Holiday season has begun and Christmas and the New Year 2020 are approaching! This means, time to reflect and to clean up code and, therefore, I am updating some of the GitHub's projects to summarize the year. I started with the Christmas lights project! But, this time, I took the M5Stack Fire and a new LED panel (WS2812b - 16x16 pixel) and with the XMasLight project, these are the results (Fig. 1 & 2):

Fig. 1: M5Stack and a new WS2812b Panel (16x16 pixel).

Hardw...

This article extends the tutorial about Hass.io and the Xiaomi Aqara Sensors that I've published months ago. That tutorial is part of the series of articles about Zigbee and the Rasbperry Pi using the CC2531 USB dongle. Here are the links:

• Zigbee: Xiaomi Sensors using Raspberry Pi (without Gateway!)
• Zigbee: Flashing a CC2531 dongle using a Raspberry Pi
• Raspberry Pi: Xiaomi Sensors & Home Assistant (Hass.io)
• Zigbee: Reading Xiaomi Sensors with a Raspberry Pi (no Xiaomi gateway ...

This tutorial is about managing a Docker Engine remotely using Portainer connected to the protected Docker daemon socket (TCP port 2376). By default, you can manage Docker locally through a non-networked UNIX socket (option -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock while running Portainer). But, if you want the Docker Engine to be reachable through the network in a safe manner, you need to enable TLS by specifying the --tlsverify flag and pointing Docker’s --tlscacert flag to a CA certificate. Then, the daemon only accepts connections from clients that are authenticated by a certificate si...

Usually, I login to different Docker registries (local, Docker Hub, etc.) with a computer running Ubuntu. I execute once docker login, then I enter the username and password, and after restarting the system, the access data is still available. That means, I write the credentials only once. But, on the Raspberry Pi, it was different until today: I needed to write the login credentials every time I booted the board.

This article helps you to install the needed tools to save Docker login credentials on the Raspberry Pi, but not as plain text, so that the next time that you reboot the Raspberry t...

Today is Singles' Day or "Guanggun Jie" in Chinese, which is a popular shopping festival among young Chinese people, who celebrate their pride of being single! Thus, I got some discount codes from Banggood for Today and I'm publishing them here:

DISCOUNT CODES

This section is new in LeMaRiva|Tech and I will update it every day with new discount codes! I receive a list every day with new codes and I will use some analytics to select the best offers for you and automatically publish them there. Stay tuned!

This article is the last in a series of three articles that evaluates the performance of the Raspberry Pi 4B. This time the performance of Raspbian with standard kernel (4.19.y) will be evaluated with and without active cooling using two types of heatsinks. The other articles in the series are the following:

1. The first article is about comparing the Raspberry Pi 4B and 3B+ performances:
   • Raspberry Pi 4B: How much faster is the new CPU?.
2. The second article compares the Raspberry Pi 4B runn...

This article evaluates three low budget Wi-Fi cameras that I buy from e.g. banggood.com and aliexpress.com but I will focus most of the analysis on my last acquisition the XIAOMI Mijia CMSXJ11A.

All cameras in this review are Xiaomi (not exactly built by Xiaomi) and can be connected to the application Mi Home (apple/android). Moreover, you need to select the region to China (Mainland) in the application, otherwise you are not going to find the devices. This has a main disa...

The Allwinner H2+, which integrates four ARM-Cortex A7 cores that can clock up to 1.2GHz, is powering the Orange Pi Zero LTS. The tiny board, which measures just 52 x 46 mm, features 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi, Ethernet, up to 512 MB of RAM, USB 2.0 Type-A and a microSD card slot. There is also a 26-pin unpopulated GPIO header along with a 13-pin header for a headphone, USB 2.0, TV-out, microphone and IR signals.

This board is the next generation of the Orange Pi Zero th...

Radxy, the company behind the Rock Pi 4 is back! A couple of days ago, I've received the Rock Pi S (see Fig. 1), a miniature developer board that measures just 38 x 38 mm. The board is powered by the Rockchip RK3308 SoC, which integrates four 64-bit ARM Cortex-A35 cores (Ultra-High-Efficiency). Each of the cores reaches up to 1.3 GHz. The SoC also has a built-in voice activity detector (VAD) for use with IoT and smart voice applications.

Despite its tiny size, the Rock Pi S in...

Last year, I bought an ESP32-CAM board from Banggood and I wanted to use it with MicroPython. The board has an OV2640 without any chip (buffer) between the ESP32 and the camera. There are many implementation for Arduino or directly using Espressif, but I wanted to use MicroPython. Thus, the only solution was to use the I2S interface, but I didn't have time to write the driver. Thus, I put the project on hold. However, last week I was searching between the ESP32 boards that I have,...

The Preempt-RT patching article is one of the most visited articles in my blog. However, that article needed a small update: Raspberry Pi 4B is out there and with Raspbian Buster, a new version of kernel is available: 4.19.y.

I also uploaded the compiled and patched kernel to lemariva/RT-Tools-RPi. You can follow all these steps and compile the kernel by yourself or you can download the files from the repository and deploy the kernel on your Raspberry Pi 4B.

This tutorial is the second of a...

Banggood is celebrating its 13th anniversary by launching a grand sales that takes place between the dates August 27th and September 18th (my birthday! :)).

Fig. 1: Banggood's 13th anniversary image on an E-ink screen (tutorial)

DISCOUNT CODES

Banggood, founded in 2006 and located in Guangzhou, is the fourth largest international e-commerce retailer in China. By running its website www.banggood.com and smartphone applications, Banggood sells more than 500,000 types of products to the United States, Great Britain, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Australia, Russia, Japan and ma...

The last days, I was looking for an online project management tool with bug tracking system. The best platform that I know is Jira from Atlassian. Jira offers a bug tracking and agile project management, however, it costs between $8.33 and $10 (annual/monthly payment) for the standard version with under 10 accounts. We use Jira in Finealyze and I am very happy with it, but I was looking for a free alternative for myself. Then, I found OpenProject, which describes itself as "the leading open source project management software".

OpenProject is offered in three different ways: Community, Cloud an...

Last week, I published an article about the Raspberry Pi and an e-ink display:

• #Raspberry Pi: an E-Paper display with Widgets (see Fig. 1a).

This time, this tutorial is about processing and displaying images on the 7.5" e-ink screen as shown in Fig. 1b.

Fig. 1a: E-ink Screen connected to a RPi running ePaperWidgets	Fig. 1b: Banggood's 13th anniversary original image here

Hardware & Software

You find here a list of hardware and software that you could use for ...

On July 4th, I ordered a Raspberry Pi 4B from Reichelt. On July 17th, I received the board, but it was broken, and a month later, finally I received a new board that seems to work OK :).

The new Raspberry Pi 4B has a lot of upgrades and one of the most important ones is the RAM: You can choose between three models (1GB, 2GB and 4GB). But, another main change is the CPU and the RAM bus: they changed from a Cortex-A53 64-bit (3B+/3A+) to a Cortex-A72 64-bit, both ARMv8, and from LPDDR2 SDRAM...