Month: September 2015

My wifi ghost lamp

Johan Arduino, ESP8266, iOS, led hacks, MQTT 1 Comment

Sometime ago all wifi hobbyist projects where quite expensive. USB Wifi dongles could be found for a handfull or dollars apiece but something easily connectible to a micro controller was also “connected” with a hefty price tag. Then the ESP8266 surfaced…

Having just purchased a Pac Man ghost LED lamp on the Black Friday sale I quickly saw an application for the ESP8266. Nothing novel, nothing that hadn’t been done 100 times before but something fun.

 

Make the ghost green
A warranty waiting to be voided

The software part

Following in the MQTT footsteps of previous projects I decided against running a server on the ESP8266 listening to yet another protocol implementation. Instead the ghost would listen to an MQTT topic and light up accordingly. I also wanted it to be able to run preconfigured light shows. The ESP8266 runs tuanpmt’s MQTT implementation and listens to the topic ghost/led sending anything it receives to the Arduino which responds to the following commands:

  • #RRGGBB – set all LEDs to specified color
  • :nnRRGGBB – set LED nn to specified color
  • ! – update the LED ring with all LEDs set with the :nnRRGGBB commands
  • p01 – run “light show” 01
  • * – turn all LEDs off

The “anything it receives” means I can add functionbality on the Arduino without touching the firmware on the ESP8266.

The hardware part

The hardware consists of the following:

  • ESP8266-01 board
  • Arduino Nano
  • 16 LED Neopixel Ring
  • Level shifter
  • 3.3V regulator with buddy capacitors
  • 1A USB charger

I purchased an Adafruit Neopixel ring with the lovely WS2812 LEDs. To save some time I took an Arduino I had lying around to control the LEDs using the Adafruit library. The two systems talks over UART. The Arduino runs at 5V (the level at which it can control the Neopixel ring) and the ESP8266 run at 3.3V which means a level shifter needs to be placed between the two. You can find level shifters almost for free on eBay. The wiring is quite simple. The USB charger provides 5V for the Arduino, the Neopixel ring and the high side side of the level shifter. The regulator provides 3.3V for the ESP8266 and the low side of the level shifter. I threw everything together on a prototyping board, nothing will be visibe anyhow 🙂

Once wired up the ghost can be tested with the command

% mosquitto_pub -t "ghost/led" -m "#00ff00"

The hard part

The board sits on nylon spacers to be glued to the lamp base
The board sits on nylon spacers to be glued to the lamp base

Now for the hard part, mounting the hardware inside the ghost. The ghost case is made up of three parts. The dome, the base and a bottom plate where the electronics is attached. The bottom plate is attached to the base using screws and the base is glued to the dome. This leaves the screws on the inside meaning the ghost cannot be cracked open without causing permanent damage. Using a fine saw and a drill I removed the bottom plate, sanded the edges and rinsed the dome in water ro remove the plastic dust. The electronics is mounted on spacers on the bottom plate and I used silicone to reattach it to the dome. It stays in place and reopening should not be that hard.

More software

Controlling the ghost via the command line would not attract much venture capital so I set out to make an iPhone app for controlling the ghost. NKOColorPickerView and MQTTKit fit the bill and resulted in this neat little app I installed on my son’s iPad.

Make the ghost green
Make the ghost green

He was somewhat impressed and have changed the ghost color about three times to date which was in line with my expectations. I do have other plans for the wifi ghost, but that’s for another post.

Code available on Github

Final thoughts

In the time between finishing this hack and actually writing about it, Arduino on the ESP8266 has matured phenomenally so today I would skip the AVR. Actually I could replace all the hardware with the WifiPixels.

Gallery

Another Raspberry Pi powered Macintosh Classic

Johan Raspberry Pi, Retro computing 27 Comments

The Macintosh Classic is somewhat special to me as it was my first computer I used for other things than just games. Not suprisingly perhaps as the line games was somewhat limited although there where classics like Dark Castle, Apache Strike, Empire and Deja Vu. That aside, I have had a Mac Classic II in my study for years reminding me of where my career in IT started and it was time to pour some life into the old machine (click for hires images or see the gallery at the end).

Hello (again and again)
Hello (again and again)

The obvious choice was to use a Raspberry Pi. Placing Pis in old macs is by no mean a new idea but I wanted to make something different and above all make something as sturdy as the old mac. The newly born Mac should be able to ride the bus as my old Classic did at times meaning I could not just put loose hardware into the box. Things needed to be fastened. I set out with the following specification:

  • Raspberry Pi
  • TFT screen
  • Speaker
  • Internal USB hub
  • External connectors for USB and ethernet
  • Working programmer’s key and reset button
  • Working floppy drive ejector motor
  • External 12V power supply

I had found this 8 inch TFT screen on eBay (update June 5th 2017, I have found a much cheaper variant on AliExpress that by the looks of it is identical) but as you can see the frame has no mounting support. Adding the cabling and driver board with its adapter boards sums up to quite a mess. How do we mount this nicely inside the Classic? Plexiglass to the rescue! I cut out two sheets of plexiglass and placed the TFT screen between them. Glued piexes of plexiglass on the back sheet keeps the TFT screen from falling out. The different boards are placed on spacers mounted on the back side plexiglass sheet. The front and back sheets are held together usings screws.

An 8" HDMI display package
An 8″ HDMI display package

The final part was mounting the “screen module” inside the Classic. As I had thrown the old CRT screen out, it was only a matter of drilling the right holes in the plexiglass screen module and mount it the same manner the original screen was.

Mounting the display package
Mounting the display package

Next was the mounting of the Raspberry Pi. For this I reused the hard drive bay where I mounted a piece of plexiglass holding the Pi on spacers.

Pi, power and speaker
Pi, power and speaker

I wanted to bring back the yawning like sound of a Macintosh ejecting a floppy disk. The idea was to have the Mac automatically eject an inserted floppy with a delay. So how did the old Macs detect the precense of a floppy disk?
There are a number of micro switches sitting in the front of the floppy drive. These will be pressed (or not) when a floppy is inserted into the drive. From right to left they will tell us

  1. Is there a floppy present?
  2. Is is write protected?
  3. Is is a single sided or double sided floppy?
Adding blue and white wires for floppy presence detection
Adding blue and white wires for floppy presence detection

<side note>Floppy disks back in the days had a write protect switch on them consisting of a small piece of plastic that would open or close a hole. An open hole indicated that the floppy disk could be written to. Another hole in the floppy disk indicated if data would be written on one or both sides of the disc. Switches 2 and 3 above would be not pressed if the corresponding hole was present on the floppy disk.</side note>

For this project, I only cared about switch #1. Deciding the floppy drive would never see real action again, I disconnected the switch from the rest of the floppy drive PCB by severing the traces. Soldering wires to the switch and attaching them to the Raspbery Pi GPIO header, the Pi could now sense the precense of a floppy disk. Next was the ejector motor. It runs on 12V (as the TFT screen) and I purchased a relay on eBay that the Raspberry Pi could control.

On the left hand side of the old compact Macs was the programmer’s key and the reset button. The former would enter the debugger built into the computer. I wanted to connect these to the Raspberry Pi so once again I severed some traces. On the the motherboard this time.

For power, I purchased a 12V to 5V converter with quad USB output on eBay. This together with the relay was mounted on a sheet of plexiglass that was mounted on spacers in the back of the computer. The speaker was mounted in a large hole i drilled in (you guessed it) a piece of plexiglass mounted on (guessed it again?) spacers. As the sound quality on the original Raspberry Pi was quite poor I added a USB sound card (also from eBay). I desoldered the microphone connector on the Mac’s mother board and replaced it with a power jack that I connected to the 12V/5V converter. An old Western Digital USB disk power supply provies the 12V needed.

Last but not least, I added two external USB ports and an ethernet port. Both use passthrough cables found on eBay (search for “USB 2.0 A panel mount extension cable 25cm” and “ethernet panel mount extension cable 25cm“. They are mounted on the last piece of plexiglass that is glued to the inside of the case. I reused the holes where the original 220V power cable connector and power switch where located.

Backside USB and ethernet connectors
Backside USB and ethernet connectors

A simple python script checks the programmer’s key, the reset button and the floppy detection switch and controls the eject motor. Pressing one of the keys will play the lovely old Macintosh Quadra chime. A long press will shut the Raspberry Pi down.

Floppy ejection was a bit tricky. The eject motor is a simple motor and not a servo meaning you cannot tell it to goto a position and back like those servos you have been playing around with using your Arduino. The motor needs to return to (roughly) its original position or it will be impossible to insert a floppy again. I have no idea how this was accomplished back in the days but this simple algorithm (based in parts of my recollection of the old floppy sound) did the trick

  1. Start motor
  2. Wait for lost floppy presence
  3. Wait for 1 second
  4. Stop motor

I am quite pleased with how this mod turned out. There is nothing loose inside the case that can fall over, get tangled up and cause shorts. By accident, the Mac was drop tested from a height of one meter. It survived, nothing came loose.

I have some future plans for HW modifications including a touch screen, replacing the clicking mechanical relay with a transistor and I should add a fuse to the 12V line for safety.

Most of all, I need to add software to make the old Classic actually do something. But that is for a later post.

Update 26th of June 2016, the python script running the show is now on Github.
Update 5th of June 2017, added AliExpress link to cheaper display and eBay links to USB/ethernet passthrough cables.

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