How to add robustness to cheap headless computers

By mvuilleu, in New stuff and Tiny PC, august 08,2013.

With the advent of cheap tiny computers based on ARM processors, there are many new opportunities for inexpensive home and industrial automation. But there is a hiccup. Those cheap tiny PC often show reliability problems, to the point of being unusable for fully headless operation. Today, we are presenting a product that brings a solution to this problem: the Yocto-WatchdogDC.

Turn your Raspberry Pi into a network multimeter

By mvuilleu, in Measures and Tiny PC, april 26,2013.

Measuring devices which you can directly connect to the network are usually very expensive, more than 1'000 Euros. However, numerous applications, such as monitoring an experiment started on a napkin, could benefit from them if they were more affordable. We are going to show you therefore how to very easily transform a Raspberry Pi into a very flexible Ethernet multimeter, with the help of a simple Python script. A simple solution based on standard USB modules, demonstrated in a video.

The quest for the ideal Mini-PC

By martinm, in Reviews and Tiny PC, march 01,2013.

Here at Yoctopuce, we are constantly looking for the best mini-PC to drive our devices. From time to time, we hear about one which seems to be a good candidate, so we buy one and test it, usually in one of our Friday projects. We mentioned most of them in this blog, but here is a short summary.

Variations on the Makey Makey theme

By mvuilleu, in DIY and Tiny PC, february 22,2013.

Someone asked us this week if it was possible to use a Yocto-Knob to detect a contact made by bare fingers, as done by the famous Makey Makey. The answer is yes, of course, but we will not leave it at that... (don't miss the video at the end of the post !)

Using the Raspberry Pi as home automation gateway

By mvuilleu, in Internet of Things and Tiny PC, february 01,2013.

Following last week's article, here is a small real-world application using HTTP callbacks to drive Yoctopuce modules through a NAT filter. We will use here a Raspberry Pi because it's cheap and we don't need too much out of it: only to run a VirtualHub to generate periodic callbacks.