Tech Tips & Tricks

Rooting the Xiaomi STYJ02YM (viomi-v7) Vacuum Robot

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microUSB port Opening the battery case Update: For everyone coming here just looking for a way to root their Mijia STYJ02YM (viomi-v7) or Mijia STYTJ02YM (viomi-v8), please head to https://github.com/rumpeltux/viomi-rooting. My motivation to get root access is to have a talking and blinking robot that can move through my flat and is independent of any cloud. Whatever your reasons, so far it’s not supported by dustcloud, although I already added support to python-miio which allows to remote control most functionality through a python cli. Read More...

Programming the EPM240 devboard on Linux

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The supposedly simple task of programming a simple Altera CPLD took me a few days to resolve. Here’s what I learned. There’s no Open Source toolchain for Altera. So you must download the multi-GB Quartus Lite software. After installation, I followed the My First FPGA tutorial which mostly worked ok (apart from the ‘Megawizard Plug-in Manager’ thing). Pin mappings are of course different, but I found the schematic for the EPM240 minimal development board. Read More...

Reducing NodeMCU power consumption

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The ESP8266 is supposed to consume only 20μA in deep sleep mode, making it totally awesome for sensor projects that sleep most of the time and then upload their data using wifi. I use the NodeMCU v3 (Lolin) for prototyping, but when I want to attach it to a battery it quickly drains. After some experimentation (and reading a related blogpost about battery powering the NodeMCU v2) I found two reasons: Read More...