Code and Life: Programming, electronics & cool tech stuff

Ugreen M.2 NVME drive enclosure with USB-C 3.1 test

I’ve been occasionally doing backups of critical files to an external hard drive (in addition to cloud of course :). However, my nice portable drive was only 500 GB and lately I’ve pushed over 600 GB with my Nikon D7200 RAW files. Time for a new drive! Instead of boring mechanical, I noticed that the very nice NVME SSD with Adata XPG SX8200 Pro with 1 TB capacity was available nearby for just 140€ (ca. $150)!

Commercial alternatives like Samsung T5 cost around 230€ here, so I thought I’d get one of those M.2 enclosures. Unfortunately, the ones with NVME support started from 50€ up in Finnish web stores.

Ugreen to the rescue

When you have something like M.2 enclosure, you know every manufacturer actually puts Chinese electronics inside. Thus, AliExpress seemed like an obvious destination to check out. I’m bit doubtful to order actual NVME drive (there were some cheap flash drives in the past that did not actually have the reported capacity), the enclosure should be fine.

Enter Ugreen, my favorite in AliExpress store. I’ve purchased several chargers from them, many having QuickCharge functionality, and the packaging, quality and everything are always top notch. Therefore I was more than happy to find a range of NVME enclosures from them for just $15-30:

Ugreen M.2 SSD USB enclosures (from Ugreen product page)

Time to order one! Fast forward 2½ weeks of anxious wait…

Unpacking and installing SSD to M.2 enclosure

I got the NVME model which promised up to 10 Gbit/s data rates, and chose the option with extra USB cable as I don’t have USB-C ports on my MB. The package arrived a bit faster than the promised 21-25 days. See the gallery below for glorious images of various stages of setup.

Ugreen Aliexpress package contents — Unboxing of Ugreen M.2 NVME enclosure with USB-C 3.1

Ugreen package opened — Unboxing of Ugreen M.2 NVME enclosure with USB-C 3.1

TrinketMIDI updated with volume control demo

Just a quick update this time: A long while ago I made a post about using Adafruit Trinket without Arduino and later converted that into a TrinketMIDI Github repository for making a MIDI device with ATtiny:

https://github.com/jokkebk/TrinketMIDI

Now thanks to a contribution by Gerhard Zintel, there is now also a MIDI volume device sample code in the repo. If you want to make a MIDI volume controller, it should be pretty easy with the code as well. Enjoy!

Filco Majestouch-2 TK (MX Blue) with Dolch keycaps

Note: The keyboard and keycaps in this article are bought by me and not a review sample. I have, however worked with KeyboardCo in the past and like them a lot in general. But just so you know!

A new keyboard in the house! Namely the Filco Majestouch-2 TK (MX Blue) Always an exciting happening in the family. After typing happily for a couple of years with superbly compact and slim Apple Magic Keyboard (works fine with Windows btw.) at home, and with my Topre Realforce 88UB at work, I thought it would be fun to get a keyboard with the classic clickly MX blues.

My main reason to get Cherries apart from the amazing blue clicky sound is the fact that one can get a wide selection of custom keycaps, very much unlike the Topre ones where you’re pretty much stuck with the keys they came with, or maybe some with Japanese characters.

After some consultation in Geekhack, I decided that out of the options I had available (in Finland pretty much zero apart from some gaming keyboards), Filco would be a good choice. Knowing they stock it, I headed straight to The Keyboard Company website and after some deliberation opted for one in Scandinavian layout — easier to swap here in Finland if I want to switch again. The Filcos are in no way inexpensive, but knowing the amount of time I spend typing, I considered the hourly cost to be quite reasonable.

Unboxing Filco Majestouch

The delivery from KeyboardCo arrived promptly as always, and I decided to shoot a classic unboxing video. Notice the great “Code and Life” logo in the thumbnail! There are no audio comments in the video, but you can hear the clickies quite well.

As an “out of the box” experience, here are my major plusses and minuses list:

Plusses

Very solid build, the case will definitely last a lifetime
Great MX blue typing experience and satisfying sound
Compact layout, it doesn’t expand much outside the keys in any direction
It’s a “no frills” workhorse, not much more to be said!

Minuses

Standard keycaps are quite high, making a wrist support pretty much a must
There’s nothing particularly exciting or special about they look

Correcting image white balance with Python PIL and Numpy

I started writing another blog post about my new keyboard today, and when uploading the unboxing video to my YouTube channel, I realized they have no “auto white balance” option, not in their new or old video editor either. Shoot. After googling for free video editors, I settled on OpenShot.

And guess what? OpenShot doesn’t have a white balance setting either! The author himself said this on Reddit, asking for help to implement it. I was pretty shocked, as it seems like the first filter I would implement myself, and thought “surely it doesn’t take more than five minutes to implement one, right?”. So I did. Well, it took maybe 15 minutes, plus 45 fiddling with Jupyter notebooks to get PIL and numpy commands right.

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view raw White balance.ipynb hosted with ❤ by GitHub

The Python 3 code above basically loads an image (either local if you run it with Jupyter notebook locally, or over network), get a small subportion of it to act as a grey reference, and adjusts color channel balance with two alternate methods: RGB or YCbCr. More advanced versions should be easy to add as well.

You can view the above gist in Github or just copy-paste the code to your own / cloud based notebook to try it out:

https://gist.github.com/jokkebk/7a0feab274356768b515db6b05f124bf

If you don’t have access to anything that can run a ipynb file, you can just take a look at the PDF version of a sample run. Enjoy!

Visit to the Official Raspberry Pi Store in Cambridge

Two weeks ago I had the chance to visit the official Raspberry Pi store in Cambridge. Apart from those living in the UK, I think not many will it that far, so I thought to share my pictures from the visit for you to enjoy (and maybe evaluate whether it’s worth the trip). Enjoy!

The Store

The Raspberry Pi Store is located in the Grand Arcade shopping mall, and on the second floor. Looks nice and official.

Naturally, it houses an excellent selection of the Pi boards. There was 3B-, 3A2, Zero, Zero W, Zero W+, compute modules, Pi 4 of course (with different memory options), all with good availability. To cheapest Zero boards were limited to 1 per customer, much like in web store. All boards had a good choice of cases as well on sale. Very nice.

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Power up your computer wirelessly with Wemos D1 mini

Tired of reaching for that power button? Or perhaps you’d like to be able to turn on your PC when travelling? I sometimes like to do that to access some local files (or software via VNC), but dislike leaving the PC on for days “just in case”. This article explains how you can do it with the $3.50 Wemos D1 mini.

Wake-on-LAN is of course a great idea, but it only works if your PC is physically wired to the router. Wake-on-WLAN theoretically should work for WLAN as well, but here’s a shocking revelation: it usually does not, as it requires your PC to power up your WLAN card for it to receive the magic WLAN packet, and router support. At least I’ve never had a combination of network card and router that would work.

I used to have a nice DIY knock-sensor to PS/2 thingy, but the piezo kept dropping out, and got tired of repeating the required sequence of knocks. So I thought it would be cooler to have just a Bluetooth button I could use to do the same. I had a WLAN enabled Wemos D1 mini board lying around, and it only draws less than 100 mA of power, so I thought to find out if I could make it listen to a “magic packet” and boot up my PC. Turns out it was easier than I even thought!

Note that this project involves opening your PC case and playing around with your motherboard power switch wiring. Everything should be relatively hard to screw up, but if done wrong, you may get electrocuted, you may stick a screwdriver where it shouldn’t go and damage your motherboard or other components, so proceed with your own risk!
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Solid Angles of Planets and Which Planet to Use to Build a Dyson Sphere?

Time for something completely different from my usual electronics projects. This morning I started to wonder (don’t ask why) a couple of fundamental questions:

If you’d convert the planet Mercury to a huge solar panel, would it cover the sun as viewed from earth?
How large portion of sun’s energy you’d get for the project if you started by covering the surface of Mercury with solar panels?
Assuming hyper advanced technology that could do this, would Venus or some other planet in our solar system perhaps be a better target?

The thought experiment initiated from some Science podcast, probably from Anatomy of Next scientist interviews (or BBC’s Tomorrow’s World), which talked about turning Mercury into solar panels or mirrors — essentially a Dyson Swarm.

Mercury is close to sun, so it’s a clear candidate, but I started thinking “If you were an alien (or future human race) with super advanced technology arriving to solar system, which planet would you pick?”. You could of course harvest gas giants for Helium-3 and use fusion energy to do stuff, or have some not-yet-invented energy source. But let’s focus on the giant fusion reactor in the center of our solar system, and look at some numbers.

Basic Data for Planets

If we think of sun as a perfect sphere putting out energy in form of solar radiation to pretty much uniformly to all directions, the amount of radiation reaching a certain planet is a simple function of the planet’s radius and it’s distance from sun (π*r^2 / d). Surely you can quickly google which planet gets the most radiation? Turns out most articles on the internet for laymen focus on energy per unit of area (square feet or meters), and leave out the size of the planet completely. Well, easy to fix! Let’s start with some basic data from NASA’s planetary factsheet:

Planet	Mass (10^24kg)	Diameter (km)	Distance from Sun (10^6 km)
Mercury	0.33	4,879	58
Venus	4.87	12,104	108
Earth	5.97	12,756	150
Mars	0.642	6,792	228
Jupiter	1898	142,984	779
Saturn	568	120,536	1,434
Uranus	86.8	51,118	2,873
Neptune	102	49,528	4,495
Pluto	0.0146	2,370	5,906

How Big Do Planets Look From The Sun?

Now as all planets are really far away from the sun compared to their radius and diameter, I’m just doing a shortcut and calculating their angle from sun as just the ratio of diameter and distance, owing to the fact that sin(x) ≈ x for very small values of x (second coefficient of Taylor series expansion is x^3/9 so with these numbers we’ll get about 20 significant digits correct). Calculating diameter/distance shows that even the largest planet from the sun, Jupiter, is just 184 microradians, that is 0.000184 radians wide when viewed from the sun! Full sky would be 3.14 radians, so there’s some way to go!
Continue reading Solid Angles of Planets and Which Planet to Use to Build a Dyson Sphere?

DIY Bluetooth Keyboard Breakout for $10

You could get an excellent Bluetooth keyboard controller from Adafruit called Bluefruit EZ-Key which allowed super easy creation of projects that sent keyboard presses (for example a gamepad) just by connecting some switches to the pins. However, the EZ-Key cost $20 and is now discontinued. And in any case, Bluetooth-capable devboards are now available from AliExpress for a few dollars, so $20 today feels on the steep side. “Could it be done cheaper?” I wondered…

I have honestly about a dozen cheap wireless devboards lying around, many based on ESP8266 which only have Wi-Fi, but some also with ESP32 which includes Bluetooth. I spent some time trying to configure a Chinese ZS-040 serial Bluetooth module to function as a keyboard, but the AT command set was a very small subset of what the similar HC-05 / HC-06 modules have. After an evening of trying, I decided to give up on that. There are instructions how to flash HC-05 modules with RN-42 firmware to get Bluetooth HID capability, but it will require quite a few steps.

I also took a look at esp32_mouse_keyboard project, but for some reason or another, abandoned that avenue. Don’t recall if there were obstacles or the project was still incomplete a year ago, might also be that the ESP32 only had BT LE which technically didn’t support HID (Human Interface Device). Throw me a comment if you have that working!

Meanwhile, another idea dawned to me:

A Cheap Bluetooth Keyboard Must Contain A Bluetooth Module

Enter the wonders of AliExpress: While you cannot source an easy BT keyboard module from US under $20, you can get a full mini Bluetooth keyboard for $9.50 (at time of writing) including postage! This package ought to contain:

A fully compliant Bluetooth board that pairs with iOS, Android and PC devices
Full functioning keyboard and case
Presumably, a battery and a way to charge it

Sounds a too good deal to be true? Well, let’s find out! The keyboard has a solid metal backplate that is easily screwed open with micro cross head screwdriver. Once inside, it reveals a very professional layout with a flat ribbon cable (or “FCC cable”) coming from the mechanical part into the controller module, And a small (most likely LiPo) battery.

Taking the tape off and turning the board around reveals a bit spacious, but very professional looking PCB with clear markings. There are easily usable on/off switch and connect button on the PCB, a connector for the keyboard switches, and obviously some kind of microcontroller wired to the connector, as well as another smaller chip that is most likely a voltage regulator or charging chip.

I Googled around to find out if the “YC1026” MCU would have a datasheet to help me along the way, but unfortunately I only got Chinese web pages (most likely the manufacturer) without any documentation. Time to dig out my trusty Picotech 2000 scope and do some old-fashioned reverse engineering!
Continue reading DIY Bluetooth Keyboard Breakout for $10

$8 Bluetooth automation button for Raspberry Pi Zero W

This project was born as a sidetrack of another one (I’m planning on building a $10 DIY Bluetooth page turning pedal for my piano and iPad sheet music app, similar to PageFlip Butterfly). I was looking if AliExpress would have bluetooth pedals, which they don’t — it seems Chinese vendors are REALLY good at copying products but there is little new product innovation combining something as simple as a bluetooth keyboard sending one or two keys with a pedal (two items that they do have)! But while searching, I found this inexpensive gadget (in case the product is removed, you might just search for “bluetooth remote” at AliExpress.com):

So what is it? It’s an $8 disc with multimedia buttons that pairs with your smartphone and you can use it for example in car to control your music. But maybe it would pair with my Raspberry Pi W which has integrated bluetooth as well? Well it costs about nothing to find out!

Fast forward about two weeks and it arrived. I did not try to use it for its intended purpose, but instead went straight to pair it with my Raspberry Pi Zero W. Turns out the pairing process was quite painless, you can follow for example LifeHacker’s tutorial for pairing quite easily. And it goes a little something like this (your MAC address might vary, just look for output after “scan on”):

# bluetoothctl
power on
agent on
scan on
connect FF:FF:00:45:8D:FF
trust FF:FF:00:45:8D:FF

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Hands-on review of IKALOGIC SQ200

Most electronics DIY projects I’ve worked in the past have involved digital communication protocols such as USB, UART or PS/2. Sometimes when first twiddling with a new protocols, everything works nicely. Other times, things don’t quite work the way they should. In the latter case, a logic analyzer is an invaluable tool, essentially a multi-channel logger of digital signals, which you can use to hopefully pinpoint where things are not going as they should. Nowadays most of these are connected to PC, so you can capture a piece of communications between two devices, and analyze what is happening with a dedicated software.

I started my logic analysis with the inexpensive Bus Pirate, but after a while also got Saleae Logic unit I used to view the PS/2 traffic in my knock sensor project. Later on, I have gotten the PicoScope 2208B which has both analog oscilloscope functionality, as well as digital logic analysis capabilities.

So when I was contacted by IKALOGIC, the makers of ScanaQuad series of logic analyzers, who offered to send me a unit to try out in return for a review, I though I was in a good position to give it a spin and also have previous experience to compare it against. I also had a project in mind to test drive the SQ200 unit I got: my recent MIDI-USB adapter, which is a combination of slow 32 KHz serial signals, and quite fast USB signalling.

Note: I received the review unit from Ikalogic without cost, but with freedom to form my own opinion about the device. I’m giving praise where it’s due, but not pulling any punches where something will nag me or compare unfavorably against the devices I’ve had first-hand experience in the past!

Unboxing the ScanaQuad SQ200

The unit arrived well packaged, and inside the plastic wrapping I uncovered a matte black cardboard box with the unit name. A grade above no-name Chinese vendors, but of course not an iPhone “unwrapping ceremony” kind of thing either. Inside, there was the unit, USB cord and logic probes neatly packed (click for larger images).

There’s nothing complicated in taking the unit into use: Just attach the USB cable, the probes, and you’re set. Build quality of the unit is very good, with grey matte surface with nice finishing, four screws and a product spec sticker on the backside, and logo, markings and a power/activity LED on top.

Size-wise, the SQ200 is slightly larger than the very compact Logic unit I have from Saleae (it’s an old model, don’t recall the exact model code), which I rate as the gold standard in product casing, with Apple-esque metal feel (aluminum?) and solid construction. The Saleae unit actually has 8 channels despite it’s smaller size. On the comparison image you can also see PicoScope 2208B with 16-channel MSO capability. Compared to that, both IKALOGIC and Saleae units are quity tiny (still, the palm-sized 2208B is extremely compact as well, given the 2 high frequency analog channels and waveform generator).

Continue reading Hands-on review of IKALOGIC SQ200