just checking whether it's me or whether everyone else sees this at times?
Occasionally, I try to visit the forum and either DNS isn't working or the web server is not responding. Try refresh in a few minutes and most times it's back.
Was wondering if this is "known" (ie constraint of ISPs or hosting plans etc etc) or whether it's potentially just my connection being flaky? I don't think i've ever seen this kind of behaviour over at the blog on dangerousprototypes.com.
when will it appear on the "sunday freebie" list? ;-)
Is it just me or did this section just pop up since it's Feb, even though the project was 2 years old? Of course it coulda been my inattention to that section of the main forum page, or my heightened awareness of Valentines Day looming closer
mm, now $1 AVRs that fit the bill.... time to research it ! ;-)
Yes, a replacement for MCE remote would be great.....
(I thought I had a failure in my existing in-MCE-case IR reciever and was looking for replacements and found your old IR hackaday project and thought that was nearly what i needed, but got things working again anyway)
up arrow support would be good I always want to re-type my 1-wire read, and even though there are macros there are still about 19 characters to get right.
Backspace - not sure as long as left/right arrow works otherwise their value (in my mind) disappears a bit, they are there but you have no way to use them except retype.
Cheaper from seeed perhaps - when I ordered my BP3 they were out of stock though, so I couldn't order it then..... They're in stock now, so perhaps i'll do that as a backup anyhow. Worse news is I only bought 8 connectors at Jaycar not 10 Now to decide which two to leave off for a day or two.....
Now to make me a hookup kit (Shadyman, you're an Aussie too, right? Any hints on sources of coloured hookup clippies? Jaycar only got Red/Blk but have heaps of IDC connectors )
I'm pretty new to all things uC, well ok pretty much a novice with a little bit of experience spread over a long time (nobody call me a slow learner, ok )
Anyway, if you've ever debounced a switch, how long do you wait? 10ms? 100ms?
i have a timer triggering 1ms interrupts, and am wondering how frequently I should check for switch contact (thinking ~25ms initially?) and how long to wait before "confirming" switch contact. Thoughts?
i second the vote for LED decoration string usage for "standard" ("common"?) LED strings in AU - I think every single one I have here right now is 24v.... but that is a sample size of 2
Is this using a PIC that has a limited flash duty cycle that would limit the number of times you could flip between functions?
I'd personally like the AVR programmer code to be more "mainstream" as it'll have a big part in my usage (when it arrives) . That said, AVRDUDE may be sufficient and that capability seems to be in the main code base along with the i2c/1wire that I'd also use. For me, PIC programming is unnecessary, all my uC work at the moment is in the 8-bit AVR space, I don't have any other programmers/chips/skills in the Microchip family.
i agree, leaving a device with DHCP enabled and making a permanent reservation is simpler, in case you ever needed to relocate it to a new network that had a different IP address range for instance. (in general, hardcoding things like this is a bad concept, I'm sure we'd all agree, and DHCP makes it easy not to block yourself)
It's a great idea, but sometimes it (Dynamic DNS) might be a bit hard to achieve on only the device - I'd suspect you might need to do "Stuff" on your modem/router too. [I hope this isn’t too basic for you – I just want to make sure you have a way forward]
Here's how I use Dynamic DNS :
I have an ADSL modem/router. It's connected to an ISP, who gives me an "external" IP address. I have my modem setup to register this external address in a Dynamic DNS provider. Now, if I want to get to a device that's inside my network, I just need to use my Dynamic DNS address (yournamehere.dyndns.com for instance).
So that gets you an externally accessable address (the external IP on my router) in a DNS that is reachable from elsewhere in the world.
Next, is making sure I can get HTTP packets to my device. This is the bit that gets interesting (ie it's hard, and depends on your modem/router, and it’s time to pull out the manual most likely).
First, I want my device to always get the same internal IP address, so I make sure my device is on and connected to the network, and then I go and make a DHCP reservation on the router for the address that it was just assigned. In my router’s menu, this is in the “fixed hosts†section of the DHCP server setup. You will have to use the MAC address (usually shown in the “DHCP active leasesâ€) to make sure the DHCP server recognises the device based on the MAC.
If I have only one device on my internal network that I want to be accessible, I can just use port 80 (the default HTTP port). If I have more than one device that I want to be able to access, then I need my router to do some "port forwarding" for me, and in that case I need to pick a second port, say port 8080, to use.
The next configuration step I will take is on my router's "port forwarding" settings. In my modem this is under "virtual server" menu and then "port forwarding". For my chosen port, 80 or 8080, I would define an inbound port forward rule to forward TCP traffic on the chosen port, and then have it forward to (always) port 80 on the device. In my router config screen, I define the protocol as TCP, the “external port†start and finish port as 8080 (or just 80) and the “redirect port†start and finish to 80, and finally I define the internal IP address I made the reservation for above.
Then, as the last step, I can access my device from a different network using the DynDNS entry myname.dyndns.com by going to http://myname.dyndns.com:8080 in a browser (if I was going to port 80 I could leave off the :8080 part, or substitute a different port if I had lots of devices). In my router’s case, I can’t test that from inside my network, so I’d do that from a mobile phone browser or when I was on a network at work or get a friend to test for me.
That should get you working, I hope !
The one thing that none of this setup addresses is security. That’s one of the big reasons why it’s often better to “proxy†this through a server as Ian suggests, as that can be set up to do the security/access control, and the internal communication from the server to the device is all unencrypted. Or, it might be possible to put a security challenge/response in the web platform (I dunno if it has one now? Ian?? Mmmm, might have to get my order underway soon and check for myself ! ) Then again, if you’re only showing temperatures around your house or something like that, the value of that data isn’t very high so you may chose to simply accept that there’s no security – and certainly it’d be good enough to test the whole thing works!
Tempreature and humidity sound great targets for this.
In fact, I have a low priority project to do this but with a ATMEGA32 and ATMEGA128 as that's what I have and what tools I'm familiar with (although perhaps with bp3 on the way this might change). I want to simply have my device as a web end-point that can be interrogated by a weather focussed PC application (yet to decide on what one I might use) and to report temperatures in a couple of places around the house. [as a side note if any one has pointers/thoughts on how best to handle the "response" part of this, for multiple devices, I'd be interested to hear]
The one thing I like about this platform over the atmel one is the TCP/IP library, it seems to me that its much more comprehensive than any of the public ones.
Open Source Hardware
Yeah i thought wordpress were running the blog and yes they have money to throw at that problem!
They're in stock now, so perhaps i'll do that as a backup anyhow. Worse news is I only bought 8 connectors at Jaycar not 10