A friend recently started a project to remotely boot his router (which tends to hang randomly) with Raspberry Pi. Unfortunately, the rpi-rf tool was not quite recognizing the signals. I pitched in to help, and as he did not have access to an oscilloscope, but had an Arduino Uno, I thought maybe I could figure it out with that.
Fast forward a few weeks later, I have been experimenting with four methods analyzing my own Nexa 433 MHz remote controller:
Having learned a lot, I thought to document the process for others to learn from, or maybe even hijack to analyze their smart remotes. In this first part, I will cover the process with Arduino Uno, and the following posts will go through the other three methods.
Starting Simple: Arduino and 433 MHz receiver
Having purchased a rather basic Hope Microelectronics (RFM210LCF-433D) 3.3V receiver for the 433 MHz spectrum signals, it was easy to wire to Arduino:
Connect GND and 3.3V outputs from Arduino to GND and VCC
Connect Arduino PIN 8 to DATA on the receiver
Connect a fourth "enable" pin to GND as well to turn the receiver on
I wrote a simple Arduino script that measures the PIN 8 voltage every 50 microseconds (20 kHz), recording the length of HIGH/LOW pulses in a unsigned short array. Due to memory limitation of 2 kB, there is only space for about 850 edges, and the maximum length of a single edge is about 65 000 samples, i.e. bit more than three seconds.
Once the buffer is filled with edge data or maximum "silence" is reached, the code prints out the data over serial, resets the buffer and starts again, blinking a LED for 5 seconds so you know when you should start pressing those remote control buttons. Or perhaps "press a button", as at least my Nexa pretty much fills the buffer with a single key press, as it sends the same data of about 130 edges a minimum of 5 times, taking almost 700 edges!
It also turned out that the "silence" limit is rarely reached, as the Hope receiver is pretty good at catching stray signals from other places when there is nothing transmitting nearby (it likely has automatic sensitivity to "turn up the volume" if it doesn't hear anything).
#define inputPin 8 // Which pin to monitor
void setup() {
pinMode(LED_BUILTIN, OUTPUT);
Serial.begin(38400);
}
#define BUFSIZE 850
#define WAIT_US 50 // 20 kHz minus processing overhead
unsigned short buf[BUFSIZE];
short pos = 0;
bool measure = false;
void loop() {
if(measure) {
unsigned char data = digitalRead(inputPin) == HIGH ? 1 : 0;
if(data == (pos&1))
pos++; // data HIGH and odd pos or LOW and even -> advance
if(buf[pos] > 65000 || pos >= BUFSIZE) {
measure = false;
return; // avoid overflow
}
buf[pos]++;
delayMicroseconds(WAIT_US); // Wait until next signal
} else { // end measure
digitalWrite(LED_BUILTIN, LOW); // LED OFF = dumping
Serial.println();
Serial.print("N =");
Serial.println(pos, DEC);
for(int i=0; i<pos && i<BUFSIZE; i++) {
Serial.print(buf[i], DEC);
if(buf[i] > 100000/WAIT_US)
Serial.println(); // 100 ms delays get a newline
else
Serial.print(' ');
buf[i] = 0; // reset
}
pos = 0; // restart
measure = true;
for(int i=0; i<10; i++) { // 5s blink before next measurement
digitalWrite(LED_BUILTIN, (i&1) ? LOW : HIGH);
delay(500);
}
Serial.println("\nGO");
digitalWrite(LED_BUILTIN, HIGH); // LED ON = measuring
}
}
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.
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:
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!
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
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.
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:
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.
