Windows CE Programming

As adsbox did take too much CPU from my main server I moved adsbox to a banana pi zero w. Running Raspbian adsbox used about 200% of the 4 cores and 10% of the 512 MB headless system. That was OK for me and I wanted to extend the range of my rtlsdr antenne. I moved the antenna out side and was impressed about the exended range but nearby aircrafts did not show any more 🙁

As I want to see the nearby aircrafts, we are near düsseldorf in the landing lines and wanted the data of the aircrafts crossing the small home village 30km away from the DUS airport.

adsbox missed too much data or the rtlsdr dongle received too much signals. First I changed the adsbox call to use 4 threads for adsb decoding. That did not help.

Then I looked for the gain values to lower the reception signal strength. My rtlsdr RTL8232u supports gain values (found with rtl_test):

#Supported gain values (29): 0.0 0.9 1.4 2.7 3.7 7.7 8.7 12.5 14.4 15.7 16.6 19.7 20.7 22.9 25.4 28.0 29.7 32.8 33.8 36.4 37.2 38.6 40.2 42.1 43.4 43.9 44.5 48.0 49.6

I first started with 0.0 and got better nearby results but only a range of about 5km. Using 25.8 gives a range of 120km but too much airplanes (~39) and nearby losts. With the max gain I had more than 59 airplanes at a time. Finally I used 16.6, which still gives a range of 80km and ~5-10 airplanes.

Using the highest gain would give a very large range of ~250km but nearby signals get lost. And we ant to see mainly the nearby airplanes and now use a gain of 16.6.

The cpu usage is now down to 100% (quad core, so that is 25%) and the adsbox decocde threads are down to 15-25%.

I wanted to have a small display with some essential Home Automation data. So I buy an 1.3″ OLED display with I2C interface and started to look for some existing code for an ESP8266. The display should be feed using WiFi and be portable, so I can place it where needed.

I started with ESPeasy, as there is already support for multiple pages with text lines. Unfortunately the code is written to show sensor data of directly connected sensor only. No option to publish free text or data from a Home Automation system. The ESPeasy code will save the text to flash memory on every change when using the Web GUI. The flash memory would wear out after some month with my use case.

Finally I decided to start my own code. First I had to find out that the OLED display is not an SD1306 but a SH1106 one. Although some people state that these are more or less the same, the SD1306 libraries did not work for me. Then I found https://github.com/ThingPulse/esp8266-oled-ssd1306 which works well for me.

Starting with SSD1306UiDemo.ino I added WiFi and MQTT libaries and code.

My code will show 6 lines of text on two frames (3 lines each). The frames will change every 5 seconds. The content of the text lines is published by a FHEM server. As there was no easy way to integrate the display using a MQTT_DEVICE definition in FHEM, I wrote my own perl mqttmsg sub function and used the FHEM notify definition to publish changes to the display.

a small video

Continue reading ‘FHEM: Home Automation remote display using small OLED and MQTT’ »

Zu Testzwecken brauche ich ab und an neben meinen Haupt FHEM System ein zweites FHEM System, zB auf meinem Netbook. Nun sind drei Devices (nanoCUL 433MHz, nanoCUL 868MHz und ein Jeelink) direkt am Hauptserver über USB (serial) angeschlossen. Wenn ich diese in einem Testsystem benötige, müsste ich die Geräte vom Hauptserver trennen. Wie praktisch wäre es, wenn ich diese USB Devices über das Netzwerk anbinden könnte, so wie dies über EspLink mit dem angschlossenen Arduino Nano mit SignalDuino Firmware möglich ist.

Nun zur Anbindung von seriellen Geräten an das Netzwerk gibt es für Linux ser2net. Leider ist die Original-Version nicht multi-Client tauglich und würde nur einem Client die Verbindung erlauben. Bei EspLink sind jedoch mehrere Clients möglich. Obwohl die meisten ser2net Quellen nur einen Client unterstützen, gibt es ein oder zwei Quellen, deren Implementierung mehrer Clients unterstützen.

Nachdem ich einen Quellcode von ser2net mit multi-Client Support geladen und nach geringen Modifikationen auch erfolgreich implementieren konnte, kann ich nun alle Geräte, die am Haupt FHEM Server angeschlossen sind auch über mein Netzwerk nutzen. Die Geräte mussten nur in der ser2net conf Datei mit verschiedenen Netzwerkports eingetragen werden:

2301:raw:0:/dev/serial/by-id/usb-FTDI_FT232R_USB_UART_A9YDLRJV-if00-port0:38400,8DATABITS,NONE,1STOPBIT
2302:raw:0:/dev/serial/by-id/usb-FTDI_FT232R_USB_UART_A94BBD91-if00-port0:38400,8DATABITS,NONE,1STOPBIT

In der fhem.cfg wurden die Geräte entsprechend umdefiniert:

#define nanoCUL433 CUL /dev/serial/by-id/usb-FTDI_FT232R_USB_UART_A9YDLRJV-if00-port0@38400 1234
define nanoCUL433 CUL 192.168.0.40:2301 1234

#define nanoCUL868 CUL /dev/serial/by-id/usb-FTDI_FT232R_USB_UART_A94BBD91-if00-port0@38400 3421
define nanoCUL868 CUL 192.168.0.40:2302 4321

Die original EspLink Anbindung des Arduino Nano mit SignalDuino Firmware:

define sduinoIP SIGNALduino 192.168.0.99:23

Mit diesen Änderungen kann ich diese USB Geräte nun auch über das Netzwerk benutzen.

Meine Abwandlung von ser2net findet sich auf Github.

We own a great VuPlus Solo2 Linux based Satelit Receiver. We record some series and films and then delete them. The deleted media files are not deleted directly when using EMC to view and delete. The media files are moved to a trash folder first and should be automatically deleted after x days. But that does not work for whatever reason.

Recently I checked the trash folders I found, as I wondered why the box’s hard disk is getting filled up. And I found many, many old ‘deleted’ files, that are not removed from the hard disk.

I decided to write my own script (/home/root/deltrasholder7days.sh, yes, there is a typo ;-)) ) to finally remove ‘deleted’ files after 7 days. The script was then added to the root’s crontab.

#!/bin/sh
# delete old files
# delete trash files older than 7 days
/usr/bin/find /mnt/hdd/movie_trash -type f -mtime +7 -delete
/usr/bin/find /mnt/hdd/movie/trashcan -type f -mtime +7 -delete
cd /mnt/hdd/movie_trash/
rm last_cleanup*
touch last_cleanup_$( date '+%Y-%m-%d_%H-%M-%S' )
cd /mnt/hdd/movie/trashcan/
rm last_cleanup*
touch last_cleanup_$( date '+%Y-%m-%d_%H-%M-%S' )

The script deletes all files at /mnt/hdd/movie_trash and /mnt/hdd/movie/trashcan with a modification date of 7 days before current day. Then it adds a file with a timestamp as name to let me know, that the script has worked at what time.
… and the crontab (/etc/cron/crontabs/root):

1 1 * * * /home/root/deltrasholder7days.sh

This starts the script every day at 1pm.

That’s all, thank’s to the author of the find utility.