Tag Archives: Raspberry Pi

How to close an unresponsive SSH session

Enter, Tilde, Period
Enter, Tilde, Period

If you work on embedded Linux systems, those Docker container thingies, play around with Raspberry Pi or anything in between, you may occasionally find yourself on your main computer connected to the target via SSH when it suddenly hangs or gets rebooted, rendering your SSH session unresponsive. Sometimes when this happens, the SSH session gets disconnected automatically and you can start a new one. In other cases, the terminal with SSH open freezes and your usual hotkeys like ctrl + D do nothing. This is because ctrl + D key presses are usually transferred to the target and the disconnecting is so to say engaged from there.

If only there was a hotkey that was detected by the SSH client before it tries to send it to the target 🤔. You guessed it, there is! The sequence + ~ + . lets you disconnect from an unresponsive target without having to close the terminal or anything like that. To be clear, you press the keys one by one, no need to hold them all at once.

It does not work!

I had some troubles getting this to work reliably. Two things that helped me:

  • Realizing the Enter key is part of the sequence. The first time I read about this, the sequence was said to be just Tilde + Period. Often when working in a terminal, Enter is the last key that was pressed so this works fine most of the time. Remember Enter as part of the sequence!
  • Remembering how to type Tilde on my keyboard layout. Because I use a Swedish keyboard, Tilde is actually alt + ¨ , space, where ¨ is the key with ^ and ¨ on it. Since there is no visual feedback when typing in the escape sequence (which is now five key presses), I would sometimes get it wrong.
Tilde on a Swedish keyboard is actually Alt + ¨ , Space

Kodama Trinus 3D-printer upgrades

Kodama Trinus 3D-printer/laser engraverAt work, we recently got the Kodama Trinus combined 3D-printer and laser engraver. I’m pretty happy with the overall quality of the printer so far, but for our use I immediately identified some areas of improvement:

  • No power switch – the only way to turn the printer off is by unplugging the cord.
  • No lights inside the enclosure – we got the additional enclosure, but it came without any lights inside.
  • No network interface – you have to connect to the printer via USB directly or go get the SD-card. Also no way to control or monitor it remotely.

So to fix this, I wanted to put a switch on the back, put in some lights and add a Raspberry Pi with a camera and Octoprint inside the printer. I started by printing a faceplate for the hole in the back of the enclosure:

Trinus back plate

This was then fitted with a switch and a DC jack for the power supply. (Make sure their rating is higher or equal to that of the power supply!) The jack lets me split off power to the Raspberry Pi and also fixes the slight annoyance of having to reach in to the very back of the enclosure to connect the cable to the printer.

Trinus back plate

I then soldered and crimped some cables to wire the switch in series with the DC jack and connected two Wago cage clamps for distributing power to the multiple things on the inside of the enclosure. I also mace a short DC cable to connect to the printer. The face plate has a flange to keep it from moving around in the hole, and is less than half the thickness of the enclosure wall, so I printed a second copy of it, put one on from either side and simply secured the whole thing with the locking nut of the DC jack.

Trinus back plate mounted

Next, I added some LED-strips on the sides. Note that the enclosure is laying upside-down, so they are actually in the ceiling.

Trinus LED-strip installed

 

The power supply gives out 12 volts, which is fine for connecting to the printer and the particular LED-strips that I had. The Raspberry Pi however, requires a 5 V power supply, so I wired in a step-down converter and a micro-USB cable.

Trinus 5 V step down converter

Finally, I put the enclosure back on and connected the DC-jack and the Raspberry Pi. Here is what it looks like in the back of the printer now.

Trinus installation complete

Trinus upgraded backside

For now, the Raspberry Pi is just laying inside the enclosure and the camera is simply stuck to the back wall with double-sided tape. I might come up with something smarter in the future, but it works for now.

Trinus with Raspberry Pi and camera

The LED-lighting made a huge improvement! It was also completely necessary  for the Raspberry Pi camera to be useful.

Trinus LED-light upgrade

To sum up, these improvements took less than a day to do in total and were fairly inexpensive, but provide a huge step up in usability. We can now upload prints and monitor the progress from our desks instead of going to the printer all the time. Octoprint also has a Cura plugin so that you can simply upload STL-files directly without the need for everyone to have a slicer installed locally. This also means we can have optimized settings on the printer and not have to distribute settings to each individual using the printer.

One caveat is that the Trinus LCD display does not work with Octoprint, meaning that you cannot stop the print or use any of the other features on the front panel but have to run back to the computer to stop a failed print. I might replace the LCD with a small touch screen connected to the Raspberry Pi instead and/or wire in an emergency stop button to the GPIO pins. Also, the LED lights flicker quite a bit as the printer draws more or less power, probably due to the poor-quality power supply. I might try to fix it with some decoupling capacitors and/or a new power supply.

Let me know if you did similar upgrades, have some good ideas for the Raspberry Pi and camera or if you just want some pointers on doing this to your own printer!

Edit:

Uploaded the faceplate to Youmagine.

Alarm Clock v0.1.0

Alarm clock prototype

We wanted to try banning phones from the bedroom (you should try, I recommend it!). Clearly, a suitable hardware replacing the alarm clock app was needed. Having thought about building my own alarm clock for a while, I quickly determined it was not a viable option to just go buy one – there simply did not exist a model with all the features I had thought of and now needed to have, like for example:

  • Weekly schedule (no alarm on weekends)
  • Smarter snooze (configurable and longer)
  • Integrated with wakeup-lights and the rest of the appartment
  • Configurable from other devices
  • Programmable/extendable with future ideas

Alarm clock prototype parts

For the first prototype, I used some parts I had laying around:

  • Raspberry Pi A+ with USB wifi dongle
  • 1.8″ TFT display (check Ebay for “HY-1.8 SPI”)
  • Some prototyping board, connectors and pushbuttons
  • Small speakers with 3.5 mm jack

The firstAlarmclock wiring step was to connect the display. The one at hand communicated over SPI, which all Pi’s support, and hooking it up was not too difficult. Then, however, I spend quite some time trying to make the Pi recognize it as a screen rather than handling the SPI commands to it directly in my code. (Doing that would mean the interface could be a webpage for example, which would make it easier to develop.)

Using an SPI TFT as a monitor had been achieved already and made quite a buzz on Hackaday back in 2012 or so, but unfortunately it was not so easy to reproduce. At the time of building this in late 2016, most documentation I could find was still from 2012-2013 and talked about compiling the kernel from scratch and a frame buffer driver called fbtft. But, once I found its official Github repository, the first thing in the readme was (and still is) a message from early 2015 saying the driver has moved into Linux staging and that development there has ceased:

2015-01-19
The FBTFT drivers are now in the Linux kernel staging tree [...]
Development in this github repo has ceased.

I could not find any signs if fbtft is now actually part of Raspbian nor any comprehensible documentation on how to set it up so I ran out of patience and decided to go with direct SPI control for the first version, meaning less fancy graphics for now. For direct SPI, finding examples was a little easier and by learning from the code on w8bh.net, I finally got something working.

The Pi now runs a fairly simple Python script, listening to the buttons and updating the display every minute, playing an mp3 file at increasing volume if it is wakeup time. The display shows current time and the time of the alarm (which only runs monday – friday). Two of the buttons are used to move the alarm time back or forth in 15 minute intervals. This can be used to change the alarm, snooze or skip it in the morning. The third button stops the alarm and the fourth toggles the Philips Hue lights in the bedroom on/off. The Hue lights are actually controlled via MQTT, from a Node Red server running on a separate Raspberry Pi,  acting as a hub for this and some other “smart home” features which might be a topic for a future post.

Alarm clock interface

All-in-all we are pretty happy with this first version, it has been in live use for four months now without any major malfunctions and basically it just needs an enclosure. It does lack some obvious features, like adding an alarm on the weekend and actually moving the time the wakeup-light starts along with the alarm time. Also, when I make a new version, probably I will add another button for starting the coffee maker as well. 😁

Wake-up Light Part 3: Hardware

This is the third part (part 1, part 2) of my write-up on building a Raspberry Pi-based wake-up light. At this point, the Pi was capable of switching 433 MHz remote controlled outlets and can be scheduled to do this at certain times.

I had a few ideas on how to roll my own light for the project. In the end, I went for 10 m of RGB-LED strip on Ebay and four pieces of quarter round rod from the department store. I think these pictures speak for themselves:

2014-02-03 21.00.58 2014-02-08 21.51.332014-02-03 20.14.41 2014-02-08 19.51.592014-02-03 20.14.32 2014-02-03 20.36.15 2014-02-03 20.14.562014-02-08 22.42.13

To get off the ground quickly, I whipped out an Arduino and soldered three MOSFET transistors to a protoboard. My initial idea was to hook it up to the Pi via I2C, but as I had the 433 MHz receiver left over from the kit I bought, and also already being familiar with the library as I used it to find what codes to use for my outlets, I figured I might as well make it wireless. This also has the added bonus of making it possible to control the light directly with my existing remote.

2014-02-08 21.46.16

To test things out, I hastily modified the rc-switch library example. The code is available over on my Github account, although for the time being it really is not very pretty and does contain bugs! I made the A-channel on my remote turn the light on and off and used B to set the brightness. I also wrote a small state machine to dim the light from blue through red and orange and up to white at full brightness over the course of 15 minutes. This would be my wake-up sequence. The “E” channel does not have any buttons on my remote (only A-D). It is, however, no problem to send on and off commands on it using the commands on the Raspberry Pi. Making the Arduino listen to channel “E” of my outlet remote system meant I did not have to waste one of the four channels on the actual remote. To the Pi it was all the same, I just changed what channel it should power on in the crontab. Here is an attempt to catch a sped-up version of the light sequence on camera. You get the idea.

2014-03-04 21.02.06

Sweet, at this point the project was really starting to get somewhere! The wake-up sequence is good enough for now, and the extra feature of being able to toggle the light on and off along with my other lamps in the evening is very convenient. With the right setup, ssh, nano and cron can be quite ok for setting the alarm. However, I was hoping to do something more portable and… modern, like an MQTT message server perhaps?

Next time: Software!

Wake-up Light Part 2: Scheduling

Last time, we had managed to get a command for controlling the lights up and running on the Raspberry Pi. The obvious choice for scheduling such a command in Linux is Cron. To automatically turn on the lights using Cron, we need to edit the root-user’s crontab:

$ sudo crontab -e

This will launch a text editor inside the terminal. Lets scroll down to the end using the arrow keys and add the following lines:

45 6 * * 1,2,3,4,5 send 11111 3 1
50 6 * * 1,2,3,4,5 send 11111 4 1

The values, in turn, represent minute, hour, day of month, month and day of week. That is, the first command fires 06:45 every month, Monday through Friday. The send command is the same as before; turn group 11111, light 3 and 4, on (1). There is lots you can do with Cron and it has been around forever. If you have not used it before there are lots of extensive guides out there to get you started so I will not bother. This setup took me through most of the winter. The Pi turned on the lights just before my alarm went off at 07:00 and the results were imminent – waking up was a lot easier and “softer” as the light eased the body into the idea of waking up before it was blasted by the sound of an alarm. It was good, but not what I had planned for. This was only fading in two discrete steps, and even though I could just have added a few more outlets like this, I really wanted a singe, more powerful, custom light. Plus, the relays in the outlets make a loud and annoying clicking sound when they turn on. On the software side things were working fine, but logging onto the Pi and setting the alarm in the terminal was not really optimal. Next time: Building some hardware!

Wake-up Light Part 1: Flipping switches

2014-02-08 22.45.39 2014-02-08 22.45.20 2014-02-08 22.45.31

I’ve had the idea to build my own wake-up light for quite some time. This winter i finally got around to it. This is the first part of my write-up of the project.

In simple terms, the point of a wake-up light is to gently wake you up by slowly turning up the light before the alarm goes off in the morning. There are several commercial products available that do this already, all of which I think are either ugly, too small or simply not practical enough for my use case. Some of the things I wanted that are commonly not available in these products are:

  • Big, powerful light. Usually, products are night stand-size alarm clocks with a few measly watts of power.
  • RGB controllable light. My living room is also my bedroom. If I’m going to make the wake-up light big and powerful, I also want to be able to set it to a cosy warm evening-setting. Plus, this would make it able to do a more sunrise-like color fade in the morning.
  • Powerful scheduling options. I’m a student and don’t get up at regular hours every day. I want the wake-up time to be easily settable, preferably synchronized to my alarm or even my schedule.

Flipping some switches

I figured I could use my Raspberry Pi as the central point for the system. It’s hanging off the back off my TV, running Raspbmc and is on 24/7 anyway, so a simple start would be to add a cronjob to simply turn on some lights in the morning. I already had 433 MHz light switches connected to three ambient lights in my room, so I started out with by hooking up a transmitter to the Pi.

2013-10-12 22.51.17

Having someone in Shenzen send me a transmitter/receiver pair for 433 MHz on Ebay set me back about the same amount sending a normal letter home to my mother would. Mine was titled “RF Wireless Transmitter & Receiver Kit Module 433Mhz for Arduino/ARM/MCU WL”.

rf

Obviously, someone on the Internetz already wrote the code to talk to my outlets using Arduino. And someone else also ported it to Raspberry Pi. Sweet! The project I’m using is called rcswitch-pi. According to the readme, it depends on the (seemingly useful) wiringpi project, so first we need to get that (assuming you have git installed):

$ cd
$ git clone git://git.drogon.net/wiringPi
$ cd wiringPi
$ ./build

Wiringpi is used for the gpio calls inside rc-switch and is sort of replacing the Arduino’s digitalWrite() and the like. Now let’s install rcswitch-pi:

$ cd
$ git clone https://github.com/r10r/rcswitch-pi.git
$ cd rcswitch-pi
$ make

The program is hardcoded to have the transmitter connected to Wiringpi pin 0, which corresponds to pin 11 of the GPIO header on the Pi. If you want, you can change this by editing send.cpp and running the make command again.

Hooking up the receiver to my Arduino and using the original rc-switch library, I figured out what group and channel corresponded to the buttons on my remote.

2013-10-12 22.50.14

I could now control the lights from the Pi using these commands:

$ cd ~/rcswitch-pi
$ sudo ./send 11111 3 1 #Press "C on"
$ sudo ./send 11111 3 0 #Press "C off"
$ sudo ./send 11111 4 1 #Press "D on"
$ sudo ./send 11111 4 0 #Press "D off"

A small explaination to all these numbers: my outlets have “group switches” allowing different remotes to control  different sets of outlets. I have mine set to 11111. The buttons on the remote are labeled A-D. I have some lights hooked up to C (3) and D (4). All this I learned by loading the example sketch from the rc-switch library onto my Arduino and observing the serial output as I pushed some buttons on the remote.

Once I knew the send command was working, I linked it into /usr/bin/. This makes it possible to run the command without having to cd into the folder every time, which will be convenient for scheduling later.

$ sudo ln -s ~/rcswitch-pi/send /usr/bin/send
$ cd
$ sudo send 11111 3 1
$ sudo send 11111 3 0

Next time: Scheduling!