Tag Archives: Raspberry Pi

Campaign completes successfully at 208% of Target & 150 Backers

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Wow, what a couple of months this has been with over 1,300 emails received, new partners, over 4,168 referrals to the campaign, 208% funded, several world firsts with IR on Arduino & Raspberry Pi and most importantly backed by 150 people from 32 Countries across the globe. Not to mention some great bonus features added to AnalysIR along the way, some of which have been inspired by our backers.

Our tasks for the next week include, progress on the following:

– Documentation
– Installation Package for download
– Some bug fixing
– Online bug tracker
– Online discussion board
– Web site
– Select & Issue email Invitations to 1st phase roll-out participants
– Ship remaining kits.

I would like to finish up this update by welcoming our latest backers and thanking all our backers for your support.

The AnalysIR Team

Update: The kits have landed, roll-out plans & Arduino vs Raspberry Pi performance

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We posted another update a couple of days ago covering many of these points, but it seems to have evaporated (Maybe I forgot to hit the ‘Post’ button).

We know some of the kits have arrived locally in Ireland. However, one backer reported that the packaging was ‘compromised’  but that the components were OK. He sent us some photos & we will now update packaging on all future kit shipments. If any backer experiences a problem with the packaging, email us and we will sort it out. We plan to post the next batch of kits over the weekend or early next week.

On the Raspberry Pi front we have learned some differences compared to Arduino. For what we are doing with AnalysIR, Arduino appears superior, which was initially surprising considering the 16MHz vs 700Mhz CPU speed. But apparently, it’s because Arduino is dedicated exclusively to IO & RPi is a linux based OS doing lots of other things simultaneously. I believe RPi may perform better with kernel patches or over-clocking, but we don’t want to go there yet.

Yesterday we got the measurement of IR modulation frequency working on RPi using GPIO. This may be a world first for both Arduino & RPi. The only downside is that we cannot decode the signal & measure the modulation frequency simultaneously on the RPi, which we can on the Arduino. So for now, we will just provide a command line facility on RPi for measuring modulation Frequency. We have also written a script to take the raw output from LIRC on the RPi and convert it to AnalysIR format via LAN, which means we can also use LIRC as a real-time recording mechanism on RPi. (In theory, it should be easy to extend this to every other Linux platform with LIRC installed)
One bonus with the RPi is that we can already decode & analyse IR signals over the LAN, a feature which the Yún will also provide via WiFi. We also read the blog post on the upcoming Arduino Yún release and can’t wait to get AnalysIR running on it…… The Yún should work out of the box, via serialUSB as it also has a Leonardo on-board and we will have to write up some small script to enable the WiFi part (Oct+ time-frame for WiFi).

Regarding our planned roll-out (circa 9th Sep), we plan to stick with a 2 phase approach as outlined on the main campaign page. If there are additional slots available for the initial phase we will contact backers directly. The reason is to avoid wasting time for 100+ people with a new release.

I would like to finish off by thanking you all for supporting AnalysIR.

Update: AnalysIR network enabled, Kits, RPi, Yún

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The first set of kits has shipped today and because we were able to get a discount on the components we also included some bonus components as a gift (2 x npn transistors, 4 x 100 ohm resistors & 4 x 4k7 ohm resistors). These extra components may be of use to those who want to build their own IR led Driver circuit with the TSAL6100. We didn’t realise that shipping components was such an ordeal (individual Customs & Air Safety declarations depending on destination). The shipping cost was more than budgeted, but was also offset by the discount achieved.

On the Raspberry Pi front, AnalysIR is now running well without any noticeable glitches. The approach we have adapted is to connect to the RPi over the network. The solution was to pipe the output over the LAN to a virtual serial port on the Windows PC. The virtual serial port utility is freely available for Windows and the network stuff on the RPi is just standard shell commands. I should point out that we haven’t yet tried to measure the modulation frequency on the RPi, just straight decoding though the IR Receiver. When idle we are using only 1.3% CPU on the RPi, when recording a single signal it goes to 1.6% CPU & when full out recording IR it goes up to ~ 4.9% CPU usage. This is pretty good as it doesn’t impact on other processes; considering our first attempt was using 99% CPU when idle 🙂

The potential to decode & analyze over a network may lead to some interesting features in future – ideas welcome. As a minimum, the work with the RPi will make the port to the Arduino Due easier (we are expecting a Due next week) and also when the Arduino Yún is released with WiFi

Update: Campaign reaches 100 backers, RPi & News

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We have now reached 100 unique backers for AnalysIR and we would like to thank you all for your generous support & welcome our latest backers. In particular, we would like to give a special thanks to those who made donations without perks.

And now for the News:

  • The components for the Starter Kits have arrived as expected; the envelopes are already printed with addresses taken from IGG & we plan to drop them off at the Post Office sometime on Monday. Hopefully, most people will have received them before AnalysIR is released to backers (circa: 9th September, which allows1 week after the campaign ends to eliminate as many glitches as possible). Remember, to get the full use of AnalysIR you will need the components in Kit A, as a minimum. However, just having an IR receiver is sufficient.(+ of course an Arduino).
    So far, everyone has chosen ‘Kit F’, which is probably a good idea.
  • Regarding the Raspberry Pi ‘stretch goal’, it looks like we may not reach this goal, based on the current trajectory. However, we decided to purchase a Pi with the IGG (aka your) funds released to date & it arrived yesterday. After a lot of ‘wasted’ time trying to get it set up without a display we eventually succeeded. So today we had a go at porting our Arduino code over to the RPi. For the initial attempt, we have decided to use the WiringPi library & we have good success so far. So here is an exported trace image of the first successful NEC IR signal decoded by AnalysIR from a Raspberry Pi.
    SignalTraceImage
    First successful NEC IR signal decoded by AnalysIR from a Raspberry Pi

    use CTRL+
    On the top you can see the same IR signal recorded directly by AnalysIR at the same time (via 2 different IR receivers – one connected to an Arduino & the other connected to an RPi pin)

  • We haven’t fully finished with the RPi coding yet & there are some minor glitches, but we are happy with it as a first attempt. At the moment we are using interrupts & are only dumping the information to a terminal screen via a network connection & then manually pasting the output into AnalysIR’s import facility. We have to do some further study to see how we can best get ‘serial’ data from the RPi to the Windows PC. The simple solution is to use a USB serial adapter connected to the Rx/Tx pins of the RPi, but given it already has an Ethernet port we are going to investigate if a more elegant solution is feasible.

That’s all for now……… Next week = Documentation update

AnalysIR featured on Arduino blog for Dublin Maker Faire

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New infrared applications using Arduino at Mini MakerFaire Dublin (tomorrow!)

Friday, July 26th, 2013

AnalysIR

Here is an extract of the Arduino blog post featuring AnalysIR. Click the the link above to visit the Arduino Blog.

The power of infrared light was widely and best appreciated with invention of television’s remote controls. The signal between a remote control handset and the device it controls, consists of pulses of infrared light, which is not visible to the human eye.

Tomorrow at MakerFaire Dublin you’ll we able to see the work of AnalysIR, a project that is taking this technology to a whole new level.

They implemented a Windows application which connects to an Arduino with the addition of an IR receiver and can decode new IR signals in a fraction of the time: no need for expensive Logic Analyzers or Oscilloscopes.

Here they are with their Indiegogo campaign:

At MakerFaire they will be showing some cool demos of what you can do with IR like generating electricity, seeing the invisible -Using iPhone & Android camera to check if TV remote is working, long range TV remote Control Demo Using Optics and many more applications for a total of 10 installations. Look out for them on Saturday!