Category Archives: Software

It’s a software project

pifon: an audio baby monitor for two Raspberry Pis

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Becoming a dad does not only completely change your life but also changes the scope of your hobby projects (If time still permits :)) My first self-made project made especially for my newborn baby boy Felix is called pifon and is an audio baby monitor realized with two Raspberry Pi devices.

the pifon project: two Raspberry Pis converted into an audio baby monitor

Hardware

The hardware setup is fairly simple: one Pi, the pifon server, has a USB web cam attached. I use its internal microphone to record the voice of my little boy. The other Pi is the pifon monitor and has a set of analog speakers attached for the output. Additionaly, the mon device has an Adafruit RGB LCD Plate attached and I use the LCD on this little plate as output device and its 5 keys as user input. I did not mount the plate directly on the Pi but used a ribbon cable to detach it: This allows me to package the plate in its own housing (As it is easier to find a case for the plate alone):

pifon/mon: the listening Pi with the control panel attached

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Watterott MI0283QT-9A Display for the Rasbperry Pi

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In my last post I attached the Watterott Display to my Raspi. The model MI0283QT-2 I have here is not available anymore and was replaced with the newer MI0283QT-9A display modul. Unfortunately, this new display uses a different graphics chip and thus the driver I wrote won’t work for these panels… 🙁

With my new display driver skills, I thought about adding this new module, too 🙂 A few days ago I received this new model and on the weekend I finally found a little time to investigate the new driver code… The new chip is an ILI9341 and uses a 9 bit SPI protocol to receive its commands… Phew, sounds a bit strange but notro’s fbtft driver framework again comes to the rescue: he has already supported the Adafruit22 which also uses 9 bit transfers and he also added an 9-bit SPI patch for the Raspi Linux kernel… With this starting point I was able to support the new display in a few hours:

Watterott's new MI0283QT-9A display running the boot console

Since the display supports the Linux framebuffer interface its also possible to run X11 with Xorg’s framebuffer driver on it:

The display also runs the X11 desktop

Again I was able to drive the display with a 32 MHz SPI clock (even 48 MHz works) and got a stable and smooth 25 fps for the 320×240 pixels in 16 Bit RGB.

If you want to setup this display on your own Raspi then read on…

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vamos runs on Windows now

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User kyberias was so kind to port the native part of vamos (the m68k emulation) to Windows and send me his patches for inclusion. The port is now included in my source tree and Windows user can now enjoy using vamos on their platform, too. Have a look at the README.WIN for build instruction.

With Mac OS X and Linux/*nix support available since the beginning, vamos is now available on all major platforms.. Yay!

added new amitool: xdfscan

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I added a new tool to amitools, my set of cross platform classic Amiga tools: xdfscan!

What does this tool do?

Its a disk image file scanner that inspects Amiga disk (.adf) or hard disk (.hdf) image files for AmigaOS OFS or FFS file systems. If such a file system is found then the scanner runs a validator that does an in-depth check of the whole file system structure. If anything does not match or does not fulfill the file system specification then error or warning messages are generated. Warnings are usually not critical and the files on the image are all accessible, but error messages may hint to file corruption in the image. In the latter case it is advisable to recover the image by running a xdftool repack command or by issuing a DiskSalv running on an emulator.

This tool either scans a single disk image file or scans through a full directory tree. The latter operation allows you to quickly scan your disk image collection with a single run…

Have fun scanning your disk collections for corrupt or even broken images… (I must admit that the scanner is really picky and it found some issues on images I believed that were running Ok for years on a real machine… So don’t panic if lots of warnings or errors are reported… AmigaOS is quite robust handling these disks without reporting trouble…)

CF card partitioning with rdbtool

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Here is my little easter present for you: I finished the first release of rdbtool. “What’s that?” you may ask. It’s a new member of amitools, a family of cross-platform Classic Amiga tools I am developing. rdbtool is a command line utility that allows you to inspect, change or create new disk images or even real disks with Amiga’s RDB partitioning format. Its a companion tool to xdftool that handles Amiga’s file system in disk images or on the RDB partitions.

I had the idea for this tool while changing the CF flash card of my A1200. I removed the old card, had look at the files found there and wanted to retrieve files from there and then set up a new shiny card and build up partitions there. The current way to accomplish this, is to dump the card’s raw data from the block device and use this image as a RDB hard disk image in UAE to retrieve the files from there. Same thing with partitioning the new card: mount the block device or an empty image in UAE, run HDToolBox there, format partitions and copy files around in the virtual Amige environment… This works, but its a roundabout way. I wanted to have a nifty tool the works directly on my Mac’s Terminal… 🙂

Read on to see how this task (and lots more!) can be achieved with rdbtool…

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xdftool updated

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Since my last report on xdftool I have updated a few things:

  • added support for RBD/RDSK hdf images
  • changed repack command to be more flexible
  • added open/create commands for better control of disk image geometry

In the following I give you a short round up of all new features by giving you some examples…

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Mastering ADF/HDF Images with xdftool

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My Amiga cross development environment on my Mac is getting really useful now: with vamos running the SAS C compiler I can create Amiga binaries with ease. With the binaries in place I want to try them on the real machine, too. For my trusty old Amiga 500, I still use disks to transfer the data. So I create an ADF image with my files on it and either use my kryoflux setup to write a real disk or write a virtual HFE disk image on an SD card to be used with the HXC2001 floppy emulator.

While building the code is done automatically in a Makefile, the disk image creation still involves manual steps including launching an UAE emulator to create the disk image. Hmm, I thought, an ADF file mastering tool (like mkisofs is used for CDs) would be a great tool!! Adding this to my Makefile would fully automates my build cycle… I was aware of ADFlib as being the portable library for ADF manipulation and I had a look there, but I did not found a mastering tool. Some more googling didn’t show me a similar tool – so again – I was left on my own and had to create the tool myself 😉

As a result xdftool was born and added to my amitools tool set! I started writing a small tool using the Python binding of ADFlib to create an ADF image and copy files there. This worked really quickly but soon I found the limitations of this library: the mastering part is only partially supported and essential things like setting all meta infos of a file were missing (or I didn’t find them ;). In the end I dropped the ADFlib approach and started to build a FS library for Amiga OFS/FFS from scratch… Thanks to the excellent ADF Disk Format FAQ I soon had all necessary information available and some hours later the first code files written.

The lib is done now and included in amitools as “fs” module. In its first incarnation it already has an impressive feature set:

  • full object-oriented API in Python
  • supports ADF and HDF containers
  • supports all OFS/FFS modes including international and dircache
  • read/write files/dir trees from/to host file system
  • multi-layer support: work on block level or on FS level
  • query and modify all parameters found in the file system including comments, protection flags and all time stamps in tick resolution
  • supports unpacking/packing/repacking of full images into host file system with meta db files to store information not available on host file system

xdftool now supports all features of the library and while it started as a mastering tool for ADFs it is now a full featured command line tool to work with all kinds of ADF and HDF images… The remainder of this post gives you a short tutorial what you can do with xdftool:

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Building a “real” Project on vamos running SAS C

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In the last post I showed you that vamos is already able to call the SAS C Compiler 6.58 and compile some example source files. In the last few days I added the missing parts to vamos to support smake, too. Namely, calling sub processes with SystemTagList() was added and lots of bugs fixed. With smake at hand I am able to compile some real SAS C projects with an smakefile describing the build.

In this post I will show you how you can build the magPLIP network driver I used in my plip2slip project directly on your Mac without using an Amiga machine emulator like P-UAE…

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Running the Amiga SAS C 6.58 compiler with vamos

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Well, the vamos project is progressing really, really well… And while I’m working at bringing more and more native Amiga tools to life on my Mac, I almost overlooked the first major milestone (and actually its primary initial goal) of the project: running the SAS C Compiler…

This posts interrupts the rather technical series of articles describing the internals of vamos and simply shows you how to actually use vamos the way its intended to be 😉

Fasten your seatbelts, grab your old SAS C compiler disks and read on!

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