Last June, I published an article about installing a DRM solution for the Raspberry Pi. If you don't know much about Widevine DRM, I'll quote my last article:

It is a rainy day and you have a Raspberry Pi, which is running Raspberry OS (Raspbian), and you think: I can make a media center to watch some movies/series. You configure everything, and then you see something like the next picture, every time that you want to watch Amazon Prime, Netflix, etc. using the Chromium Web Browser:

Fig. 1: Trying to play Amazon Prime videos on the Raspberry Pi running Raspberry OS.

DIY Instruc...

Late last year, I posted an article about the Elecrow CrowPi2. The laptop integrates plenty of electronics modules and I will be publishing a review later this month. But, this article is about the Crowbits. The folks at Elecrow are great and they have launched the Crowbits magnetic electronic blocks for STEM education, and the devices are ESP32, Arduino, and Micro:bit compatible.

Fig. 1: Playing with Crowbits

There are over 80 programmable electronic magnetic modules and bricks (see Fig. 2), with three different sizes ( large, middle, and small modules) and colors that indica...

The "Pico" board with the RP2040 chip developed by the Raspberry Pi Foundation is the latest tiny fast and versatile board in Arduino Nano format. As you may already know, the board can be programmed using MicroPython and C/C++. In this tutorial, I extended the official MicroPython version to support cryptographic primitives, and this unlocks the possibility to connect the board (using the SX1276 chip) to the "The Things Networks" (TTN) - which means LoRaWAN support.

Fig....

This tutorial opens the series of articles about "Project JiJi" and describes how to add autofocus to the 16 mm Telephoto Lens mounted on the Raspberry Pi HQ Camera. In the past months, I've been working on a project to add autofocus to the lens and this is the result:

Adding some background to this: The Raspberry Pi Foundation offers different Raspberry Pi Camera modules since 2013. The first module (5-megapixel) was produced in 2013, and an 8-megapixel module upgrade (...

M5Stack has just launched a new device in its core series. This time, the company has combined two great things into a great product: a 4.7" EINK screen with touch capabilities and an ESP32 with 8MB PSRAM. As usual, the device is compatible with Arduino, MicroPython, and UIFlow. It only costs USD69,00.

The M5Paper is a fully programmable and portable device, which is an ideal choice for an IoT application (or you can just use it as an E-reader). The touch EINK screen can b...

This is the last follow-up of the tutorials:

• M5Stack: Fresh air checker helps you to stay safe from #COVID-19 and,
• Nginx: Docker, Flask and Let's Encrypt (SSL),

in which I explained how to build a CO2 measuring device using a M5Stack and an SG30 sensor, send the data to GCP, and offer it using HTTPS.

Fig. 1: CO2 reporting widgets on Android and iOS.

These sensors can help to prevent Covid-19 spread in a room. If you want to implement the complete pipeline, check out the links above. This tutorial connects the data to your Android or iOS phone to see that in a Widget (see Fig. ...

This tutorial is a follow-up of M5Stack: Fresh air checker helps you to stay safe from #COVID-19, in which I explained how to build a CO2 measuring device using M5Stacks and SG30 sensors. These sensors can help to prevent Covid-19 spread in a room. The collected measurements were sent to the Google Cloud Platform and a microservice offered them on a Website or a RestAPI using HTTP. This tutorial adds an Nginx microservice to offer the Website and RestAPI over HTTPS.

Let's start with some explanation about how HTTPS works: The encryption and security functionalities for HTTP are implemented thr...

Winter is coming and the air-quality inside a closed room could be an index used to estimate the amount of aerosols in it, and hence the risk of Covid-19 infection. In other words, a system of CO2 traffic lights could help to spot potential corona-aerosols!

Where there are many people in a room, there is a lot of exhalation (approx. eight liters of air per minute per nose). This air contains CO2 (carbon dioxide). Long before Covid-19, in Germany, the German Environment Agenc...

Last week, I was working on a C++ application on a remote machine in the cloud, and I didn't want to install all the compiling and debugging tools/libraries/dependencies on the host OS, but I wanted to have all of them in a container. I found that VSCode has the capability to target a container for application building and/or debugging :).

This article is a documentation for me that I will use every time that I need to compile a C++ application. The steps are divided in three main groups:

• You need to build a Docker image with the tools/dependencies/libraries etc.. A container will be started...

M5Stack has just launched the M5Stack CORE2, an ESP32 based IoT development kit, with a capacitive touch screen that brings users a smoother human-computer interaction experience. As usual, the development kit is compatible with Arduino, MicroPython, and UIFlow.

The M5Stack CORE2 has an ESP32 D0WDQ6-V3 with two Xtensa® 32-bit LX6 microprocessors that can be individually controlled. The clock frequency is adjustable from 80MHz to 240MHz.

M5Stack sent me an early sample to play...

I've just upgraded the MicroPython camera module for ESP32. The OV2640 uses I2S and two months ago, I wrote/updated the I2S connector to support more boards (check the hardware and software section below).

This time with the help of @joerggollnick, the driver was extended to include the following camera settings: frame size, white balance, saturation, brightness, contrast special effects, image quality, vertical flip, and horizontal flip.

Hardware and Software

DIY: Instructions

I've i...

There are already many tutorials that explain how to boot the Raspberry Pi 4 from an SSD disk without any MicroSD card. This is just another one; but, it includes some tips that I founded on Google, because the other tutorials didn't work, nor did they explain the details.

Let's start with some technical details. The Raspberry Pi 4 has an SPI-attached EEPROM, which contains code to boot up the system and more. The firmware of this EEPROM can be updated to include more functionalitie...

Two months ago, I wrote a tutorial that explains how to get DRM support on Chromium on the Raspberry Pi. If you follow the steps of that tutorial:

• Raspberry Pi: Amazon Prime, Netflix, etc. and a DRM solution!

you can use the Chromium web browser to play videos from Netflix, Hulu, HBO, Disney+, Amazon Prime, Spotify, Pandora, and many others (see Fig. 1 & 2).

Fig. 1: Playing videos on Amazon Prime
using Chromium on the Raspberry Pi OS.

Fig. 2: Playing music on Spoti...

The M5Camera is a camera unit based on ESP32 chip has an OV2640 and also includes a PSRAM. As you may already know, M5Stack is an open-source modular toolkit for IoT developments based on ESP32. There are four versions of this camera (see Fig. 1). I got the M5-Camera B and this is a tutorial to use the camera to generate timelapse videos. However, this module doesn't have a microSD slot. Therefore, the application will publish the photos on an MQTT Broker, so that an MQTT subscrib...

This tutorial updates the article: MicroPython: Taking photos with an ESP32-CAM, in which I described the steps to add support to the ESP32-CAM on MicroPython. In this tutorial, I've updated the driver, and more cameras/boards are now supported. I tested the driver on the ESP32-CAM and the M5CAMERA (model B). It should also work with every board that has an OV2640, and it can be extended to support the OV3660 (I didn't find any board with an ESP32 that uses this camera)....