#agilart

[bobirakova]

Hey Guys, Have you done something with Raspberry Pi and Z-Wave?  I managed to get it up and running with open-zwave, now I wonder what fun things could I do with z-wave sensors and switches?

+ the post on what I did with the Raspberry & Z-wave: http://www.agilart.com/blog/open-zwave

[bobirakova]

Just blogged about what it takes to design your own sensing scenarios using a Raspberry Pi. The scenarios represent dependencies between widgets that you connect to your Pi and software services like Social Networks, the weather, etc. All of this is possible through the use of online feeds of data. Read the whole of it here.

If you are a Raspberry Pi fan you could also learn how to check the weather using a TMP102 temperature sensor, a Raspberry Pi and plain old C/C++

[bobirakova]

Yes, it doesn’t sound that straightforward. Think about how different all the web browsers are... it’s the same with the different platforms. It’s good that when we think of microcontrollers - many of them are ARM based which means that more or less they are similar and it would be easy to migrate your code from Raspberry Pi toOlinuxino for example.

This is why in Agilart we have different drivers for the GPIOs and the other hardware widgets in the different platforms - for now Raspberry and Olimexino Micro. However we want to make super easy for everybody to get started using the platform therefore we want to be able to able to compile just the drivers you need but not everything.

Here is how we managed to cope with this.

Detecting the underlying OS

To detect the underlying Operating System you can use the shell command uname. In order to view the underlying platform, you need to add the -n option. Here is what we can do inside the make file:

UNAME := $(shell uname -n) ifeq ($(UNAME), raspberrypi) # add additioanl libraries, etc. endif ifeq ($(UNAME), alarm) # add additioanl libraries, etc. endif

Read more on uname here.

Define a macro in makefile?

Next inside the code, in Agilart we would need to know which driver is for Raspberry Pi and which is for Olimex. We can do this using #define macrosses.  Read the whole post here: http://www.agilart.com/blog/programing-for-multiple-platforms

[bobirakova]

Finally! a step by step tutorial that explains what you need to do in order to set up cross compiling and cross debugging on a microcontroller like the Raspberry Pi or the Olinuxino iMX boards. You don’t need ARM based host to develop software for them. You can do everything with Ubuntu and a proper cross compiler. So here is how   

[bobirakova]

Finally! a step by step tutorial that explains what you need to do in order to set up cross compiling and cross debugging on a microcontroller like the Raspberry Pi or the Olinuxino iMX boards. You don't need ARM based host to develop software for them. You can do everything with Ubuntu and a proper cross compiler. So here is how :)

Also the whole team is happy that Agilart runs great on the Olinuxino Micro and takes not more than 2-3 MBs of its RAM memory! Everything is updated in Github. Since a few days we're also huge fans of mongoose - a very easy to use web server. It also can be used as embedded web server library to provide web interface to applications. Before mongoose we used gSOAP - an open source C and C++ software development toolkit for SOAP/XML Web services and generic (non-SOAP) C/C++ XML data bindings. However it was creating a lot of overhead and taking too much memory on the microcontrollers. We also found out that we don't even need all the functionality that gSOAP provides. In this case something as simple as moongose seems to fit best.  Cheers! 

[bobirakova]

Hardware Renaissance or not, the OLinuXino Open Source Software and Hardware controllers are great and are really Open Source - all the sources including all the CAD files for the hardware are available on Github. You can reuse them for your own personal or commercial projects. The best part is that OLinuXino use a widely available microcontroller that is also very cheap even in small amounts. The community is great, there are plenty of tutorials, they are a little bit scattered around the wiki, the forums, the documentation... but this can only make it more challenging to set up everything!

Sharing my experience on how to quickly get started with OLinuXino Micro.

Building the ArchLinux SD card

Building the WiFi driver

Have a look at it here

[bobirakova]

A detailed view of how to set up a Zigbee Wireless Sensor Network using XBee radios. How do you go about configuring them using X-CTU and the AT interface, sending messages through Arduino and controlling the I/O pins of the XBee.

The idea is about being able to switch on and off an LED remotely. On one end you have an Arduino connected to an Xbee and a button. 

On the other end you have just the XBee, the LED and some power supply.

All the code is on Github and there are some open questions as well! So share what you know about how to avoid the delay when sending messages using the Zigbee API?