Category Archives: Raspberry Pi

Pirate Audio Line Out For Raspberry Pi

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Pirate Audio Line Out Device

Here’s a fun little project. This is the Pimoroni Pirate Audio Line Out Device .  Pimoroni sells several devices including a 3watt amp, a speaker, and a headphone amp but I chose the Line Out Device for home stereo use.

You could make a headphone amp and power it from a small charging brick and with a wireless Raspberry Pi (Pi Zero W) you could use your phone as a hotspot and have the most original “Walkman” on the block.

So what you need essentially is:

  1. Raspberry Pi – Get the Pi Zero W (W = WiFi) – links just below
  2. Pirate Audio Line Out Board
  3. SD Card – I use SanDisk cards 16 or 32 GB
  4. Micro USB power cable – you have one laying around already
  5. Y adapter cable to hook Line Out to your stereo.

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Rotary Encoder on Raspberry Pi

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IQ Audio DAC+ Rotary Encoder On Raspberry Pi B+

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This is a quick tutorial on how to add a rotary encoder to a Raspberry Pi with an IQAudio DAC+. There were bits and pieces of this on the web but nobody has a Barney style tutorial and that’s what this is.

The assumption is that you have a Raspberry Pi and IQAudioDac that plays music. And now you want to control the volume manually.

And I’m making the assumption that when you got your IQAudio DAC that you soldered on the header pins they sent with it. You’ll need to do that. Follow the directions on page 30 of their user guide.

First get the rotary encoder and some female to female jumpers from Adafruit.

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Raspberry Pi’s and Solar and Stuff

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Venus Firmware

Problem:  My Victron Solar Charge Controller and Victron Battery Monitor are bluetooth only.  This makes it very difficult to observe the status of my solar power system while I am away from home.

 

How I deal with this is to take a laptop and run VictronConnect software on it and then I can VPN into my network and then VNC into the laptop and observe VictronConnect.  It works well 90% of the time with the 10% downtime as being the most important times I actually need to observe it.  And it ties up an entire laptop which must be kept powered on and within bluetooth range of the Solar board.

Solution:  Victron has software or more accurately firmware that emulates their Color Control GX / Venus GX monitoring devices and it runs on a Raspberry Pi.  A Venus GX costs nearly $300 and a Raspberry Pi costs about $30.  It even runs on older Raspberry Pi’s which are even cheaper. I’ll be using a Raspberry Pi 3 for this.

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It’s The End Of The World As We Know It – I Feel Fine

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This last week or two has been one of the most bizarre in my 57 years however the chaos all seems confined to Social Media and Media in general.  People are still nice, commerce is still chugging along.  If we didn’t own TV’s and computers we’d never know much was up.

In an attempt to get the REAL story I’ve been creeping on the Police Scanner and the State medical communications.  It’s not been very interesting.  Boring in fact.  If there is a coverup, the people with the radios are covering up their coverup.

Anyway, like REM says, “I Feel Fine”.  Not just figuratively but literally as well.  I’m ready for the whole of humanity to let the crazy out.  I have ample food, a gun with bullets, clean water, communication devices, and alternative power. And most importantly it would seem……..toilet paper.

Bring it on!
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Best Tech of 2019?

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So here it is, New Years Eve…….I’m up at 1 AM and reading “Best Tech of The Year” articles.  Either one of two things has happened.  Either nothing tremendously wonderful happened in Tech this year or the imagination and writing skills of journalists are now nearly non-existent.

Every list shows the latest cell phones or drones, or gaming device or newest TV offering.  I’m sorry, but that just isn’t that inspiring to me.   I may be a dinosaur but newer is not always better.  Case in point.  Look up the home entertainment category and most lists have some SONOS player.  That’s a networked streaming audio system.

I’ve been using Logitechmediaserver so many years it isn’t funny.  It streams Spotify, Tidal, TuneIn, Pandora (I dropped my Pandora subscription) and many, many more services.

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Why Is Radio So Important To Me?

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Thought I’d do some philosophical stuff today instead of technical stuff today.  Beware.

One of the things that first fascinated me as a little kid (besides baseball and before women) was radio.  Specifically short wave radio.  We had a world band radio in the house and it had the TV audio band.  I used to think that was so cool.  Then along came Citizens Band (CB) radio.  Oh God how I loved that.   I really find that odd because now at my advanced age of 57, and the fact I’m a licensed Ham, I really don’t care to talk.

But oh how I love to listen.  I almost don’t care what I’m listening to as long as I’m LISTENING.

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GOES satellites

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Above you working silently are Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES).  They are operated by NOAA and are essentially weather satellites.

Now here’s the current configuration above.  Seeing as how I live on the East Coast of the US I aim at GOES-16 or GOES East.   Getting the signal is a bit of a challenge and requires some special hardware.

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AirSpyHF+ Spyserver on Raspberry Pi

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AirSpyHF+ on Spyserver on Raspberry Pi

What is a Spyserver and why do you NEED one?  A spyserver takes an RTL-SDR software radio and allows it to be used over the network or controlled from the internet if you allow.

 

For this project I’m using the AirSpyHF+ ($199 USD).  The AirSpyHF+ is probably the BEST HF SDR radio you can get.  This project will let us operate from about 9kHz to about 31 MHz where AM radio, and Short Wave Radio reside.

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How To Keep RTL_433 Alive For Your Home Automation Using Supervisor

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I run RTL_433 to push data from several sensors and a motion detector to an MQTT server for home automation.  For some reason as of late it is just not that stable. Could even be a hardware failure with the dongle….I dunno.  I generally just run the program command inside a terminal on the raspberry pi it is installed on and just walk away.  When it crashes I have to log back in the Pi and re-run the command.   Un-cool.

The command I use specifically is this:

rtl_433 -F json -M utc | mosquitto_pub -t home/rtl_433 -l

Again, that pushes data found on 433.920 MHz devices to publish a topic on my MQTT server called “home/rtl_433”.

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Flash Outlets with LED Ring With Tasmota

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Found these cool little outlets on Amazon and verified they can be flashed with Tasmota Over The Air (OTA).  They are technically called “Home Awesome Breathing Light Smart Light.

They are also sold under the name TMRLife Plug

They are another made in China device that is controlled via phone app and I generally don’t trust such things.  Flashing the device with Open Source firmware is MUCH better for securities sake.

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