I’m currently building a home automation project around Raspberry Pi: I want to be able to monitor and control things like the lights, garage doors and the heating system both at home and from remote. I already have added a touch screen to one of my Raspberry Pi 2 computers (see “Adding a Touch LCD to the Raspberry Pi 2“). This article is about how to install the openHAB on that Raspberry so it can be the brain of the automation system.
openHAB Demo House on Pi
Question: What is the IP address of my Raspberry Pi?
I use my Raspberry Pi’s usually with an external VGA or HDMI monitor. How cool would it be to use a touch LCD screen instead?
Raspberry Pi 2 with 7 Inch Touchscreen
For a space project we have to make sure that things are not failing while our hardware orbits around the Mother Earth. Therefore we are using different static and dynamic analysis tools, and one of it is using PC-lint from Gimpel to catch as many errors and bugs as possible. For that project, we are using Eclipse with the GNU ARM Embedded (launchpad) ARM compiler and Eclipse as IDE with the GNU ARM Eclipse plugins. There are commercial plugins available for linting with Eclipse (e.g. Linticator), but with a few tweaks it is possible to lint with Eclipse free-of-charge. So this article is about how to lint an Eclipse (Freescale/NXP Kinetis Design Studio) project with PC-Lint.
Lint messages in Eclipse
My Raspberry Pi Zero arrived last week (see “A Raspberry Pi for $5! What are your decision factors?“), and finally I have found an hour to try it out. Because the ‘bare board’ $5 version was sold out at that time, I ordered a package with 8GB SD card, micro USB cable and mini HDMI adapter. That way I had all the needed cables, including the mini HDMI adapter cable:
Raspberry Pi Zero
This tutorial describes how to create a Kinetis SDK V1.3 project using the Freescale project generator in Kinetis Design Studio.
project generator
When I left for the week-end, I missed to take with me my Segger J-Link debug box. I have one P&E Universal Multilink at home, but I needed a Segger J-Link to use the SystemViewer with my robot. I need that for a FreeRTOS trainig I will deliver in Poing/Germany on Monday at Avnet/Silica.
But I had a Freescale KwikStk board at home, and I did remember that I can use that board as a Segger J-Link to debug my custom hardware (see “Freescale Kinetis KwikStik (part 1)“).
Debugging Custom Board with KwikStik
It it is obvious that a new trend from the US is swapping over to Europe and probably the rest of the world: Black Friday. That is the day yesterday following Thanksgiving day in the United States. It is a ‘shopping’ day. Consequently, the stores are battling with huge discounts. And I use that to fill up my inventory for the Christmas-time projects 🙂 What caught my attention yesterday Friday was this: a Raspberry Pi Zero for US$5!!!!
Raspberry Pi Zero (Picture: Adafruit)
It’s not Christmas yet, but: For a research project I’m currently evaluating a new microcontroller where I need a bit more leg room. Right on time I saw that there is a new board available which caught my interest: The Freescale FRDM-K82F :-). Without thinking too much about it, I have ordered that board from Mouser Thursday last week and I had it in my hand today 🙂 Time to put up a quick post about it:
New Box on the table
In case there are problems with the C/C++ preprocessor, it is useful to generate the compiler preprocessor listing. Here is how to create a preprocessor listing with GNU gcc compiler and the GNU ARM Eclipse plugins in Eclipse:
Preprocessor Listing in Eclipse
MCU on Eclipse 