Filed under: Uncategorized
I bought myself a new toy for xmas from NewIt, a Sheevaplug. It’s a low power, ARM linux device. I plan to use it as a network attached storage maybe backup. The SheevaPlug has Ubuntu 9.04 pre-installed. Apparently its only draws 4 watts. I’m adding this to remind me of the basic setup I did if I ever have to do it again.
You can use the USB cable it comes with the get tty access, but I couldn’t be bothered, I’m happy enough to use the provided OS filesystems etc. Just plugged it in, waited a couple of minutes and use the standard root password.
The device was called UBUNTU on my routers config.
The forum at NewIt recommends regerating keys.
As I want to use it for a storage I attached my usb hard drive, typed in ls /dev/ expecting to see an entry for a hdd something like sda1. The drive was lighting up; I could hear it spinning up repeatedly.
Nothing there, so I swapped it for a memory stick, which seems to work fine. I’m guessing that the drive is drawing more than the 500ma that USB are supposed to draw. I installed lsusb and checked for the device, which didn’t appear. I added a hub, with external power supply, and attached the USB drive via that and it worked fine. Now its easy to mount the drive (my drive happens to be a WD Passport:
mkdir /media/WDPassport/
sudo mount /dev/disk/by-label/WD\\x20Passport /media/WDPassport/
Added a new user so that I don’t have to log in as root.
adduser daveh
and add to sudoers list to stop me from making stupid mistakes
visudo
annoyingly it uses vi, add the line with i
daveh ALL=(ALL) ALL
then :wq to write the file and exit
Do an apt-get update so that apt has the correct locations to get packages from.
I changed the MOTD for so I know I’m definitely booting from the SD card.
I’d also like to use it to serve my music up, so I’ve installed mt-daap. This was pretty straight forward.
Filed under: ATTiny45, AVR, Electronics, Firmware, Software, Uncategorized | Tags: ATTiny45, c, code, led
I’ve created a Google code project with the snappy title of avr-usb-rgb-led. It is based on the hid-custom-rq example from AVR usb examples. I’ve added 3 new commands, one for each LED. It uses a software PWM to control the brightness of each LED based on the value set.
There is a coresponding program using libusb which allows you to send the commands, it simply allows you to set the colour of the cube with an RGB tuple on the command line.
To get the code you need to check out using subversion. To flash the chip you probably want to use the makefile.
Filed under: Uncategorized
My first blog. Let’s see if I ever use it.
It will probably be mostly programming and hardware hacking.
Recent projects I might write up include:
- AVR prototype parts
- Rock Band pedal Arduino
- Caps locker device
