An RSS feed of blog postings for the FreakLabs Open Source Zigbee Development Blog. http://freaklabs.org Thu, 02 Sep 2010 16:52:21 +0100 FeedCreator 1.7.2 http://freaklabs.org/images/M_images/joomla_rss.png http://freaklabs.org An RSS feed of blog postings for the FreakLabs Open Source Zigbee Development Blog. http://freaklabs.org/index.php/Tutorials/Hardware/Weatherproof-Wireless-Enclosure-Build-Tutorial.html Hi all.No, I haven't been dead these past few weeks. I've actually been spending a lot of my free time researching how to build a weatherproof enclosure for the rice farm sensing project in the Tokyo Hackerspace. I've mentioned it previously and the project takes place in Kamogawa which is about an hour and a half outside of Tokyo. The place is a complete contrast to Tokyo and has problems with monkeys, boars, poisonous snakes, and some nasty bugs. Overall,... Mon, 09 Aug 2010 20:40:54 +0100 http://freaklabs.org/index.php/Blog/Misc/2010-07-23-Status-Update-Arduino-Hackerspaces-and-Gothic-Punk.html So far, it’s been a pretty interesting and eventful year but extremely busy, so I decided to take a short summer break. I wanted to take some time off to do stuff I’ve been interested in but been putting off because of all the tasks I’m dealing with every day. One of the things I’ve been thinking about is the Arduino platform. I bought my first Arduino a couple of weeks ago but never had a chance to play with... Fri, 23 Jul 2010 04:56:26 +0100 http://freaklabs.org/index.php/Tutorials/Software/Tutorial-Using-CmdArduino.html The Arduino Command Line Interface, aka CmdArduino, is a simple shell that can be run on an Arduino. It's nothing fancy and its main purpose is to allow users to easily call their functions on a running Arduino via a simple serial terminal. It also allows users to pass in arguments from the command line into the functions they wrote so they can easily toggle pins, set blinking speed, set pwm duty cycles, or whatever else might need command line... Thu, 22 Jul 2010 20:52:12 +0100 http://freaklabs.org/index.php/Blog/Store/ATXMega-Board-Release...Finally.html Hi all.Sorry about the delay in releasing the ATXMega boards. There's some good news and bad news. The bad news is that there won't be SPI DMA support. I was validating the SPI DMA feature and found that DMA transfers for an SPI master can't be made directly to an SPI port. They can only be made to a UART configured as an SPI master. This would have required swapping two pins, but still wouldn't have been much of a... Mon, 12 Jul 2010 03:11:32 +0100 http://freaklabs.org/index.php/Blog/Chibi/Chibi-Release-v0.85.html Just a quick note that Chibi v0.85 is released. The main purpose for this release is to add support for the Atmel ATXMega MCU family. There are other minor changes that were also added. The EEPROM driver was moved to the MCU specific directories since the ATXMega has different EEPROM access method than the standard AVR series. The standard AVR chips have EEPROM libraries that are supported by avrlibc which is not the case for the ATXMega. Along with that,... Tue, 06 Jul 2010 23:39:01 +0100 http://freaklabs.org/index.php/Blog/Store/2010-07-06-Status-Update-Pigs-Monkeys-and-ATXMegas.html Hi all.Wow! Things have been unbelievably busy recently. Along with the part-time consulting, things have been heating up at the Tokyo Hackerspace recently. I started a group with another member called Wireless Wednesdays that meets two Wednesdays a month. In it, we discuss and try out different things going on with wireless. The first meeting, we actually flashed an 802.11 router with DD-WRT and then demonstrated how to boost the transmission power,... Mon, 05 Jul 2010 22:43:27 +0100 http://freaklabs.org/index.php/Tutorials/Software/Getting-Started-With-The-ATXMega-The-ATXMega-Test-Library.html The ATXMega is an upgraded version of the popular AVR microcontroller from Atmel. It still contains the basic AVR core but has a huge amount of enhancements to both the core and the peripherals. Basically, you can think of it like an AVR on steroids…a whole lot of steroids. Switching from the ATMega to the ATXMega series is a bit overwhelming because there are so many new features and improvements. Consequently, there is also a lot of new documentation which... Mon, 05 Jul 2010 20:19:30 +0100 http://freaklabs.org/index.php/Blog/Misc/The-Mystery-of-the-Increasing-RAM.html I’ve been spending the past week bringing up the ATXMega boards that I put together and porting Chibi over to them for testing the radio modules. While doing so, it also got me thinking about how I chose the parts and what the landscape for wireless sensor nodes is starting to look like. The original idea of wireless sensor nodes was that they would be like dust. They’d be inconspicuous, ubiquitous, and you could essentially just sprinkle a couple all... Wed, 16 Jun 2010 01:12:11 +0100 http://freaklabs.org/index.php/Blog/Misc/Tutorial-Update-How-To-Download-to-AVR-USB-based-MCUs-on-a-Mac.html One of the interesting things I've been seeing is that Macs are starting to become very common in the tech industry. Strangely enough, there is almost a majority of Mac users in Tokyo hackerspace which is heavily dominated by techies. I also see a lot of Macs in other hackerspaces and at events like the Make meeting in Japan. So it seems kind of strange that there is still very little support for embedded development on the Macs. In fact,... Mon, 07 Jun 2010 01:02:28 +0100 http://freaklabs.org/index.php/Blog/Chibi/Chibi-Release-v0.81.html Hi all.Just a quick word to let you know that the Chibi stack has been updated to v0.81. This is just a minor update to add support for the TI CC1190 RF front end and coincides with the release of the AT86RF212-CC1190 board (http://www.freaklabsstore.com/index.php?main_page=product_info cPath=23 products_id=171) . If you've been interested in what it'd be like to match the AT86RF212 with the TI CC1190, you can check it out at the store. The schematics, layout, and BOM can be found... Mon, 31 May 2010 23:19:01 +0100