Raspberry Pi 4 setup notes
I have recently bought a Raspberry Pi 4 (RPi4) and wasted more time setting it up than I had planned for. These are just some notes for my own use in the hope that they might be useful the next time that I need to touch the device (and as a bonus they might be useful to other people as well).
For context: I am using the device to compile “userland” and kernel module code (C++/C) directly on the device (i.e. compilation should not take longer than absolutely necessary and when the device crashes it should restart as quickly as possible). I am using the device mostly “headless” accessing it via SSH and Samba but I have also installed a desktop that I can activate/remotely access via VNC-Viewer when needed. I don’t care about the form factor and some additional SSD dangling on a cable doesn’t bother me a bit.
IMPORTANT:
- Create a backup image of your “hard disk” (or SD card) as soon as you have your correctly customized system! Some of the setup steps take a long time and you DO NOT want to repeat those when your disk gets corrupted or when you need to rollback some “update” that does not work. Note: I’ve had to restore the Raspberry boot disk more often in a single week than I had to reinstall Windows in the past 10 years! It seems that the boot SD card (or SSD) may get corrupted quite randomly – leaving your device in an non-bootable state! At which point it is crucial to have an easily restorable backup. Test that your backup actually works (before you need it)! I’d recommend to have two “identical” drives so that you can always test the backup using the redundant drive. Use whatever backup software you like but *IMMEDIATELY* test if the backup that you made actually works (see “Create a backup..” section below)!
GENERAL HINTS:
- Before assembling the case of your RPi4, take off the sticker at the back of the cheap chinese CPU fan that came with it. Put a drop of lithium grease on the fan’s axle before you put back the sticker. (otherwise the fan will soon have startup-problems, make screeching noises, any maybe have undesirable effects on your supply voltage – at ~200mA that fan is probably one of the more power hungry attachments to your RPi4 and it might draw even more while not spinning freely).
- Working with a class-10 micro SD is unbearably slow. Using an SSD (even a slow one) via USB instead, makes a huge difference. From an SSD the desktop runs passably (even with only 1GB RAM) – which was totally unusable when booting from the SD card. So instead of wasting money on a micro SD card that you might end up not using, directly go for an SSD. I’ve read reports that sometimes SSD’s seem to be causing “low voltage” issues, but the two SSDs that I tried so far both drew between 0.06-0.10A which should be handled easily by the RPi4.
- In spite of your intention of using the device “headless” you’ll find yourself directly plugging in the display more often than you care to remember! (Whenever the device fails to boot or connect to the network, there is just no other way than to plug in a display to see what is going on.). Believe me, fiddling with the DVI connector in the back of your display to toggle back and forth between PC/Raspberry gets annoying very quickly. So check if your display already allows to connect two devices at the same time, or while shopping for that riddiculous micro-HDMI cable, make sure to also get a respective DVI/HDMI switch. (In principle the same applies to the USB cables used for keyboard and mouse.)
- Install a regular “desktop” distribution of the Raspberry OS: A “lite” version might save you a few GB initially (who cares since the SSD has probably more space than you’ll ever use) and you’ll probably end up wasting extra time manually installing that desktop stuff later anyway (e.g. when you need the “SD Card Copier”). Also on the desktop the setup of the initial WiFi connection can be done easily at a click of a button rather than having to dive into respective config files.
- As a first step you should directly connect a display to check that a newly installed device starts up properly (until you have a correctly functioning network setup). The device starts with the typical Linux boot messages (screens full of them). So if the screen stays blank then check that you did use the leftmost HDMI connector on the Raspberry, if that is plugged in correctly then there is probably a configuration issue (see “/boot/config.txt”) that causes the display to not recognize the device or vice versa (The Raspberry will turn off video output completely when it does not detect the display!). Plug your SD card (or SSD) into some PC and you can edit the “config.txt” without using the Raspberry: Hard-code a resolution that you know your display can handle – if that doesn’t help start uncommenting the various “HDMI” related entries (e.g. start with “hdmi_force_hotplug=1”).
- If ever you get stuck on the desktop login screen, press “CTRL-ALT-F1” to get a regular terminal window (“CTRL-ALT-F7” will take you back) : stupidly “raspi-config” allows to select “boot into desktop” even if respective x11 stuff isn’t installed on the device – but it will not automatically install required missing components; i.e. the desktop login screen may show even when the desktop is NOT available!
- If for some reason the main boot sequence gets stuck, it may be usefull to add the following text at the end of the existing line in the “cmdline.txt” (on the boot partition): ” init=/bin/bash” This causes the Raspberry to directly boot into a bash, thus giving access to the device.
- For console users: Add alias names for commonly used commands in .bashrc – usefull when the same lengthy commands are repeatedly needed.
Network setup
Run “ifconfig” to find out the MAC addresses of the network adapters (eth0 and wlan0) in case you need that information to configure your LAN’s router / DHCP server.
When booting to the desktop, you may just use the respective widget in the status bar to directly connect to some Wifi access point (this has the advantage that you’d immediately notice if your Wifi access point had crashed).
Otherwise first connect via LAN cable and edit the “eth0” related entry in /etc/network/interfaces (e.g. give it an IP and gateway address that works for your LAN). Run ‘raspi-config’ to activate and configure the SSID of your Wifi – if any (note: the ‘raspi-config’ UI does not show the SSID eventhough is actually is saved). Run ‘ifconfig’ to verify if your wlan0 adapter has an IP address. There may be more to it than this if you have specific security requirements – which I don’t have.
Use SSH and VNC
First run “raspi-config” and activate “SSH” and “VNC” (if you want to remotely use the desktop) in the respective “interfacing” section. (You can easily test if ssh works by opening a respective local connection directly on the Raspberry in some terminal.) If Win10 then is not able to establish a respective connection, then it is likely a Windows problem: “Putty” (SSH client) and “VNC-Viewer” both just DO NOT work when started with regular user permissions. But when started with “Administrator” rights those issues just disapear! What a POS! (also the respective apps may need to be given rights in whatever firewall is used..)
Install the OS on an SSD
When I had first installed the standard desktop version image of the Raspberry OS on a Samsung 32GB class 10 SD card, it took about 3 minutes to boot to the login screen. And that screen then was so unresponsive, that it took 10 secs to just change from the name-input to the password-input field. Similarly Chromium was so slow as to make it utterly unusable.
Booting that same image from a very slow SSD (one that I still had left and which I connected with some cheap USB-adapter cable – with no additional power supply) takes less than a minute and booting into a shell is obviously much faster. (I did meanwhile experience various disk corruptions and I don’t know if those are due to my bad quality SSD, due to some power supply issue, or something else.)
My fairly recent OS distro might have been capable to boot from SSD out of the box (I did not check), so the first step should have been to directly write the downloaded Raspberry OS image to an SSD and check it the Raspberry boots from it (without even bothering with an SD card).
Unfortunatly I first started with a SD card and later followed the below steps that may or may not have been necessarry (this updated my linux kernal from “5.4.83-v71” to “5.10.25-v7l+”..). These steps might be needed in case the bootloader in the RPi4’s eeprom is too old.
sudo apt update
sudo apt full-upgrade
sudo rpi-update
[reboot]
sudo rpi-eeprom-update -d -a
[reboot]
sudo raspi-config
[select “latest” boot rom in “boot options” in “raspi-config”; also select that when SD and USB disk are plugged in
try to boot from USB first – or whatever preference you might have]
Use the “SD card copier” to clone the SD card onto the SSD (or try some other tool if you are feeling lucky).
Create a backup of your “SD card” (or SSD)
If you can connect two drives at the same time then the “SD Card Copier” from the Pi Desktop’s “Accessory” menu (you’ll not be able to use this with the “lite” OS) might be usefull to directly clone a disk (“sudo apt install piclone” to install the tool if necessary).
I like to have my backups as “image” files on my PC and I initially tried to use “Win32DiskImager” to create / restore respective images – but for some reason respective restored images usually failed to boot (e.g. during boot it might cause countless error messages: “EXT4-fs error… -ext4_find_entry:1536:inode#…: unable to read itable block.” or a respectivly restored image did not boot at all). I then tried to create an image using https://github.com/framps/raspiBackup – but that created a corrupt gzipped image file that did not even setup the partitions when restored via “Win32DiskImager”.
The last tool I tried was the free version of “Macrium Reflect” and the respective image could actually be restored to a different disk without any problems so I guess I’ll be using that for now. (I prefer to create a backup while a disk is offline, i.e. while there is no Raspberry OS using it.)
Add desktop to the lite OS version
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends xserver-xorg
sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends xinit
sudo apt-get install raspberrypi-ui-mods
sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends raspberrypi-ui-mods lxsession
Share folders via Samba
I am copying files between my Win10 PC and the Raspberry via folders that are shared on the Raspberry. Samba seemed like a good enough solution for my needs and I am always using the same “pi” user:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install samba samba-common smbclient sudo smbpasswd -a pi
in case of config changes the respective server will need to be restarted:
sudo service smbd restart
sudo service nmbd restart
Ditch/or rename the existing /etc/samba/smb.conf and replace it with something like this (adapt to whatever folders you want to share);
[global]
workgroup = WORKGROUP
security = user
force user = pi
encrypt passwords = yes
client min protocol = SMB2
client max protocol = SMB3
[SambaTest1]
comment = Samba-Test1
path = /home/public
read only = no
[SambaTest2]
comment = Samba-Test2
path = /home/pi
read only = no
public = yes
writeable = yes
browsable = yes
create mask = 0777
directory mask = 0777
With the above configuration Win10 can access respective folders. Use “Map network drive..” by right-clicking on “My PC” in Explorer and enter the path, e.g. \192.168.1.123\SambaTest1
Check the “Connect using different credentials” checkbox so that you can enter “pi” as the user name. If the connection fails, then this is likely the doing of your firewall software. Open whatever Firewall you are using and check the connections that it has recently blocked. If you see the IP of your Raspberry, then make sure to educate the firewall that this is a trusted device.
Build kernel from source
This is a point that may not be relevant for everybody. But since I want to build my own kernel module (aka device driver) I need the matching kernel sources to the kernel that is actually used. Since I don’t want to cross compile on some other device I am using this approach here directly on the Raspberry (see https://www.stephenwagner.com/2020/03/17/how-to-compile-linux-kernel-raspberry-pi-4-raspbian/ ):
sudo apt install raspberrypi-kernel-headers build-essential bc git wget bison flex libssl-dev make libncurses-dev
sudo apt update
sudo apt install git
mkdir kernel
cd kernel
git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux
cd linux
KERNEL=kernel7l
sudo make bcm2711_defconfig
sudo make menuconfig
sudo make -j4 zImage modules dtbs
sudo make modules_install
sudo cp arch/arm/boot/dts/*.dtb /boot/ sudo cp arch/arm/boot/dts/overlays/*.dtb* /boot/overlays/
sudo cp arch/arm/boot/dts/overlays/README /boot/overlays/
sudo cp arch/arm/boot/zImage /boot/kernel-RT.img
add in “/boot/config.txt”:
kernel=kernel-RT.img
reboot
digital waveguide based audio synthesis of a piano
https://www.wothke.ch/webPiano/
After my past retro “SID chip” audio synthesis experiments I thought it might be interesting to try out what more modern audio synthesis approaches have to offer. It isn’t a Steinway grand piano yet, but contrary to a Steinway it can be turned into a bell tower with the turn of a knob 🙂
The implementation is based on Balázs Bank’s thesis: “Physics-Based Sound Synthesis of the Piano” (see http://home.mit.bme.hu/~bank/thesis/pianomod.pdf) and the various papers that are cross referenced in that document. I highly recommend reading Bank’s thesis since it gives a much broader overview of the subject matter than the more specialized research papers usually do.
I have to admit that my math proficiency is somewhat rusty and I seem to have forgotten much of what I had once learned more than 20 years ago. In addition, much of the audio signal processing theory is simply new to me. Consequently some of the terminology used in the respective papers was totally alien to me (some of it still is) and it sometimes felt like reading a chinese text automatically translated by Google. I recommend Julius O. Smith’s page here (the “PHYSICAL AUDIO SIGNAL PROCESSING” section in particular), which provides a ton of background information useful in this context: https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~jos/Welcome.html
My “webPiano” page should work in any browser that supports WebAudio. However the UI was done for desktop computers and the layout will probably not work well on small smartphone displays.
Joomla in hindsight
It’s been some years that I had played a bit with Joomla (at the time version 2.5 was “the thing”). Since it was only kind of a learning experience and the resulting pages were of a hobby project nature, I did not spend any money on extensions but used what was available at the time in some “free to use” version. Still I ended up using about half a dozen 3rd party “extensions” (basic “booking” functionality, etc) some of which I had to customize significantly to make them cover my requirements. But the result did what I wanted and it had probably taken less time than if I had programmed everything from scratch myself.
One “doesn’t look a gift horse in the mouth”.. but some of the “Joomla/extensions” code was obviously subpar, and their authors apparently hadn’t even had an idea how to properly overload methods in sub-classes nor had they known the difference between static and non-static methods, etc. .. but I guess you get what you pay for.
I cannot say that I was thrilled by Joomla’s approach to composing pages either .. writing some “article” and putting it into some “menu” structure is easy enough. But having to define separate “modules” elsewhere (e.g. for the included JavaScript files that a specific page might be needing) and then attaching those via tedious/slow admin-GUI “checkbox clicking” to some “menu item” or some placeholder from the site’s template, etc.. Alas, whenever I came back after some month to make just some minor adjustment it always took excessive amounts of time just to remember how those things where actually connected (since much of the stuff comes from the DB it doesn’t help to do a quick text search on the file system to look for something).
Green banana software
Joomla is actively “improved” and there is what looks like a continuous stream of new releases. A look into the respective https://developer.joomla.org/security-centre.html shows that respective releases are not always an improvement and some severe security flaws where actually absent in older versions and then introduced in some “cool new update” (like some “Severity: High” bugs (CVE-2019-10946 that affected versions 3.2.0 through 3.9.4, CVE-2019-9713 that affected versions 3.8.0 through 3.9.3, etc).
Some other software flaws actually go unnoticed for years before they are eventually noticed by the Joomla developers, e.g. “Severity: High” CVE-2017-9933 affects 1.7.3 – 3.7.2. (I can almost hear the 2016 sales pitch of the Joomla acolytes, “what you are still using 2.5.9? you must upgrade to 3.5 immediately! older versions are such a security risk!”.. haha, very funny..)
The depressing thing though is that (even for the officially supported/current Joomla versions there are no separate security patches. Instead the official advice always is to update to the next version – which supposedly fixes the problem. This means that you cannot get the 3 files that fixed a specific bug separately but instead you may get a 10Mb zip file that introduces a ton of other changes at the same time (the only exception seem to be the EOL fixes here: https://docs.joomla.org/Security_hotfixes_for_Joomla_EOL_versions/de ).
Joomla’s versioning and updating policy is weird .. or rather disturbing. Some kind of automated updating support is available in the admin GUI – except that it is “somewhat limited”: My first Joomla instance had been using 2.5.4 and the second one 2.5.9, interestingly their admin-GUI tells me that 2.5.4 should be upgraded to 2.5.5 while my 2.5.9 instance happily tells me that no automatic upgrades are possible. So even if I had ever wanted to update to the last 2.5 version (which I think would have been 2.5.29) then even what should be a minor-sub-version update seems to be something too risky to perform automatically.. seriously?
Regarding security
As indicated above, the software quality of the Joomla core is not that great and
there are tons of more or less severe issues that “pop up” in the various versions. I’d say it is prudent to not expect much with regards to Joomla security and select potential projects accordingly.
From the beginning it is probably a good idea to restrict access as far as possible, e.g. by activating the web server’s basic HTTP authentication for the “/administrator” GUI functionalities.
A Joomla instance isn’t suitable for a “never touch a running system” approach and most sites will probably be trapped in the “update to the very latest version” hamster wheel, thereby volunteering as beta tester for whatever green bananas Joomla wants to field test. (You better not use any 3rd party “extension modules” unless you are absolutely confident that the respective provider will still be there tomorrow to get you an updated version for the next Joomla version – or else you’ll end up rewriting those portions of your site.)
Personally I chose the different approach of just back-merging the code changes for the “Severity: high” Joomla fixes into my old code base. Thus avoiding to find replacements for the long gone “extensions” still available for my old version. (This is of course an absolute no-go and I am most certainly a risk for the Internet and maybe for world peace as well…)
Green banana software meets planned obsolescence
It never fails to amaze me how PHP could ever grow such a large following: The poor design decisions taken in early “versions” are so obvious that even newer versions (thankfully) start to reverse them (see “backward incompatible changes”).
But hey, everybody has the right to design a crappy programming language and then learn from his mistakes. The problem with this crappy language is that it comes with an expiration date: “Each release branch of PHP is fully supported for two years from its initial stable release“.
Like a light-bulb that wants to be replaced after 1000h of use. Only here it works even better.. no need to be broken, let’s replace every 24 month. Add some “backward incompatible changes” and you have a printing machine for money/extra work.
So much wasted opportunities.. just imagine “ANSI C is end of life and all the old programs must be ported to Java8 by the end of the month!”.. splendid, why did nobody think of that one earlier?
So it happens that my Web hoster informed me that “he will no longer be hosting PHP5 by the end of the month and would I please migrate everything to PHP7”. But of course! I had no plans for the weekend anyway, f*** you very much!
Obviously Joomla 2.5 could not know about PHP7 yet and the Joomla support doesn’t want anybody to use those old very dangerous legacy versions anyway. (Support in the Joomla universe means: getting help when migration to the new version went south.)
Spoiler: In spite of the “Joomla support” propaganda – old Joomla 2.5 (with the manually added security patches) can be “easily” ported to PHP7.
- Search for “->$” to find the following indirect variables usage pattern: change “$a->$c[$b]” to “$a->{$c[$b]}” in order to preserve the original semantics in PHP7
- Search for “$key = key($this->_observers)” which no longer works here since the foreach loops no longer update the internal state of the array (add “$key++;” within the foreach loops instead) .
- Replace preg_replace with respective preg_replace_callback based impls.
After this the Joomla instance will start again and you can go after the deprecation warnings (etc) if you want to cleanup properly.
I do not recommend to use an old version – or any Joomla version for that matter (you saw the Joomla security issue tracker)! but if you are desperate..
PlayMOD online chiptune music player
My voyage into the realm of legacy computer music had originally started with my webSID music player and later continued with my extended webUADE version of the uade Amiga music emulator.
I still have fond childhood memories of my respective C64 and Amiga home computers since these devices ultimately triggered my career in software engineering. Whereas most of the capabilities of respective 40 years old home computers obviously look quite lacking from today’s perspective, their audio features have aged rather gracefully and I feel that the audio stuff is much better suited to preserve the nostalgia – e.g. as compared to the blocky pixel graphics or underwhelming computing power.
I later learned that even though the above devices where obviously the best that ever existed (cough), other people share similar nostalgia but with regard to other devices. In many cases emulators for respective devices already existed on some platform and all that was missing were respective ports so that it would be possible to use them on a Web page. Since this is basically the same thing that I had already done for my webSID and webUADE players I started to also port some of the existing 3rd party emulators (many of which I somewhat enhanced in the process).
Over the years the number of respective JavaScript/WebAssembly based music emulators in my toolbox has grown to around 30 and it was time to put them to good use: PlayMOD combines all of “my” Web emulators within one UI to provide “all-in-one” online browsing and music playback for some of the largest “legacy computer music” collections available on the Internet:
The modland.com collection contains about 455’000 music files from various legacy home computer and game consoles and the vgmrips.net collection adds another 62’000 primarily arcade system songs. The PlayMOD project derives its name from “module files” (MOD) music – which signifies computer music that has been created using some kind of tracker software (the term “tracker” goes back to Karsten Obarski’s Ultimate SoundTracker on the Commodore Amiga from 1987). However, in addition to actual MOD-files the used collections also provide a large number of other music formats, e.g. many of the older stuff would be usually referred to as “chiptune music” today. You may use the Basics tab directly on the PlayMOD page for more background information.
When looking for a MOD or chiptune player, PlayMOD provides the best coverage available due to its combined use of different emulators/player engines. PlayMOD is probably the only comprehensive cross-platform online player in existence today.
There are hundreds of different legacy music file formats involved and the emulators available in PlayMOD currently allow to play more than 99.9% of what is available in the two collections. This avoids having to manually find and install a suitable player for each exotic format (which otherwise may be a tedious task, and a player may not even exist for the platform of your choice, e.g. see Ixalance).
The PlayMOD web page allows to browse the folder/files available in the respective collections but it does not host any of the music files. In order to play a song, the user’s browser will directly retrieve the selected file from the respective collections (see links above) and then play it. Consequently the page will only be able to play the music while the ‘modland’ and ‘vgmrips’ servers are available.
The respective modland and vgmrips collections document the evolution of computer music during the past 40+ years. Having everything consolidated in one place allows to easily compare the capabilities of respective legacy sound systems (e.g. by comparing how the compositions of the same composer sounded on different platforms) or to just indulge in reminiscences.
The PlayMOD user interface is based on the design/codebase originally created by JCH for his DeepSID. I wasn’t keen on creating a UI from scratch so I am glad that I could reuse JCH’s already existing stuff – eventhough it had to be heavily modified. The PlayMOD UI is still in a prototype/proof-of concept stage and the quality of the used meta data (e.g. composer information) leaves a lot to be desired due to it having been automatically generated based on questionable quality raw data.
Obviously, legacy computer music could also be preserved by just creating some recording from the original hardware, and as can be seen on youtube, many people already use that approach. Indeed the approach of using an emulator will not always be as accurate as the use of the original HW (on the other hand recordings may suffer from lossy data compression – a problem that an emulation does not have). As compared to the original music files, recordings may use up much more memory and consequently network bandwidth, but today that isn’t the issue that it might have been 10 years ago. However emulation avoids the additional recording/publishing step and new music files can immediately be listened to – without having to wait for somebody with the suitable infrastructure to provide such a recording. (There actually are still “scenes” where people create new music for legacy systems today.)
From a “legacy computer music preservation” perspective the emulation approach also has the benefit that it not only preserves the end result but also the steps taken to achieve it. It allows for interactions that would not be possible with a simple recording. (Mileage may vary depending on the “original” music file format.)
Example: The “Scope” tab in the below screenshot shows the output of the different channels that some “Farbrausch V2” song internally uses to create its stereo output, i.e. an emulation approach allows to look at the “magic” that is happening behind the scenes.
Similarly a respective emulation could still be tweaked during playback, e.g. by turning certain features on/off, or by using different chip models.
sprinkler WiFi update..
Starting with a little retrospection: So far I had built two sprinkler controllers that I remotely control via a home grown (Java) PC software (see my earlier sprinkler posts).
These devices are based on a cheap ATmega128 micro controller which requires a separate breakout board and a bit of soldering to get going. With some custom PCB this would actually be a neat chip to use – with more IO pins than you’ll probably ever use. But with the breakout board it uses quite a lot of space and it gets very annoying when one of them burns out (e.g. due to some surge on the power grid) and you quickly need to come up with a replacement.
The devices then use a Si4432 transceiver to communicate with the PC application. The Si4432 theoretically should have an impressive “best case” range and is fairly inexpensive too. As always, solid obstacles (like walls) are the limiting factor for the real range of this transceiver: In my case the obstacles are two tiled roofs and I am ending up with a maximum range of around 50m-70m.
However I soon found, that the Si4432 is pretty fragile (i.e. these things just keep dying for no obvious reason) and most of the really cheap PCBs use 1.27mm pin spacing which makes it a pain in the ass to replace them or to even hook them up to your 2.54mm prototyping boards. I had therefore opted for a somewhat more expensive version with 2.54mm pin spacing. Unfortunately there seem to be different builds (I already saw three) of very similar looking (blue) PCBs, and to make things worse some of these are just incompatible. So when I wanted to just add one more device to my existing zoo I very annoyingly ended up replacing all existing transceiver PCBs because the new version that was sold at that time no longer worked with the older models I already had. Also transmission speed of the Si4432 is not that great (to some degree that may be my fault since I traded in some speed in favour of a more reliable connection).
New approach
Based on the above experiences I felt that I should try something new for the 3rd device that I was about to build (something to be used in my greenhouse). I decided to give WiFi a chance after all and replace the ATmega128 & Si4432 with a “Wemos D1 mini Pro” (ESP8266EX based). The idea is that it should be much easier to get some standard WiFi range extender if necessary and the transmission speed should be much higher in any case. The respective board costs around five bucks (with external antenna & cable) so it won’t hurt if ever there is the need to replace it.
Obviously I will keep the old devices that I already have and I therefore decided to extend my existing software such that it also is capable to deal with WiFi/UDP based communication. I just completed the respective software changes and everything seems to work like a charm (and blazingly fast):
Meanwhile everything is nicely packed into the device case and ready to go 🙂
For now just some ESP8266/Wemos D1 related observations. In principle, migrating existing Arduino code to the ESP8266 is pretty straight forward: Most of the existing libraries that I had been using previously, also work on the ESP8266 (I did only have an issue with one specific EEPROM library – which I ended up not using).
But there are significant differences to the “normal” microprocessors I had been using previously:
- WiFi handling (i.e. the built-in behind the scenes functionality) is the ESP8266’s first priority.. Your application code IS NOT and it MUST NOT get into the way or the device will just crash (there mustn’t be any long running sections in your code.. “yield()” generously – this is the annoying part: having to litter your code with ESP8266 specific yield() code that has absolutely nothing to do with your application logic).
- The memory model is somewhat more complex than you might initially realize (see http://cholla.mmto.org/esp8266/where.html). Code like interrupt handlers must be in the “correct” area (i.e. RAM) or the device will unexpectedly crash.
- Power supply is crucial: Insufficient power supply – e.g. via a weak USB connection – may be the cause of unexpected crashes.
- Lastly the built-in hardware watchdog will also crash the device if not “fed” regularly.
All of the above may lead to “unpredictable” system behavior and tracking down the actual root cause of a problem can be quite an annoying task. Using a tool like https://github.com/littleyoda/EspStackTraceDecoder may then be your best chance to at least get some idea where the problem might come from. (The reference here may also be useful.)
To make things worse I found myself having problems with the IDE I am using (Sloeber 3.0) that may or may not be ESP8266 specific: It may be a general problem of hobbyist IDEs (or Eclipse in particular) but the IDE regularly DID NOT build/upload the correct code. And the ESP8266 oftentimes does not restart properly after a “reset” triggered by the IDE (which may be linked to inadequate USB power supply). I ended up chasing phantom problems that disapeard after a “clean build” and un-plugging of the device. Obviously it is rather annoying when you cannot depend on the correct functioning of your tools!
Regarding the Wemos D1 (ESP8266) hardware: IO pins are scarce and many do have built-in limitations (e.g. they are used to control how the device boots, etc). It seems to be a good idea to use I2C whereever possible to preserve the little that is available. (This may become a pressing issue in case you also intend to use SPI – which may be a prerequisite to hook up things like an SD-card reader.)
Licensing
I had not been concerned with the topic of licensing while I was still in midst of trying to get the basic functionality to work. (Most people probably aren’t while dealing with their Arduino toy projects.) Therefore I had not payed much attention to the licensing conditions of the Arduino libraries that I had been using either.
For a large part respective libraries use LGPL and that license allows you to use some library in pretty much any way you like. BUT…
… there also are libraries that use GPL – which may/should be considered a problem: I for one do not write blanco checks nor do I like the idee of having 3rd parties exploit my work financially without me getting a single dime of the proceeds. As a matter of principle GPL therefore for me is an absolute NO-GO.
Luckily, in the context of Arduino libraries, functionality is usually so small that you can easly write a replacement yourself. And before subjecting your own code to a shitty GPL license you are probably better off writing your own library.
I dumped two respective libraries and replaced them with my own (see https://github.com/wothke/justASK and https://github.com/wothke/TinyLCD). So if ever I release my code it can be CC BY-NC-SA by default and in case anybody wants to make money with it he can get a commercial license).
Playing with WebAssembly
I recently noticed that ’emscripten’ meanwhile allows to also generate WebAssembly output. WebAssembly is touted (see e.g. https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/03/why-webassembly-is-faster-than-asm-js/) to use less space and to run more efficiently (i.e. faster) than previously existing web technologies.. sounds great!
With my portfolio of various ’emscripten’ compiled chiptune music players this seemed like the perfect opportunity to just give it a try (If you want to try this yourself, make sure to really get the latest ’emscripten’ version! Also be warned that the new ‘clang’ version that ’emscripten’ is using now, is more strict with regards to existing C/C++ standards and you may need to fix some of your old bugs in the process..).
Due to the fact that web browsers will load the *.wasm WebAssembly files asynchronously, existing bootstrapping logic may need to be reworked (you’ll need to wait for the notification of the loaded ’emscripten’ module that it is actually ready – don’t even think about using the SINGLE_FILE hack, it won’t work in Chrome!).
In the case of my chiptune players, migration fortunately wasn’t a big deal (my player was already prepared to deal with asynchronously loaded stuff) and soon I had the first *.wasm results. And from a size perspective, those output files already were good news: In their old asm.js incarnations some of my emulators are rather bulky and in total the size of the nine emulators originally summed up to more than 11MB. The better optimizer used in the new ’emscripten’ already managed to bring those asm.js versions down to about 10MB – but with *.wasm that now shrinks to 5MB. Nice!
I then went about measuring the performance of the different versions (I tested using Chrome 64 and FireFox 57 on a somewhat older 64-bit Win10 machine). I was using my all-in-one “Chiptune Blaster” page as a test-bed (see https://www.wothke.ch/blaster/ and https://www.wothke.ch/blasterWASM/). I patched the music player “driver” to measure the time actually spent within the various emulators while they are generating music sample output. I started measuring after each emulator had already returned some sample data (i.e. its program code had already been used) and then measured the CPU-time that it took to generate 10 seconds worth of sample data (i.e. the numbers in the below table are “CPU ms / sec of music output data”, i.e. smaller is better):
I repeated my measurements multiple times (6x) and eventhough the results were – for the most part – reproducible, they fluctuated considerably (e.g. +/-10%). Any single digit percentage measurement is therefore to be taken with a pinch of salt. In Chrome there were even some massive hiccups (maybe some background garbage collection? see “(*) worst times” in parenthesis). The above table shows the “best” result that I ever observed for the respective scenarios.
Interestingly with regards to the “better performance” claim, the results are not really conclusive yet. There are some finding though:
- Chrome users may typically experience a massive performance improvement from WASM.
- FireFox’s asm.js implementation already performs much better that Chrome’s. For Chrome users, WASM here is actually only the 2nd best choice – for most scenarios the performance benefit of switching to FireFox here is even bigger.
- For FireFox users the situation here is more complicated. It really depends on the specific program: Some may run massively faster, but some may actually run slower than their asm.js equivalent!
PS: I had only briefly looked at Edge but asm.js performance is slightly worse than Chrome’s and WASM is almost 2x slower than Chrome’s.
An important thing that I did not mention yet are startup times: WebAssembly is designed to be parsed more easily than respective JS code, the asynchronous loading may then also speed things up (in case your browser really puts those multiple CPUs to good use..).
And indeed this is where Chrome (and even Edge) actually shines: For the old asm.js version of my page it takes about 3 seconds for Chrome (4 seconds for Edge) to locally load/display it on my PC. For the new WASM version it’s barely more than 1 second (also for Edge)! FireFox somewhat disappoints here: It also improves on the 4 seconds for the old asm.js page, but the new WASM version still takes 2 seconds to load/display (Chrome/WASM may not be too bad after all.).
- So WebAssembly may not always improve execution speed, but combined with the greatly improved startup time it is really nice!
sprinkler update..
This is just a little update regarding my earlier DIY sprinkler project: The old Rainbird product (see left photo below) had finally died completely and the time had finally come to put in “version 1.0” of my home-grown replacement (see photo on the right).
As compared to the original post I had meanwhile replaced the ATmega328P (i.e. the Arduino ProMini) with an ATmega128: This microprocessor gives me more space for the program code – but it still is a very cheap IC.. However it comes at the price of some extra soldering (see green PCB on the photo above). Anyone interested in using this chip as a replacement for less powerful Arduino’s should have a look here: https://github.com/MCUdude/MegaCore
Previously I had been performing all of my testing with brand new 12V DC solenoid valves. The question was whether or not my new 12V DC controller would also work for the old 24V AC valves already in place from the old installation:
To my great relief it works perfectly and I can finally control the things remotely from my PC 🙂
269 Life
In addition to showing some cool ray-marching based realtime graphics, my latest web page is dedicated to “269 Life” and the matching title is meant to attract some extra attention to that meaningful movement (see http://www.269life.com).
The realtime WEBGL web page can be found here: https://www.wothke.ch/269life/. You’ll need some sort of 3D graphics accellerator and a Chrome browser to use it. Or you can have a look at a youtube recording here.
I am not repeating the information that can already be found in the comment of the youtube video here. Instead I’ve added some background information regarding the techniques that I used in the page.
All the fractal graphics are created using Knightly’s “pseudo kleinian” algorithm (see example code in “Fragmentarium”) as a base and parameterizing it with various “distance estimate” functions. An “orbit trap” based implementation is used to color the result. Depending on the specific “scene” a number of reflections is calculated (up to three). The “Phong Blinn” shading model is finally used in combination with a standard “ambient occlusion” implementation to render the fractal background (basically the same impls that I had previously used in “modum panem”).
Three different approaches are used to display text elements:
- “Flat” texts are created by using a font texture that is then displayed via simple triangles (two per character).
- Texts like the title or the ones in the “greetings” section are then based on extruded 3d fonts (see standard THREE.js examples).
- Finally there are the “particle based” texts that explode in the “greetings” section – which are created using regular canvas text rendering.
A “bokeh” post-processing is applied to the resulting page to create a “depth of field” effect. (The respective implementation is derived from Dave Hoskins work.) The “bokeh” post-processing is also used to create some interesting distortion effects on the overlayed title text (which is not using the same z-buffer).
Finally the “greetings” scene showcases the combination of “standard” THREE.js elements (particles, extruded texts, etc) with the shader generated fractal background: By having the fractal shader propagate its z-buffer information, the regular THREE.js overlays are later clipped correctly (thanks to Marius for the respective depth calculation – see boxplorer2).
The “neon signs” here are created via a post-processing pass that adds a “glow” as well as a “god’s ray” effect. A simple random noise based shader is used to create the purple “northlights” on the horizon and 20’000 confetti particles provide for some action.
Thanks again to Wolf Budgenhagen and LMan for letting me use their music.
modum panem
Obviously there was something missing in my previous mandelbox experiment… exactly, some means of transportation so you can explore the scenery!
I therefore extended the original version such that “regular” 3D stuff can be mixed with the ray-marching based fractal landscape.
also I added a bit of “collision detection” so that the landscape can be moved “out of the way” when your transport gets too close..
so enjoy your ride: https://www.wothke.ch/modum/
or have a look at the youtube recording.
Notice: Unfortunately Chrome seems to be the only browser that currently properly supports WEBGL_draw_buffers. (Firefox also claims to support the feature but in fact it is completely messing up the respective color attachments..
update: It seems that meanwhile the Firefox clowns have managed to get their shit together and the page should now also work in that browser. Note that the first load of the page may be slow.
part three..
And to complete the trilogy here another bit of fractal fun (in case your PC is not equipped with a fast enough graphics accelerator you can find a video recording here: https://youtu.be/PzTwOfoZp0E):
happy programming logbook 