Setting up the PineDIO LoRaWAN Gateway

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....

July 28, 2021 · 16 min · Ben V. Brown

Fixing stupid JMS578 HDD Enclosure issues

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....

January 10, 2021 · 5 min · Ben V. Brown

STM32 Hardware & Software Design Part 4

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....

May 26, 2020 · 5 min · Ben V. Brown

STM32 Hardware & Software Design Part 3

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....

April 22, 2020 · 4 min · Ben V. Brown

STM32 Hardware & Software Design Part 2

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....

April 11, 2020 · 8 min · Ben V. Brown