Category Archives: Development

Solved: Initial Arduino Opta setup woes

1 Reply

I had great difficulty getting my Arduino Opta set up and working using the Arduino PLC IDE – whatever I tried I got the “Cannot download Sketch file (error code: 1)” error.

I finally had success using the plain Arduino IDE to do the initialization and then switching to the Arduino PLC IDE. The final step was changing the Modbus address to 247.

It probably shouldn’t be that tricky….

Pebble Development in 2020

Leave a reply

After a fair amount of trial and error I now have the Pebble SDK working on my Mac (macOS 10.15.4 Catalina). I was working from the guide here. I can now create, build and deploy programs and watch faces to my Pebble watch.

Firstly I had problems with the virtualenv command:

cd ~/pebble-dev/pebble-sdk-4.3-mac
virtualenv --no-site-packages .env
source .env/bin/activate
CFLAGS="" pip install -r requirements.txt
deactivate

It turns out the –no-site-packages flag is not required and should be omitted (see here for details).

I then had issues with no SDK being installed (and the scripts trying in vain to locate the SDK on the Internet). After trying:

pebble new-project testing

I was greeted with:

No SDK installed; installing the latest one...

Consulting Google yielded:

Cannot install SDK
byu/Ben0t0n inpebbledevelopers

The key part of the reddit post is path to the SDK. I used the following to successfully install the SDK:

pebble sdk install https://github.com/aveao/PebbleArchive/raw/master/SDKCores/sdk-core-4.3.tar.bz2

The last fix was disabling the analytics tracking by creating a NO_TRACKING file in the SDK directory.

SDK Install Guide
byu/RomanPort inpebble

TempMonHTTP

Leave a reply

For a while I’ve been tinkering around with a simple project – an Arduino-based temperature (and humidity) monitor that outputs a webpage on my home LAN. The Arduino I used was the Freetronics EtherTen, a quality product.

Screenshot of the TempMonHTTP webpage. Yes, it gets hot in my walk in robe where the home LAN switch is…

Check out the code at https://github.com/gjhmac/TempMonHTTP.

Arduinos and SD cards

Leave a reply

If you require an SD card interface for your Arduino project I highly recommend purchasing an Arduino with one built-in.  It took three attempts to get an SD card interface added to my basic Arduino Mega:

  1. A very cheap generic (“LC Studio”) break out module that seemed to work intermittently at best;
  2. A cheap shield (linksprite SD Card Shield v1.0b) – not compatible with the Mega (it does not state this on the packaging but if you search the documentation on their website it clearly states this, I should have done my research first);
  3. And finally, a not so cheap Ethernet plus SD card shield (Freetronics) that worked without a hitch.

I would have been better off spending the extra coin on a Mega with the SD card interface built-in and reclaiming most of my weekend…