Johannes' Blog

Quite some time ago, I have written a blog entry about how to install Arch Linux on the Zipit Z2, but I did not provide an image back then. Now I have prepared a ready-to-use image of Arch Linux ARM for the Z2.



It is based on official up-to-date packages. Only for the kernel I had to build one compatible with the Z2.

Recently, I have been asked by Farnell if I were interested in taking part in their free product road test program. As I like tinkering with electronics stuff, I said yes and chose the STM32F4-Discovery board as an item to test.



The STM32F4-Discovery board is little development/evaluation board from ST to promote their STM32F4 micro controller series. The STM32F407 on the Discovery board consists of a 32 bit Corex-M4F ARM processor (which can run at up to 168 MHz), 192 kB of RAM (112+16+64 kB), 1 MB of flash memory and lots of peripherals (timers, DMA controllers, DACs, ADCs, two USB OTG ports, ...) and of course lots of general purpose I/O pins.

The original power supply of my C64 was broken. Unfortunately it was one of those power supplies where everything inside the case has been glued into one big block filling the entire case. Repairing such a mess seemed next to impossible.

Since it has been a little quiet around the Gmu development, I wanted to give short sign of life.

Introduction

This is an IKEA SPÖKA light. It is a small night light resembling a little ghost.



Originally powered by an internal rechargable battery, the light is controlled by a single button. When pressing that button it starts cycling through various color combintations. When you press that button again it freezes the current color. That's all it can do. Depending on the model the colors can be a combination of either blue and green or red, orange and blue.

Inspired by another SPÖKA mod I decided to also modify such a light, but instead of wirelessly communicating with the device, I wanted to be able to control it through USB. As the power requirements of the SPÖKA light are very low, it can easily be powered through the USB as well.