Monthly Archives: June 2014

Individually controlling 1000 WS2812 pixels with an Arduino UNO

2014-Jun-30

2014-06-30 – This (both this post, and the project) is a work in progress. My lights are installed and controllable, the installation is being upgraded, and a better user interface is needed.

Wanted to get into some electronics, and I really need some form of end objective to get going on anything. The thermostat project that was going to be my debut into electronics and microcontrollers has a pretty ambitious scope that has been intimidating enough to procrastinate any serious work on.

When I saw the advertisement form sparkfun with some addressable RGB LED strips for sale (60 WS2812 pixels/m) – I decided to do something with those. With solution in mind, I went looking for a problem.

The crown around my living room has a perimeter around 17m, and I wanted some better lighting in there. At 60pixels/m, 1000 pixels works out to be a nice arbitrary round number that takes up enough space.

 

A test installation of a few strips from January:

Continue reading

Bluetooth Adapter ASUS USB-BT400

2014-Jun-16

Edit 2014-10-09 –  on Kali needed:
# apt-get install bluez-alsa
# apt-get install pulseaudio-module-bluetooth
# rmmod btusb
# insmod <path-to-file>/btusb.ko
# echo “0b05 17cb” >> /sys/bus/usb/drivers/btusb/new_id
(and then I had to *NOT* have the ~/.asoundrc file – pulseaudio picked it up once it had module-bluetooth-discover.so to play with)
I did modify /etc/bluetooth/audio.conf as listed below. Unsure if it was a part of the solution.

This audio drivers stuff in Linux always seems to be a seriously counterintuitive pain in the ass – and while I generally don’t mind learning some of the under the hood details, this I just want to work. Oh yeah – and trying to do it on a laptop……..

Driver doesn’t recognize the vendor/device combination in the version I have compiled. Can add after each boot by:

echo “0b05 17cb” >> /sys/bus/usb/drivers/btusb/new_id

Wasn’t the exact path on mine, but got me the next step forward. thanks


 

Did the below, managed to have “bluetooth” show up as a device in Audacity, and it works to play sound! asound -l and asound -L doesn’t show it for some reason. Not going to pursue further right now.

wiki.debian.org

cat ~/.asoundrc
pcm.bluetooth {
        type bluetooth
        device "XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX"
        profile "auto"
}
  • On the other laptop – I needed to remove the quotations from around the MAC address, and I removed the profile “auto” line to get it working. Alsa completely refused to do anything once it saw the above lines as-is.

 

  • [General] section of /etc/bluetooth/audio.conf
 Enable=Socket

 


 

~/.asoundrc

added

pcm.!default {
type plug
slave.pcm “bluetooth”
}

now it might be hard to get sound to NOT come out of the headset..

Yeastar NeoGate TG100

2014-Jun-02

Summary

So far, this looks like it is going to be a decent little unit for what I want it to do.

Configuration through the web UI wasn’t a problem. I set up an account on the TG100 and configured my asterisk box to register to it. Once registered – both originating and terminating calls worked properly. I didn’t talk to myself long enough to judge call quality or to see if doing anything in the UI or on the device would load it up enough to impact call quality. Also did not try call waiting, multiple channels, or to see if any voicemail indications were passed through.

SMS didn’t work properly for me with the as-shipped firmware – they showed up in the UI looking corrupted. They have worked properly with the newest firmware (51.18.0.34 released 2014-05-15). It looks like you will either have to use the web interface, or code your own interface to the API to work with SMS messages. I did try sending an SMS while a voice conversation was active. It didn’t send the message until the voice call was over.

Having not used them very much, and it’s not likely the prepaid service I am using supports them anyhow – I didn’t try any MMS messages.

Their API for sending/receiving SMS messages uses the Asterisk Manager interface – with a couple tweaks to the manager permissions there is a lot of potential. With a root shell provided, those tweaks can probably be made. Continue reading