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ESP8266 IO bridge

github.com/eriksl/esp8266-universal-io-bridge looks cool – it exposes the I/O of a ESP8266 wifi module including the GPIO, I2C, PWM, ADC, and UART via a line based telnet interface.

A toy PL/0 compiler

I’ve released a toy compiler for the PL/0 educational language at https://juju.net.nz/src/cgit.cgi/pl0.git/ or https://github.com/nzmichaelh/pl0. I did this as, despite working with compilers for a fair part of my life, I’d never written one from scratch.

Serial to NeoPixel bridge

I’m hacking on a project to hook a NeoPixel ring up to the internet. I don’t have a good reason why, but it’s a good excuse to work with OpenWrt, TURN servers, and some blinking lights.

Serial to Wifi board hacking

I’m having fun with my Olimex ESP8266 dev board. For ~5 Euro you get a 80 MHz processor, built in Wifi, a bunch of I/O, and “IoT” style libraries with a RTOS.

Arietta 25

I picked up two Acme Systems Arietta G25‘s. They’re a tiny Atmel ARM9 powered board with most of the I/O out on a 0.1″ header. I hope to hook one up to a GPS to send up in my plane and record the track and speed.

Stopping ‘PAM service(sshd) ignoring max retries’ errors in syslog

Seeing messages like sshd[28778]: PAM service(sshd) ignoring max retries; 6 > 3 in auth.log? It’s caused by pam_unix disagreeing with sshd on how many times a user can retry their password before getting disconnected.

Huffman coding on NMEA sentances

I’m impressed with how well Huffman encoding works on the very verbose, very repetitive, ASCII based NMEA GPS sentances. I hacked up a Python script that bakes a fixed dictionary from example data and a device side C++ encoder that encodes based on the dictionary.

Three days to posession

As an experiment, I hooked up a spare ARM machine to the internet and left it running Tor. It only took three days for a script kiddie to break in, as it turns out the pre-built rootfs I used has a poor default root password.

First flying of the year

I dusted my T-28 Trojan off and took it for a fly in the Allmend today. Hard to say no to such nice weather. I could even feel my fingers when I got back!

Christmas star light

We’ve got some Christmas stars in the window that needed some illumination. I hacked together a Olimex OLIMEXINO-85, a 8 mm RGB led, and the support components to make this: