I’m making a Raspberry Pi to put at a “remote” location, and I needed network connectivity. I had an old USB 3G dongle lying around. It appears to be a Vodafone-branded Huawei K4302 modem, supporting HSPA+ (no LTE).
Continue reading ‘Huawei K4203 on Raspberry Pi 3B+’ »Author Archive
The linux kernel is responsible for managing all the hardware. Which brings us to the question: how does it know what hardware there is to manage? On traditional PC platforms, the kernel can read out a lot of information from the BIOS. But on embedded devices such as the BeagleBone (Black), there is no BIOS to read from.
The answer is that you simply tell the kernel what hardware is present. The way you do that, is by providing a device tree during boot. This tree lists all the hardware that is present on the system, along with the needed parameters.
Continue reading ‘BeagleBone Black – the device tree (overlay)’ »
I chose the BeagleBone Black (amongst other things) for the embedded microcontrollers (PRUs): Besides your usual ARM Cortex processor, you can put two “Programmable Real-time Units” to work. These are 2 RISC-cores clocked at 200MHz, optimised for real-time processing:
- Most instructions take 1 cycle (external memory access takes longer)
- No async interrupt handling, but provisions to efficiently check for pending interrupts
- Enhanced GPIO mode, that allows some pins to be directly controlled by the PRU, bypassing the normal GPIO-logic. This boosts performance down to 5ns latencies.
While having pre-configured devices is super-fun for getting started quickly, I usually want to know exactly what is installed on them. So I spent some time installing my BeagleBone from scratch.
Booting up a modern microprocessor is more like a journey than a recipe. The Texas Instruments Sitara AM3358 processor, powering the BeagloBone Black is no different.
My BeagleBone Black came pre-installed with a 2-year-old Debian Wheezy on it’s eMMC chip (image, hashes). The out-of-the-box experience is actually quite impressive: the BeagleBone presents itself over the USB bus as a mass storage device with the needed drivers and some documentation. Once you install the driver (only the RNDIS is needed, the Black does not have a serial-over-USB anymore), you can just surf to the BeagleBone and control USER-LEDs from your web browser. Impressive!
I have an Epson WiFi multifuncional, and was very happy to see that I needed no additional software at all to make it work. OS X had everything built in. For scanning, I use Image Capture. It’s fairly basic, but it does the job of scanning a batch of duplex pages in to a single PDF.
Sometimes, however, Image Capture hangs on “Waiting for scanner…”. Restarting Image Capture doesn’t help; restarting the multifunctional neither, nor did turning the Mac’s WiFi off and on again. Restarting OS X entirely did solve the issue, but I don’t call that a solution.
Today, I came across a post of Packetrider on an HP forum. He figured out that killing the Image Capture Extension process solves the problem as well:
killall "Image Capture Extension"
When I buy electronic devices, I always keep an eye on their power consumption. Especially the power drain that you’ll get 24/7. For most devices, this is their “standby” power consumption, but some devices are left on all day long. My broadband router, a TP-Link Archer C7 running OpenWRT 15.05 Chaos Calmer, is in this last category.
When I buy electronic devices, I always keep an eye on their power consumption. Especially the power drain that you’ll get 24/7. For most devices, this is their “standby” power consumption, but some devices are left on all day long. The b-box 3 of Proximus is in this last category.
Akismet recently decided to revoke my API key, so I got overwhelmed with spam comments again. So I’m trying something new: a quiz before you can comment. Let’s see how this works out.
