Friday, November 18, 2011

HOWTO: Arduino Mini 04 with USB2Serial light

The new version of the Arduino Mini (04 that is) might be a little  tricky to setup, mainly due to misleading or just false information from the arduino.cc documentation. The documentation is obviously focused on the old version of the Mini, which was based on an ATMega168. In addition to that, the documentation for the USB2Serial light module is also not very extensive.

The wiring for the two modules should look like this:


As you can TX and RX of the Mini and the USB2Serial module are cross-wired. Also, there is a 100nF capacitor wired between the EXT-Reset Pin of the USB2Serial and the RESET-Pin of the Mini. I highly recommend that because the Mini 04 is very picky about the timing of the reset before uploading a new sketch. While connecting RESET like that will enable you to easily upload new sketches, it might create some problems when your sketch needs to receive any kind of data on startup via USB (read about this problem here).

After the wiring the next problem appears: The arduino ide offers a configuration for the Board "Arduino Mini", which is unfortunatly only for the Mini 03 with an ATMega168. So, for a Mini 04 set the Board config to "Arduino Pro or Pro Mini (5V, 16MHz) w/ ATMEGA328".

That should be it.

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Streaming SopCast from Linux Box to Playstation 3 or any other DLNA/UPnP-Client

SopCast is quite a popular P2P video streaming client.It is very similar to TVU, PPLive, PPStream and others. One good thing about SopCast is, that a fully supported client for Linux exists, that is somewhat stable and performs well.Since you generally stream TV-Programs with SopCast it is desireable to watch them an an actual TV-Set as opposed to a monitor or a laptop screen. Of course the easiest way to watch the streams on TV would be to hook up your computer or laptop to your TV using HDMI or DVI-Ports but the procedure of connecting and disconnecting your computer to your TV is really uncomfortable. However, many of us either have a DLNA-Client of some kind either integrated into a TV (most newer Samsung, Panasonic and Philips have) or hooked up to the TV in form of a streaming box (WD TV Live HD, AC Ryan Playon) or a gaming console, like the Sony PlayStation 3. So in many cases it is safe to assume that your multimedia equipment and your computers can communicate with each other via LAN or WIFI. Since you can't run a SopCast client directly on your DLNA-Clients you need to run it on a computer and stream the content using DLNA-Protocol to your DLNA-Clients. Now, there are plenty of ways to accomplish this using a Linux box and free software, here's the way i found to be the most convenient for me: