Jacob, Author at Jacob N Calvert

Building a Customized Linux Image for Raspberry Pi with Yocto + Docker Support

December 22, 2019

Build Your Own, Programming, Projects, Uncategorized, Virtualization

Motivation I recently stumbled upon HypriotOS while looking for Docker-ready distributions for my Raspberry Pi 3B+. I flashed this onto and SD card and started playing around with it. It works incredibly well, but I noticed that it was built for armv7l which is a 32-bit implementation. Since the Raspberry Pi 3B+ has a 4x core Cortex-A53 which is 64 bit, I wanted to make use of the 64 bit processor! I’ve worked with Yocto before (in fact, my day…

Turning my Hallway Closet into a Drop Zone: Gallery

December 21, 2019

Jacob

Build Your Own, General

Genesis of a Project In our new house, we had a hallways closet that was massive. It was very deep, and fairly wide, but had low overhead, due to the stairs passing above it. My wife had the brilliant idea to turn this into a dropzone for shoes, parcels, mail, etc. She took to Pinterest to gather ideas, and I turned it into a weekend project. The Project Plan Regrettably, I didn’t capture all the “design” pieces, and only have…

Virtualization for Embedded Systems Series: Containers Deep Dive

November 18, 2019

Jacob

Series, Systems, Virtualization

In the previous post, I looked at several real-world use cases for containers and hypervisors. This post will be a deep dive into containers and a how-to on using them. Note: all the code, Dockerfiles, etc. are archived in a git repo at GitHub. Container History Origins A little history is needed before we jump into building and deploying containers. Docker, which is likely still the largest container technology provider by a longshot, was originally released in 2013. In just…

Hacking a Smart Outlet

November 17, 2019

Jacob

Programming, Projects, Systems

IoT Everywhere Everything, and I mean everything is “smart” these days. Everyone has heard of the Internet of Things, and we are living through the emergence of some incredibly revolutionary connectivity. Some pretty cool and useful concepts have come out of it, admittedly, but there’s also some drawbacks. I really enjoy the idea of having smart outlets that I can command with my voice, and there are outlets-a-plenty on Amazon, but can I trust them? I’ve decided to use my…

Virtualization for Embedded Systems Series: Applications in the Real World

November 11, 2019

Jacob

Series, Virtualization

In the last post, we looked at several different types of virtualization technologies. We wrapped up by narrowing our focus on the types of virtualization down to just two primary categories – hypervisors and containers. In this post I’ll dig in to some real world applications of these types of virtualization, and we’ll look at how they can be used to solve real problems. Containerization Simplified Management One of the low hanging fruits of container virtualization is the ability to…

Multicore Processor Modes of Operation

November 5, 2019

Jacob

Systems

Multicore processors were first introduced in the early 2000’s, and were pervasive in common computing platforms by the 2010’s. The industry started with dual core chips, and then quad core, and now we are up to 48 cores! When the hardware industry brought multicore chips to fruition, the software community had to invent new ways to utilize those additional cores. I’d like to use this post to discuss a few of the common multicore software utilization schemes or modes and…

Virtualization for Embedded Systems Series: Types of Virtualization

November 4, 2019

Jacob

Series, Virtualization

Virtualization in the context of computing comes in many flavors. Typically, virtualization is referring to hypervised environments (more on that in a bit), but can also mean containerization or other technologies. This post explores several of these flavors and how they work. If you didn’t catch the intro to this series, you can read a little about the motivation for these posts in the previous post. Types of Virtualization Technology When considering the delineations between different types of virtualization technology,…

Virtualization for Embedded Systems Series: Introduction

October 31, 2019

Jacob

Series, Virtualization

The concept of virtualization and virtualized hardware has long been a part of computing. Even dating back to the early days of computing[1], virtualizing components of the system proved beneficial. In today’s technology driven world, virtualization plays a giant role in our day-to-day life. Services like Amazon AWS and DigitalOcean are ubiquitous as service providers to all sorts of companies. These provide the backbone to our daily browsing and Internet usage habits. Entire ecosystems have been built around this concept…

There’s a new USB-UART chip in town

October 4, 2018

Jacob

Projects

I love Hackaday. I read it almost every day. Yesterday I a blog post caught my eye and I wanted to share it. Most of the time if you want to add a USB interface to your project, you’ll have to get an FTDI chip, or one of those similarly operating knockoffs. But those chips require additional external circuitry that you may not want to fool with (I know I don’t). This Hackaday blog post introduces a neat little chip, the CH330.…

Into the 3D printer game I went!

September 27, 2018

Jacob

Projects

I’ve always wanted to try my hand at 3D printing, but prices were too high and the machines required too much maintenance… until recently. I’ve purchased a Creality Ender 3 printer from Amazon in the past month or so. I grabbed the printer, along with a roll of grey AmazonBasics PLA, and decided to try my hand at 3D printing. My “all-in” budget was around $250, shipped. Now this printer is unique in several ways. It has a heated…