ASCIIMath creating images

Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Wireless Serial on a Raspberry Pi

I don't have my Raspberry Pi yet.  RS has informed me of a delay - I guess the good news is I should be getting a Rev. 2 board.  In the mean time, a colleague of mine got his a while ago, but due to lack of time is letting me play with it.  I don't have time either, but I'm not letting me stop that!

So the first thing I did, not wanting to mess around with swapping monitors and keyboards etc..., was to hook up the Rπ to a bluetooth serial adapter I got off DX. ($8.60!, see also here)  It was trivial to hook up to the Rπ, but make sure to hook Vcc up to 3.3V! Otherwise, the TX line will probably output 5V TTL levels that could damage the Rπ input pin.  So, the hookup is, (adapter pin:Rπ pin) VCC: P1-01, GND: P1-06, TXD: P1-10, RXD: P1-08.

Software wise, there is not much to do either.  I left the adapter at 9600 baud; at some point I will send it the magic AT incantation to change that, but at the moment it was simple to just change numbers on the Rπ, all of which can be done on the SD card using another computer running Linux (in other words, the Rπ never needs to be hooked up to a monitor/keyboard).  In the boot partition, change the baudrates for ttyAMA0 to 9600, and in the actual real linux root partition, change the appropriate inittab line.  (details will follow - I don't have the board in front of me)

The biggest problem is the power.  As the Rπ (rev 1) does not have a halt or reset line, the bluetooth adapter will get power at the same time as the Rπ, so you cannot connect to it before the Rπ boots - on the Rev 2 board I think I could hold it in reset state until I've connected the bluetooth so I can monitor all bootup messages.  The other solution would be to give BT adapter its own 3.3V supply but that could also be dangerous for the serial input line of the Rπ.

Monday, September 3, 2012

LASERS! on (virtual) paper

Yay, another journal article! Ok, ok, I'm 8th author (out of 13 - quite the horde) but it's still good (besides, I wasn't able to contribute much after leaving Montreal). Kudos to Philip and his gang.  The paper was published in Analyst, a journal of the Royal Society of Chemistry; the article itself ("Demonstration of a plasmonic thermocycler for the amplification of human androgen receptor DNA") can be found here.  For reference this was the project I was playing with when I wrote this post.

In related news, the ICASSP 2012 paper (mentioned in this post) is finally in IEEE Xplore.  That took a while.  Now back to research to write a paper on my current research!