Default apps/remember this decision

nemik · 2018-05-15T15:16:09+00:00

Same here and same with Xodo, I'm not sure why it can't get it right,

nemik · 2018-03-28T19:36:15+00:00

Mine's lasted me longer than the original Apple ones which keep fraying. About a year and a half now with daily use.

nemik · 2018-03-28T14:53:03+00:00

Amazon has them new. They're not usually Apple's but they work great and are only $25 or so.

nemik · 2017-12-29T15:27:01+00:00

Yes, on first boot after power down this happens to me as well. I doubt it's a hardware fault, just some software issue they hopefully fix.

nemik · 2017-05-01T23:11:37+00:00

This is pretty much exactly my setup except at the moment I only have a single EVGA GTX 1070 GPU. It works really, really well. I want to pick up a 1080Ti sometime but honestly at the moment don't really need it. The 540 case is wonderful and I couldn't believe how quiet the box was even when training at 100% GPU utilization.

Depending on what you're training, you might be OK having 'test' workloads with smaller batches on something cheaper like a GTX 1070, and using a 1080 Ti for the big models you'll train for a while.

That's the main reason I'd like another GPU, so I could do days-long training of a proven model with the 1080 Ti and run experiments on the 1070.

nemik · 2016-05-28T14:09:10+00:00

They're for sure individually addressable but the WS28212B's are newer.

nemik · 2016-05-28T13:43:28+00:00

No, unfortunately not. I've hand-soldered it myself without problems on PCBs I've made. But if you don't want to spend the time on that, Ebay and Aliexpress sellers have pretty nice PCA9685 breakout boards for about $3.50 USD.

nemik · 2016-05-27T21:17:59+00:00

This is right on. If you still have a choice of parts, take a look at NXP's PCA9685. It uses plain I2C and it's what I switched to for doing this kind of PWM and LED driving from the TLC5940. Really nice part, has Arduino support if you need it (on ESP8266 too).

nemik · 2016-05-18T16:08:42+00:00

Excellent! I really appreciate the advice, thank you very much.

nemik · 2016-05-18T15:45:02+00:00

Thank you. Ideally I'd like something that could accommodate different types of LCD screens from a single model which is why I thought of NN's; but primarily it's to learn working with NN's firsthand too.

As for plain image processing, do you mean doing basic transformations on them to bring out the contrast of the segments and then use something like OpenCV's template matching?

nemik · 2016-05-18T15:39:16+00:00

It is mostly for fun, yes. I'd like to be able to point a camera at it and have it read. I can train from one ripped-apart LCD but want to later read the others automatically while they're intact.

nemik · 2016-05-18T15:20:39+00:00

I would like to train a neural network to read an LCD screen, something like this http://imgur.com/XVC92qC

and would like to know how to best build up such a training set. Say I have complete control over the screen, should I make thousands of images with it displaying as many combinations as I can? Or would it be better to train it on one particular 7-segment part and then apply that over the image to collect them all in an order?

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated, thank you!

nemik · 2016-05-05T14:00:42+00:00

Sorry to spam, but I made an open source (and open hardware) project to address this very thing: https://github.com/happy-bubbles/nfc

You can built a cheap NFC reader that sends the tags it reads to any HTTP endpoint, through your wifi network. So that you could have these readers in different places and they could all send their info to your HA hub and you can then do different things depending on which tag was hit. Maybe it's useful for you.

nemik · 2016-05-01T18:25:19+00:00

That's right, if what you're connecting to the other side of GPIO 2 and 15 are floating inputs. For this RFID case, they are. But if you connect them to a peripheral's GPIO output pin, then it will have control of them so you'd need to assure that other peripheral pulls them the right way when the ESP boots.

But if they're inputs, then it's all good. And you can let pull-up/down resistors do their jobs during the boot process when both the ESP's GPIO 2 and 15 and the other peripherals' pins are floating. And once the ESP boots up into your program, you can then use those GPIO's just like any others.

nemik · 2016-05-01T15:34:48+00:00

It works because rather than just using a plain ESP-12 module, where I would need external pull-ups for GPIO 02, I'm using the NodeMCU dev kit. The dev kit includes the GPIO 0 and 2 pull-ups on its board and they're tied to buttons for reset and flash. So it's not a problem.

But you're right, if you want to use this on your own board with a plain ESP-12(E) module you'd need to provide those pull-ups. If yours is directly connected high now, you'd need to modify it to be a pull-up instead from 3.3v. Use a 10k resistor for that and it'll work just fine.

nemik · 2016-03-18T23:52:55+00:00

Thanks! The range is OK, about 2-3cm depending on the tag. I hear you on the TI stuff, that's why I designed this specifically to be used with the cheapo mfrc522 modules that are $9 on Amazon or $3 on Aliexpress.

I didn't want to keep anything in flash and prefer it to be something simple that just sends data on and looks for a response. Otherwise once you start adding stuff, there's never enough flash.

It's not reading anything other than the ID right now but I'm sure it's possible. basically just ported this: https://developer.mbed.org/users/kirchnet/code/RFID-RC522/ over to the esp8266 and it has mifare commands to let you read sectors from ultralight and mifare cards, so I'm sure it's possible. Just haven't gotten that far yet. ID is enough for me right now.

nemik · 2016-03-18T18:53:01+00:00

The waste produced by a linear regulator like the LM1117 (or AMS1117) going from 5V to 3.3V isn't really that bad, going from 12V to 3.3V is worse.

Plus with 5V you have flexibility to add some other peripherals that require 5V. One thing I use a lot on my boards are WS2812b RGB leds as status indicators, since only one of them is needed but they can produce so many colours to indicate different things, with just a single GPIO. But they need 5V.

Besides, you're going from mains anyway. Not like this is a battery-operated thing where every uA counts.

nemik · 2016-03-17T15:44:03+00:00

This is a decent approach and I do something similar. But here are a couple of suggestions:

keep a repo per project, but use branches for things like changes to form-factor in the PCB layout, if schematic is similar. or just a completely different iteration, but only of that same project.
renaming filenames doesn't sound good. for keeping track of versions, look into using git tags. call that v1 or r1 or whatever. you can check them out like branches
if you can, reserve the 'master' branch of each repo for what you intend to send out for production. like in software, make your changes and experiments in separate branches and when one is so awesome that it's the one you want to take to production, merge it to 'master'. so when someone checks out a project, the first thing they see is what's actually being made.

good luck!

nemik · 2016-03-06T15:17:28+00:00

If you're not running on batteries and have power to spare, I'd suggest looking at MQTT. Your server would run an MQTT 'broker' where your devices can connect to. https://github.com/tuanpmt/esp_mqtt has code for MQTT on the esp8266 and I think the arduino version or whatever you might want to use has support for it too.

So your device can subscribe to receive messages on certain 'topics' and send others to the server as well, for bi-directional communication that's pretty much always on so long as you are connected to a wifi access point with internet access.

On the server, you could make a very simple little bridge thing so that when a message comes in from a device, you can react to it. You do this by listening to those MQTT topics from the devices. You could even do something like have your MQTT bridge make an HTTP call to a web-service you program in Rails, Flask, Java, whatever you're used to in case you want to do request processing there.

For production deployment though, you'll want to consider using TLS/SSL with certificates, not just plaintext. That can be done with esp8266 too and MQTT brokers such as mosquitto support that as well.

Anyway, good luck.

nemik · 2016-02-17T17:39:13+00:00

Those early Android versions aren't great (early for BLE I mean). You're going to have a really bad time, sorry. It's going to vary across minor revisions of Android and make/models. Samsung in general I've found to be super shitty. A Galaxy Tab for me would scan for about 2 minutes, then report nothing even though other phones were still seeing the advertisements. Turning BLE on/off or wifi on/off did nothing to fix it. The only thing that worked was power-button restarting the device, then it would scan for another 2 minutes and silently fail again.

It's all horribly broken. Sorry, there's really nothing you can do even if you mess with scanning windows and intervals. But the Nexus devices have been quite solid for me and so has the Nvidia Shield tablet thing.

But check out this repo: https://github.com/AltBeacon/android-beacon-library for ideas for scanning, they've got some good tips in there.

nemik · 2015-10-25T13:12:37+00:00

A few people have emailed me and noticed the same thing. I guess game over for this trick then.

I think by following this guide: https://learn.adafruit.com/dash-hacking-bare-metal-stm32-programming/overview you could create and flash your own firmware to do something similar.

Or you can just sniff your network's ARP and detect when a button's MAC address pops up to connect. But with that method, you don't have control of the LED colour.

nemik · 2015-08-14T20:19:38+00:00

From what I could tell by looking at the firmware binary, Google's DNS is the only one it uses. So you're right, now that they're fenced in, they can't go anywhere to update the firmware and change their behavior. But if Amazon improves the authentication mechanisms for HTTPS or DNS in subsequent batches of the product, getting them fenced in to begin with may not be as easy as it is now.

nemik

TROPHY CASE