to search any broadcasting WiFi device within reach of my dongle.
The first thing to do is to setup the WiFi card into monitor mode which is done outside of python on the shell:
#/usr/bin sh
sudo service ifplugd stop
sudo ifconfig wlan0 down
sudo iwconfig wlan0 mode monitor
sudo ifconfig wlan0 up
sudo service ifplugd start
You can verify things are set properly by issuing iwconfig, this is my output:
Within scapy's lamda function we need to create a list to hold the MAC addresses that we'll acquire. Around the area where I live there are normally quite a few Access Points and other WiFi devices. The first thing to do then is to store all these MACs on a file so that they will not trigger any false "scares" each time that the Pi starts. I did this by running the script in "silent mode" for a couple of hours. I had created in this way a WiFi fingerprint of the area which I stored on a file that gets read at the start of the script and pre-loads all the MACs in the neighbourhood.
if path.isfile(fileName):
with open(fileName, 'rb') as MAC_file:
MAC_list = pickle.load(MAC_file)
for the serialisation I am using pickle which for the purpose works just fine
From here on any new MAC detected is a potential scarable,
Scapy offers a sniff command that can take as arguments an interface and a function amongst other options.
The store=0 turned out to be vitally important as it tells the sniff command to just monitor the packets and not store them in memory. I learned this the hard way as I the Pi stopped responding all together as its memory got full.
I have obviously specified to monitor packets on wlan0 and given a PacketHandler function which I use to specify what I am interested in about the packets seen by wlan0
def PacketHandler(pkt):
if pkt.haslayer(Dot11):
if pkt.type == 0:
if pkt.addr2 not in MAC_list:
MAC_list.append(pkt.addr2)
with open(fileName, 'wb') as MAC_file:
pickle.dump(MAC_list, MAC_file)
Call the Scare function
the layer I am interested in is Dot11 as in 802.11x and the packet type is 0 as in management. If the MAC is not in my list I will add it and write the list on a file.
The other very important thing that I do in the last if block is that I will start the animation for each new MAC added to the list.
Now, this could have done it in a number of ways, I wanted to explore the pygame events, I wanted to use two threads on for WiFi scanning the other for the animation, in the end at 16:30 of the 31st of November I decided to call a function directly after writing the list to a file.
The Scare function receives a random image and a random sound from two preloaded lists. I paste the PrepareImages only as the PrepareSounds is essentially the same
All .wav and .png files where in the same path as the script.
Everywhere I looked for examples of pygame.image.load I found that it is highly recommended to convert the images to improve performance. I certainly noted an improvement
The Scare function looks like this
def Scare(image, sound, screenSize):
image = pygame.transform.scale(image, screenSize)
frame = image.get_rect()
white = (255, 255, 255)
black = (0, 0, 0)
screen = pygame.display.set_mode(screenSize)
playing = sound.play()
while playing.get_busy():
screen.fill(white)
screen.blit(image, frame)
pygame.display.flip()
pygame.time.delay(1000)
screen.fill((black))
pygame.display.flip()
it will resize the picture (sometimes deforming it as the source did not have the same proportions of the screenSize I selected), set the screen, play the sound.
Whilst playing the sound the picture would be displayed (blit) and a 1 second delay also added to get the shivers deep in the scarable's spine.
After the sound is played the screen turns black again.
How would you like to transform your sluggish desktop based hypervisor into a super fast server based one?
Well in fact maybe I have exaggerated a tiny bit, you are not going to transform a desktop PC into a blade server but ... the end result is pretty neat considering that for the majority is free and fairly easy to achieve.
I have had for quite a while a PC at home continually powered on and running a bunch of virtual machines. The hardware is nothing spectacular:
The biggest trouble I had with my system was that it ran Window 7 Home edition and Oracle VirtualBox for the virtualisation platform. Don't get me wrong, VirtualBox is great, the trouble though is having a full blown OS like Windows underneath which needs updating, chews a lot of RAM on its own, gets all sorts of security issues, etc. One can use Linux I guess to get less of a footprint and it works better as a server in many ways but the bulk of the problem pretty much stays.
If you have ever used VMware ESXi I really don't need to sell this to you, it is designed to be a great hypervisor and many will consider it simply the best.
So I had this idea brewing for quite a while to see whether I could install the standalone version of ESXi onto my PC, take all my VMs and convert them to VMware. Turns out that last week I managed to just that!
Creating the ESXi image
The first problem to solve was to get an image that will work with the hardware I had. For most of what I have done below I followed the instructions on this blog.
Download the ESXi customiser to inject the drivers in the base image
As an optional step I also wanted to use a USB key to perform the installation instead of a CD. The utility is called Rufus and can be downloaded here. This site also explain quite well how to use the utility.
With all of the above done I then had a USB key with a customised imaged for my bare metal hypervisor"to be.
After setting the BIOS to boot from the USB key I just followed the rather easy installation process for ESXi. The last step of it is to setup the management network which will then give you access from the vSphere client which can be found here
That was it for the installation, I might go through the configuration in a further post. The only problem I am having so far is to do with the chassis fan which is currently running at max speed as I guess the ACPI drivers aren't compatible with the mainboard. I will buy a quite fan to replace mine with.
In the next post I will go through how to convert and move the VMs from my VirtualBox to my new shiny hypervisor.
And so this is the scarer in a box, all finished and connected up ready to spring into action
by either using the QR code or send an SMS to my Nokia 7250i the Python code will parse the incoming SMS. If the message says "scare" it will tell the PIC to scream. The PIC will be scared via its serial port and will then activate the motor back and forth a few times
Once installed in place the motor is linked to four fishing lines two are wound clockwise and two counter-clockwise. What is attached to the lines weighs pretty much the same on each and because they are wound in opposite direction the motor doesn't have to struggle much at all.
That's it really, the code isn't terribly interesting but I would be glad to provide it if needed.
Here is a short video of the final effect.
And this is the sign I had outside my house.
In the end I did not have many customers scared but quite a few took the time to watch the animation and enjoyed the novelty. A witch was particularly interested in the QR code, not even her could think of such sorcery!
Me and the family are having great fun this year preparing the Halloween project. I am afraid this time we might have had exaggerated a bit but ... I guess it is too late now, we are nearly done!
Before I upload any pictures of the real thing and, who knows, maybe even a scary video, here is just a teaser.
Neighbours and children hungry for chocolate ... prepare to be scared wohahaha,
Before leaving home today I checked the weather forecast. It was mostly sunny and I thought it was a good omen. So there I was on my way to the second and last day of IPEXPO.
My resolution for the day was not to go to any of the talks in fear of the experience from the previous day.
I arrived "slightly" early at 8:00 o'clock when the gates would have opened at 9:30. At least that gave me time to catch up with some work and think of what I wanted to get from today's visit.
It was still sunny when they finally let us in. I knew that today it would have been the last opportunity for exhibitors to get business cards and contacts from the visiting crowd. The race was on!
I got approached already by somebody right at the entrance 30 seconds before 9:30. First beep of the day. Just so that it is clear, each one of these exhibitors was equipped with a bar code reader and my badge had a bar code that would say who I was. So as you are talking to somebody you would see them more or less discretely pull one of those "weapons" out of their pockets and with nonchalance ... they would beep you to death!
It was constant, you talk to somebody you get beeped, they give you a gadget but you get beeped, you go to a talk you get ... beeped, you get stopped by somebody that actually asks you information and ... you get BEEPED!! Well I guess you get it by now, there was no escaping.
As the hours passed it was rather entertaining to see visitors dodging pretty girls holding chocolate and gadgets in one hand and the dreadful weapon in the other. "Get a chocolate! Beep! mwahahaha".
Then there were the freebies freaks. They are a different species, lurking in the shadow they wait until all exhibitors are busy with other visitors to launch themselves in an attach magpie style and get their object of desire. Which in itself is rather sad especially if you consider that since the credit crunch the freebies you get are along the lines of pens and sweets. Who uses that many pens nowadays anyway!
My determination not to go to talks paid off in the end. Getting from one exhibitor to another wasn't easy but I eventually managed to have a good nearly old fashion chat with a few techies (yes they do still exist).
I had a really interesting chat with somebody from Ruckus which explained how different their antennas are from the competition and how does that guarantee a better coverage with less interference and eventually better bandwidth per user. Read this white paper for more.
My main goal for the day was to get more information on mobile users management for the enterprise and my best bets where Citrix and VMware's latest acquisition Airwatch. The acquisition is so recent that the guys from VMware and the guys from Airwatch were actually in two different stands!
Both seem to be offering similar solutions but Citrix seemed to be able to offer a wider scope of functionalities. They were also the only ones that could explain a bit more of what really happens in the back-end, what services need to be deployed, how does the admin GUI looks like and gave a rather in depth explanation of what happens on the mobile device that wants to join ... your private Cloud.
And so it ended. The first day was cloudy with a chance of content, the following day was dodge the beep but it was in fact more useful than the day before.
Today was the opening day for the IPEXPO Europe which takes place in London Excel.
This was my first time at the IPEXPO and I did not know what to expect so ... bear with me if I did not get the full gist of it.
The event started with a rather refreshing speech from Sir Tim Berners-Lee. I had forgotten how difficult it is to follow what he says, I guess having your brain running at the speed of light causes some problems with the coordination of the lips. You should really film him and watch him later in slow motion to get all he his saying. Literally a river of words!
I guess the most difficult part to make sense of was about how could it really be possible for big corporations to shape up the future of the web to improve our life and guarantee democracy, I am afraid I was not terribly convinced about the ethics behind the likes of HP, Google, Microsoft, VMware, etc. and how are they going to give us back control on our data and our privacy but mostly how are they going not be tempted to use that same data for things like targeted advertising.
Well, his forecast is for 2050 and ... I believe in miracles and I want to believe in you Sir Tim Berners-Lee!
It was however really nice to listen to him talking about the beginning of the World Wide Web and how his boss Mike Sendall at CERN defined his proposal "Vague but exciting". It was 25 years ago and much happened in the meantime, maybe Mike Sendall was ahead of his time and had already thought about the future we live in today where everything is vague but exciting only we chose a better way to describe it:
The Cloud!
SERIOUSLY! Isn't time to stop abusing that word? The Cloud? What does it mean? Really? When I first heard about it I thought it was going to be a question of a year or so and people would have rebelled to that. Years later we are still using it and the technologies that are described behind the term are as cloudy as the promises they make. Even speakers are embarrassed to use it, they might have one of those clouds on the slides they are presenting but they make their best to actually try to use a different more meaningful word for it. Some might refer to grid computing, some may talk about hosting and so on.
I think cloud was really invented to sell something that had not really been quite developed yet or maybe they thought we could not handle the complexity of what they where offering and hid it behind ... well, behind something sort of foggy so that each one of us could see what they really were looking for.
YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH
And so the day went between colourful clouds and little icons moving back and forth to the clouds like little angels.
I am a system administrator at heart and a wannabe geek, back in the days what excited people was seeing a demo of something actually doing things. In the 90s seeing a GUI would give you a feel of what could be achieved with one program or another, seeing a shell ... well, seeing a shell and some scripting in action would get lads howling. Now you get clouds and pretty pictures, you are told a really nice story and frankly with pretty pictures and clouds you can say anything you want without risking too much.
"Say, where do the data go after they are uploaded to that system?"
"To the cloud"
"What will the users connect to when subscribing to that service?"
"To the cloud"
"Where are my servers and how do I administer them"
"Via the cloud"
and so on ...
Honestly I attended a few talks today and I could not quite understand what was that they were selling or more in general talking about. It all sounded like the c word, reduced TCO and yada, yada, yada.
Sometime I am wondering:
"Has information technology lost it?"
These mega vendors are selling us a new era of computing born out of their competition to sell products which are often rushed on the market without having reached the necessary maturity on both their design and their development and I feel as if at times we are no longer sold software, we maybe sold
A few days ago I gave my children a Canon IXUS i5 that stopped working a while back. It had always bothered me that it could not be fixed and the more I would see them play with it the more it got me thinking that the problem it was suffering from was neither mechanical nor to do with the electronics.
I had that camera a few years ago from a friend which had asked me to look at it as it seemed to be stuck in movie mode despite which position was the selector in. Replay was movie mode, photos was movie mode.
Very annoying!
It had to be with the firmware and there had to be a way to either reset it or flash it anew.
I opted for the easy way first and tried to reset it. As you can imagine no mention of this on the manual and most upsetting not much on the internet either!
Electronic toys generally have a combination of buttons or keys that can be used to enter hidden features one of which can sometimes be a reset. About an hour later it was clear that this approach was not going anywhere, the camera has 9 buttons so it should have taken me longer but the more obvious combinations i.e. power button + menu, power button + function and some others weren't really promising.
It is a shame not to have taken any pictures of the process but frankly ... is it really worth to anybody knowing the step by step process to repair such an old camera?
To cut the story short, after removing the rather obvious screws, you get to expose the main PCB which sits on the front of the camera. Remove all the flat cables and get the PCB free. On its reverse you will find the tampon battery. Remove that for a couple of minutes (maybe much less) and job done! After putting the camera back together the camera is reset to factory settings and the problem is gone.
Little I new that this is pretty much the same procedure to get rid of the "Memory card error" affecting the IXUS 400 and apparently other models of the same family.
Well, this might not be of much help to many but certainly was of great satisfaction to me.
Myself and Chas from /PNW/Electronics had been working on a new site where we join forces to produce a set of unique tutorials and articles on Microchip PICs, MikroC and XC8 compilers and a variety of protocols and devices that will be used thought the various articles. 0xEE.net has gone live with a couple of articles this weekend with more to come soon.
Have fun reading!
after spending far too much time with a code 52 which would not let the driver work, I run the following to disable the driver signature enforcement in Windows 8.1.
On an elevated CMD to disable:
bcdedit -set loadoptions DISABLE_INTEGRITY_CHECKS
bcdedit -set TESTSIGNING ON
to reanable:
bcdedit -set loadoptions ENABLE_INTEGRITY_CHECKS
bcdedit -set TESTSIGNING OFF
To check what are the current settings run bcdedit on an elevated cmd
Be aware that although I had installed the drivers when the driver signature enforcement was off, as soon as I enabled it once again the drivers where back to not working with code 52.
Despite many guides which will advice you to follow the GUI approach to achieve a one off startup with the driver signature enforcement, this seems to be a quicker and more permanent solution.
This is certainly not an ideal solution but a good enough workaround.
Update:
Mikroelektronika has now released new drivers which fix the problem. They can be found at this link
Mikroelektronika is celebrating 10 years of compilers this month and I thought I should not be shy from joining the celebrations.
It was in fact 2004 when they decided the world needed better compilers. Back then in order to get your LEDs blinking, on pretty much any microcontroller on the market, it wasn't as easy as it is today.
Ten years forward in time and now, thanks to the professionalism and dedication of Mikroelektronika's developers, we can now just simply click on an icon and your program get's compiled, programmed onto the microcontroller of your choice and executed, fantastic!
The code does not compile or something nasty is happening with the behaviour of your program? The compilers are coming with simple and intuitive debugging functionalities including In-Circuit Debugging. With it is possible to step by step through your code as it runs on the microcontroller which gives you the possibility to discover problems that only surface due to the program running on your circuit.
Some of the numbers of the Mikro guild are:
3 different languages for the various tastes - MikroC, MikroBasic, MikroPascal
6 different microcontroller platforms - PIC, dsPIC, 8051, AVR, PIC32, ARM
2 different licencing models - The traditional key installed on a computer and the more innovative USB dongle option for licencing on the go. Great flexibility.
785 and counting libraries available through LIBSTOCK to make the most of reuse of code. Any developer should share his/her code here! Seriously!!
The many libraries that come along with the compilers are very well documented, integrated with examples and in most cases with circuit diagrams. Should that not be enough, Mikroelektronika also offers a number of books and articles which in most cases are also available online for free. Although some of these need to be refreshed, they are still an excellent resource for the beginners and a good reference for the experts
The IDE has nothing to envy from the likes of MS Visual Studio or Eclipse. The MikroC for PIC page shows some of the functionalities and tools that are made available to the developer for efficient and effective coding.
Have you ever had to setup the fuses on a PIC16F84A prior to the Mikro era? With the Mikro IDE it is as simple as using the Edit Project.
Code assistant, parameter assistant, code folding? Need I say more? If you have done any coding in your life you know that you cannot live without these things.
An IDE should be a tool that helps the developer to get from a project to a program in the easiest and quickest possible ways. It is good and well to learn the hard way how to write your "Hello, world!" program or how to manually setup the fuses the first time, the second, even a third time but after that it becomes evil! A developer needs tools that will help him/her to quickly go through what should be a given and focus on the problem that matter to get the next project running and it seems to me that the Mikro compilers do just that. Isn't that the reason for the great success of the likes of the Arduino entourage?
Happy birthday Mikros and keep up the good work guys!
Messing up the SD card is part of the game when playing with the Embedded Linux board from Elektor.
Elektor's official way of restoring the image to the SD card is by use of the Ubuntu system you are meant to work on when following the tutorial.
you can find the SD image file zipped at the Elektor website
as explained in the README file within the zip archive, to transfer the gnublin.img to the SD card, you have to issue the following command from Ubuntu:
sudo dd if=gnublin.img of=/dev/sdb (note it is sdb not sdb1 or sdb2, the image is for the whole card to but written bit by bit)
My Ubuntu is a VM, I use Oracle Virtual Box and there is no problem connecting the SD card reader to it. I have noticed though that it takes a really, really, really long time before the image is transferred to the card.
dd if=gnublin.img of=/dev/sdb
3854336+0 records in
3854336+0 records out
1973420032 bytes (2.0 GB) copied, 4999.44 s, 395 kB/s
this is 1.38 hours!!! I admit there is something quite wrong here which I mean to investigate further. It would seem that all of the three USB 2 SD card readers are seen as USB 1.1 by the VM.
In the meantime though if you want to do this very quickly you can use the same tool that it is used with the Raspberry Pi images. You can easily find it at the official site or here. (Note: remember to run the tools with administrative right otherwise it might not be able to write on your card)
It is slightly cheating on the "Linux purism" that Elektor tries to impose but ...
I was playing with the Elektor Linux board and needed to tranfer code compiled on a "host" system to the SD card of the embedded Linux board. Following the tutorial off the magazine I read: "To test whether the above process has been successful, we can copy the file ‘hello’ that the compiler has created to the Elektor Linux board’s SD card. Make sure the board is off and remove the card. Insert it into the PC’s card reader, and plug the reader into the PC."
I did not have a card reader with me and I did not like to halt the system, remove the card, etc. etc.
Back in the days of modems it was not unusual to transfer files over the serial ports.
This is what you need to do in order to transfer your files between your Linux PC and your Linux embedded system using the serial port.
Picocom can transfer files using several protocols that, whomever used to use modems, will be familiar with.
Specifically you can use ZModmem which is the best choice compared to XModem and YModem.
Enough with the yada yada, let's cut to the chase.
Let's say that you are either using Ubuntu or Mint for what matters.
You will need to install rz and sz. Check here for more. apt-get install lrzsz
Your serial port is ttyUSB0.
Run: picocom -b 115200 /dev/ttyUSB0
Note the output especially: send_cmd is : sz -vv receive_cmd is : rz -vv
This means that your board can talk ZModem!
Hit ^a (ctrl+a) then ^s (ctrl+s). Read the man page for picocom to know more.
This will set picocom in file transfer mode. You will be prompted for a file name as follows: *** file:
Write the full path of the file e.g. /root/hello (being the compiled version of hello.c)
Sure enough your next ls command should show the file now on your Elektor Linux board.
