Monthly Archives: November 2018

AVR basics: Using cheap ultrasonic rangefinders

As part of my cunning plan to develop ‘smart’ sensors, I’ve been playing around with infrared rangefinders (and may do a post on those soon). But the first kind of rangefinder I ever tried was the ultrasonic type, so it was time to reacqauint myself. And, in particular, I wanted to see if I could do this on the cheap…. Read more »

Installing Sigrok under Ubuntu on the Alpha

One of the tools I knew I was going to want straight away on my new LattePanda Alpha is Sigrok – or to be more precise, the PulseView logic analyser tool. I already have this running on my old Windows 7 laptop, but who the hell wants to use that, right? However, Sigrok is created by hackers for hackers and… Read more »

LattePanda Alpha: a platform for hacking

A while back I decided that it would be good to have a Linux machine dedicated to my various electronics, robotics and other maker-y projects. I have an Ubuntu VM on my iMac, which is all well and good. But being able to physically plug stuff into the machine is handy. I trawled the web for small form factor PCs,… Read more »

Into the cloud with a Pine64, NextCloud and DietPi

Dropbox is all well and good – good enough, in fact, that I pay for it. But it does have occasional irritations. And if you want to play around with cloud-based stuff, what could be better than having a cloud of your own? I’ve just received a LattePanda Alpha single board computer on which I’m running Ubuntu 18.04. I won’t… Read more »