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Rustic Retreat

Live broadcasts and documentation from a remote tech outpost in rustic Portugal. Sharing off-grid life, the necessary research & development and the pursuit of life, without centralized infrastructure.

Rustic RetreatSubscribe to our new main project Rustic Retreat on the projects own website.

Hot Projects

SEEDStack

SEEDStack - Open 3D printable seed/sprouting systemDIY Food Hacking

UCSSPM

UCSSPM - Unified Clear-Sky Solar Prediction ModelOpen Solar Power

picoReflow

picoReflow - DIY PID Reflow Oven Controller based on RaspberryPiDIY Reflow Soldering

PiGI

PiGI - DIY Geiger Counter based on RaspberryPiRasPi Geiger Counter

DIY ARA-2000

Active Wideband Receiver Antenna for SDR - ARA-2000Wideband Antenna

DSpace

DSPace - Map everythingMap everything!

Mission-Tags

3d 3d-printer antenna development diy dspace energy events fabrication felix geiger geigercounter gentoo geo gis gnuradio grc hack hardware lab linux livestream map monitoring odyssey pi picocnc picofab picoprint pigi power printer python radiation radio raspberry receiver research rf robot sdr security sku software solar sponsor test voron wind zephyr

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Apollo-NG Mobile Hackbase

Apollo-NG Hackerspacecraft

Apollo-NG is a mobile, self-sustainable, independent and highly-experimental Hackbase, focused on research, development and usage of next-generation open technology while visiting places without a resident, local Hackerspace and offering other Hackers the opportunity to work together on exciting projects and to share fun, food, tools & resources, knowledge, experience and inspiration.

Latest Mission-Log Entries

Sweet: The lab got a Mitutoyo 2046 Dial-Gauge

In order to reliably calibrate any kind of mechanical system, a dial-gauge really is a necessary tool. Today our Mitutoyo 2046S arrived and will be tasked directly to calibrate the bed of our 3D printer.

mitutoyo-2046s-dial-gauge.jpg

Mitutoyo seems to have a similar reputation level for measurement tools like Makita has for battery powered power tools: A very high price/performance ratio. The lab already carries a couple of other Mitutoyo tools, a large set of Makita tools and both have already proven themselves in terms of quality and reliability on many occasions.

You can even use them in the kitchen to drive mixers etc., this hack was successfully tested in the prototype-galley to create a number of dough's and mix all kinds of things with a Makita BHP459 (18V) while saving precious space and weight, a separate set of kitchen power tools would add. Better to make creative use of equipment which is already on-board, i.e. a battery powered motor with some sort of adapter we can put tools in.

2015-01-27 19:30 · chrono
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Emerge gentoo crossdev avr-gcc for Arduino and Cura

In order to update the firmware of our 3D printer for dual head extrusion and to compile Cura (an alternative gcode slicer) a working AVR crossdev toolchain was needed.

The printer firmware uses the Arduino toolkit so the dependency was obvious, the Cura build unfortunately needs a working avr-gcc as well (not that obvious), because it also ships with Ultimaker firmware, which cannot be disabled, even if you don't have an Ultimaker (kinda stupid).

Currently, the stable crossdev avr-gcc suite with gcc 4.8.3 did not compile so it was a bit of a hassle to get it running again. In order to save somebody else the time to figure this out, here's the install trace that was already tested verbatim on another gentoo amd64 box and worked as well.

Let's start with a clean slate and unmerge any cross-avr chain: 

crossdev -C avr

This was used originally: 

USE="multilib -cxx" crossdev -v -s1 --without-headers --target avr --gcc 4.5.2 --binutils 2.21 --libc 1.7.0
USE="multilib cxx" crossdev -v -s4 --target avr --gcc 4.5.2 --binutils 2.21 --libc 1.7.0

As of 2015-04-05 the above combination doesn't work anymore, please use this instead: 

USE="multilib -cxx" crossdev -v -s1 --without-headers --target avr --gcc 4.5.4 --binutils 2.21.1-r1 --libc 1.7.0
USE="multilib cxx" crossdev -v -s4 --target avr --gcc 4.5.4 --binutils 2.21.1-r1 --libc 1.7.0

And to finish it up: 

ln -nsf /usr/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu/avr/lib/ldscripts /usr/avr/lib/ldscripts
ln -nsf /usr/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu/avr/lib/ldscripts /usr/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu/avr/binutils-bin/2.20.1/ldscripts
cd /usr/avr/lib
ln -nsf avr5/crtm328p.o .
ln -nsf avr6/crtm2561.o .
ln -nsf avr6/crtm2560.o .
mkdir -p /usr/share/arduino/hardware/tools/avr/bin/
ln -s /usr/bin/avr-gcc /usr/share/arduino/hardware/tools/avr/bin/avr-gcc
ln -s /usr/bin/avr-g++ /usr/share/arduino/hardware/tools/avr/bin/avr-g++
ln -s /usr/bin/avr-objcopy /usr/share/arduino/hardware/tools/avr/bin/avr-objcopy
ln -s /usr/bin/avr-ar /usr/share/arduino/hardware/tools/avr/bin/avr-ar
ln -s /usr/bin/avr-as /usr/share/arduino/hardware/tools/avr/bin/avr-as
ln -s /usr/bin/avr-size /usr/share/arduino/hardware/tools/avr/bin/avr-size

If you want to use the Software Serial and monitoring feature, you need to install rxtx-2.2_pre2 or newer. This version is still masked in the main portage tree, so you will need to unmask it by adding 

=dev-java/rxtx-2.2_pre2 ~x86 ~amd64

to /etc/portage/package.keywords/arduino and then (re)emerge it 

$ emerge dev-java/rxtx

Also, if you don't want to use the crappy JAVA based Arduino IDE, you can simply use a Makefile like this: https://github.com/sudar/Arduino-Makefile

2015-01-20 16:07 · chrono
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Clear-Sky Solar Prediction: First Test-Results

Since it's currently winter in central Europe, it's the perfect time to evaluate the ucsspm for its feasibility/validity. After bringing the VFCC online, it was a simple task to ship prediction metrics and reference measurements into influxdb and create a couple of dashboards to create meaningful graphs to evaluate its performance very easily.

Yesterday was the first full clear sky day since the beginning of data collection and the prediction results definitely look very promising as we can see on the following dashboard screenshot:

First clear-sky day prediction results compared to reference pyranometer measurements on VFCC Dashboard

The top right graph shows global solar radiation over a 10 hour period. The green line shows what the UCSSPM predicted as a maximum clear-sky value, the yellow bars show the reference measurement of global solar radiation in W per m² over the same period. The bigger graph at the bottom shows how that translates into the context of photovoltaics (conversion of solar radiation into electricity) and since the output is always a derivative value of global solar radiation the graph looks about the same but the output is measured in W. We can see that we are a long way off the 800-1000 W/m² which are often used for baselining. Of course, it cannot predict the weather but it is an enormous help in planning, scaling and operating solar energy conversion systems in order to have a reliable baseline, so that we know what could be obtained as a maximum at a specific location/time, when there are no clouds.

The reference measurements are sourced from a pyranometer operated by the physics/meteorological department of the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich, who were kind enough to share their data online, which saved us the investment of monetary resources to buy or time to build/calibrate our own pyranometer for now. In order to keep the prediction evaluation results consistent, all other metrics needed by the UCSSPM like temperature, humidity, air pressure etc. are also collected from the same station and fed into the UCSSPM.

If time permits, it would be interesting to see if we can make use of our global cloudmap service, to use either historic or live data for an even more accurate prediction, not just clear-sky baselining.

Long term live reference and UCSSPM prediction metrics are contiously collected and publicly accessible on these VFCC dashboards:

2015-01-14 10:35 · chrono
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