Ben V. Brown

As is relatively well known, both the Wii and Wii U have extremely limited power output on their USB ports. Nintendo appears to have limited these to exactly the 0.5A of USB 2.0. As the Disk drive in my Wii U has started to become intermittent at reading disks I went through rapidly backing these up to an external hard drive to prevent the device from effectively becoming a brick. However; using any external drives requires either a Y power splitter cable or externally powered drives. While functional it’s certainly ugly. ...

Kubenetes, in the home, for fun The current cluster nodes Pine64 graciously sent me a set of the SoQuartz boards + carrier boards that are being used for this cluster (But I was not paid; they didn’t know what I would use them for). Additionally, some of the time used in first setting up the cluster was done as part of my employment at Propeller Aero. ...

The PineDIO unit. Modified to have external WiFi antenna for range. Setting up the PineDIO LoRaWAN gateway with TTN The PineDIO is a LoRaWAN gateway solution from Pine64. Announced on May 6th, these units have been slowly sent out to lucky early developers. It consists of a Pine64 A64-LTS SBC + an adapter hat to hold a RAK2287 module. The RAK2287 is a low-cost concentrator module that provides all of the LoRa goodness required for this unit to work. ...

The WS2812 aka the Neopixel is a very well know LED, it combines a fully self-contained PWM driver ic with RGB led’s in a cheap and (relatively) painless to work with package. The downside to these is their not-very-fun protocol that requires effort to ensure you drive it at the correct timing. Other fantastic people have already done a deep dive into this protocol. The TL;DR is that the protocol works out to encode the bit as 0 or 1 based on the pulse length, with minimum off times between bits. Otherwise, there is a very long off time to latch the data and reset the state machine. Thats it. ...

The stupid state of JMicron drive interface IC’s If you have ever tried to use a USB3.0 hard drive enclosure based on a JMicron chipset with TrueNAS (formerly FreeNAS); you may have come across multipath errors or serial numbers that make no sense. Or simply SMART and TRIM not functioning. Additionally, you may have run into the stupid way these units power down the drives after 10 minutes of inactivity forcefully. Completely ignoring OS or HDD settings. This is infuriating if you want the drives to do what you tell them. ...

As mentioned in part four of the STM series, that development board was sponsored by PCBWay. For this review, they agreed to allow for assembly of two of the boards which is excellent as I can compare their assembly service. Since the Elecrow review, I have used their assembly service a few times for projects and generally been very impressed with the quality and contact. At a high level, the PCBWay ordering process was a lot more personal than I have worked with other unnamed vendors; which is fantastic if you are unsure in your designs and would like someone to review the design to make sure it’s actually manufacturable. Otherwise, everything is as you expect, the boards arrive on time, they all work and the assembly is done well. ...

Where we left off Part 1 covered the quick rundown of selecting the STM32 and assigning a rough pinout in STMCube. Part 2 provided a quick through the schematic capture process and PCB layout at a high level. Part 3 covered exporting the PCB for manufacture and a quick run through the ordering process with PCBWay. Disclaimer In this section, I’m using PCBWay for the ordering process example. They have kindly offered to cover the cost of the production of these PCB’s before this series actually went live. They offered some free PCB’s around the time I was writing part two, making it very convenient to use their services for this series of posts. ...

H2O N2 - Water Cooling an Odroid N2 In mid-2018, I started to move all of my home server use and compute from an HP microserver G8 over to ARM-based SBC’s. This move was inspired initially as a power-saving exercise to save the idle power draw of the microserver (50-100W). The original setup consisted of an Odroid C1 running standard developer services and the microserver moving to just acting as a backup device that only powered on to handle backing up computers in the house. ...

Where we left off Part 1 covered the quick run down of selecting the STM32 and assigning a rough pinout in STMCube. Part 2 provided a quick through the schematic capture process and pcb layout at a high level. Part 3 here will cover the exporting the PCB for manufacture and a quick run through the ordering process with PCBWay. Disclaimer In this section I’m using PCBWay for the ordering process example. They have kindy offered to cover the cost of the production of these PCB’s before this series actually went live. They offered some free PCB’s around the time I was writing part two, making it very convient to use their services for this series of posts. ...

Where we left off Part 1 covered the quick run down of selecting the STM32 and assigning a rough pinout in STMCube. Part 2 here will run through the schematic capture process and pcb layout at a high level. Schematic Capture I design exclusively in KiCad now, having completely moved off other platforms over the past few years. As such this guide will only cover KiCad related design work. I highly reccomend using hierarchical sheets in your design, to allow for both (some) reuse, as well as make the seperate building blocks clearly definied. Please, please, do not just throw your entire schematic on one page, it makes for a highly unreadable schematic for anyone else who comes along. ...