Udev rules for CH340 serial devices

Udev rules for CH340 serial devices
I like to fiddle with Micropython, particularly on the Wemos D1 Mini, because these are such a neat form factor. Unfortunately, they have a cheap CH340 serial adapter on board, which means that from the perspective of Linux these devices are all functionally identical – there’s no way to identify one device from another. This by itself would be a manageable problem, except that the device names assigned to these devices aren’t constant: depending on the order in which they get plugged in (and the order in which they are detected at boot), a device might be /dev/ttyUSB0 one day and /dev/ttyUSB2 another day.
read more →

To sleep or not to sleep?

To sleep or not to sleep?
Let’s say you have a couple of sensors attached to an ESP8266 running MicroPython. You’d like to sample them at different frequencies (say, one every 60 seconds and one every five minutes), and you’d like to do it as efficiently as possible in terms of power consumption. What are your options? If we don’t care about power efficiency, the simplest solution is probably a loop like this: import machine lastrun_1 = 0 lastrun_2 = 0 while True: now = time.
read more →

I see you have the machine that goes ping…

We’re all looking for ways to keep ourselves occupied these days, and for me that means leaping at the chance to turn a small problem into a slightly ridiculous electronics project. For reasons that I won’t go into here I wanted to generate an alert when a certain WiFi BSSID becomes visible. A simple solution to this problem would have been a few lines of shell script to send me an email…but this article isn’t about simple solutions!
read more →

Using a TM1637 LED module with CircuitPython

CircuitPython is “an education friendly open source derivative of MicroPython”. MicroPython is a port of Python to microcontroller environments; it can run on boards with very few resources such as the ESP8266. I’ve recently started experimenting with CircuitPython on a Wemos D1 mini, which is a small form-factor ESP8266 board. I had previously been using Mike Causer’s micropython-tm1637 for MicroPython to drive a 4 digit LED display. I was hoping to get the same code working under CircuitPython, but when I tried to build an image that included the tm1637 module I ran into:
read more →