BSidesPR 2016 Badge prototype

Last year (2015) BSides PR badge was cool but time pass and we need to keep on improving. This year badge is little different. As of when this post is published we only have a prototype, final version can and will change a bit. However key aspects of the board will stay the same. Design files for the board can be found at github.

Lets divide the badge in three areas. The brain, the communication and peripherals.

The Brain:

This badge carries some cool stuff. We went with a STM32F030F4P6 micro controller. This is an ARM® 32 bit Cortext M0 micro controller made by ST and consists of 16Kb of flash memory and it is clocked at 48Mhz. Information and manual can be found at manufacturer web site. It has 1 UART (in use to communicate with pc), 1 I2C and 1 SPI port. SPI port is used for shift registers.

Communication:

The badge can comunicate with the pc via USB. For this it uses a CH340G usb to serial chip. I have been using this chip for so long that I do not remember if linux needs any special driver. But for windows it indeed needs a driver. The chip works with Linux, Windows and MAC after is corresponding driver installation.

For drivers

• Chinese official web site link
• Some guy blogpost (has something for MAC, but I have never tried it)
• Or just go to google and search for CH340G driver

Peripherals:
This baby is packing a few things.

1. LED matrix
• 8x8 LED matrix that is controlled from two 595 shift registers
• One shift register is used for the rows and one for the columns
2. Buttons
• In the front it consists of four push buttons
• The prototype do no have any of these buttons wired up to the microcontroller. Instead pins for the buttons are exposed at JP4 port. Pins are labeled Left, Right, Up and Down.
• On the back there are two more buttons. One for programming and the other for reset.
3. I/O exposed pins
• To the left of the microcontroller a few pins are exposed. Please note the one that says 3.3V it is actually 5V. There pins PA0, PA1, PA2, PA3, PA6 and PB1 are available to be used. Easily can jump wire one of those pins to the buttons to interact with them.
• On the right (beneath PROTOTYPE) is a ST-LINK port. It can be used for debugging with an external programmer. This is not required for normal programming but if you'll like to see a break point in your code this is the way to go and an external programmer is required. An external programmer can be a cheap ST-Link V2 programmer/debugger and are cheap on ebay.

Badge as USBASP verry badly explained

Make your BSides Badge into a USBASP Programmer

Step 1. Download Github repo
https://github.com/soynerdito/BadgeUsbasp
Important stuff is:
Flash compiled file: https://github.com/soynerdito/BadgeUsbasp/raw/master/main.hex
MakeFile for easier flash: https://github.com/soynerdito/BadgeUsbasp/blob/master/Makefile

Step 2: Get your badge ready
Connect your Badge into the PC usb and press the reset button.
On Linux you should see something like (with lsusb):
"...ID 16c0:05dc Van Ooijen Technische Informatica shared ID for use with libusb"
On Windows you may need to install some drivers
If on windows 10 you may need signed driver. Use Adafruit's drivers,
https://learn.adafruit.com/introducing-pro-trinket/downloads

On mac, you are on your own but it should just work.

Step 3: Burn firmware

If using Makefile go ahead and just type

make flash

If you want to just flash the code use avrdude straight

avrdude -c usbasp -p atmega328p -P /dev/usb/ttyUSB0 -U flash:w:main.hex

avrdude port may change with different OS. Hope this helps, latter I hope to make this more organized.

USBASP pin out to connect another board, use same pins as Arduino as ISP

https://www.arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/ArduinoISP

A three months developer.... yeah right

All over the news we see reports about the need of developers and if we do not teach programming skills to youngster we might run out of

developers in the near future . I am all in to teach and encourage people to try programming. 

Becoming a developer is not for everyone, and as a society we need people in other professions as well. So showing what programming is to young is a good way to let them choose if this is the carer for them.

All is good but like always, there comes people that to my opinion are into this to only make money. Making promises to young people that in three months they can become excellent developers and land a job with a lot of money. That my friend in bull.

There is no way that you can go from zero to senior in three months, not even to beginner. There will always be people with talent that can achieve a lot in short period of times. And even those (minority) need to get some typing time, and they will because they love what they do. However the regular person will not have the born talent and require a lot of practice. It takes practice and dedication to become a good developer as everything else. Snapping together some web framework and a beautiful template  (downloaded) does not makes you an developer, and even less a good one.

All this crap about three months excellent developer is like a loose weight without diet and exercise. It does not works like that.

What would happen if a people buy into the dream of senior developer in no time? Well a lot of people asking for a lot of money to copy/paste code from web and create crappy code. The ones paying are not stupid, and when they keep spending money and not receiving good products in return will force them to look for other alternatives. What are those alternatives you may say, not other that outsourcing.

To keep my rant short. Do not buy in the idea that anyone can snap their fingers and make you a good developer with a simple programming course. To become a good developer you need some fire inside that keep you eager to learn and keep on learning. When the lights goes out you still want to  keep on going because you are in the flow of the moment. Do it because you love it, not because of the money.

It is easy to point fingers into a doctor and say they are into that only for the money and in doing so risking the life of he/her's customers. Same thing apply to IT professionals in all areas.

In conclusion practice, practice and practice is the only way. Work day and night and eventually you will get better and better. There is no substitute to good elbow grease.

ESP8266 possible breadboard interface

Probably you know what the ESP8266, if not it is a very cheap Uart to Wifi module (more info). Anyhow to the important part.

This module is 3.3V and my Arduino is 5V. There is a problem. Also the module is not "breadboard friendly".

So there are two problems that a simple interface board can fix very easy. Based on that, I have a few ideas running in my head about this. I am in the process of designing a board that I would like to build a prototype.

What this magic board do?

1. Voltage regulator, IN 5V and regulate to 3.3V with 3.3V output as well.

2. Level shifter for RX and TX signals, so you can wire it up straight to the arduino.

3. Bread board friendly header pins for easy testing.

This is a very small design to keep it cheap. As is of now it is 1 inch by 1 inch. It is not in its final stage, however I like to write about it, just in case.

pcb board

schematic

I will continue on improving the design for a bit more. However I want to try to actually build it, however build time for me is very limited now, so only time will tell how this gets done.

All eagleCad files are here. This is very early in the design process. I have started two times, and probably restart it all again.

Any idea or comment, please do. This is public domain, so you may do what ever you want with it. If you build it as is or modify it, comment about it and post pictures. There is no need to mention or link back to me.

Update:

Board modified a little bit and sent to oshpark for a prototype. Soon will know if it actually works.

Eagle files moved to a github repo of it's own here. Now the board has a name it is called WifIco (it needed a name you know).

This is the image rendered by OSHPark web site when ordered.

Bottom View	Top View

This has not been tested however I decided to order it anyhow. It has a mini usb port beneath only for 5V input. Just in case I wanted to power it stand alone, who knows!

It also has two resistors visible on the bottom view, that should be soldered shut for normal use. You may solder a wire or a zero resistor, actually whatever you have. They are pull up and can be shut. I figure that since I will be receiving a few boards may find it useful to use one to update the firmware and in those cases I would need access to the pins exposed there. But for normal operations I may not. 

Update:

This design has a lot of errors in the silk screen for the board connections. It worked, but the labeling of the connections is incorrect.

Adding .gitignore file after first repository commit

It happen to me very often to create a git repository and even push it to mu github without first creating a .gitignore file. Specially on Android projects this publishes a lot of unwanted files, like binary and temporary files. For this I found a post on stackoverflow for just that.

From all the post I read this is the one that worked for me (at least now)

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7927230/remove-directory-from-remote-repository-after-adding-them-to-gitignore

I did this, however in the post is more information about it, please go to the stackoverflow link and if it work for you go ahead a plus it.

git rm --cached `git ls-files -i --exclude-from=.gitignore` 
git commit -m 'Removed all files that are in the .gitignore' 
git push origin master

If you have a better way to do this please leave a comment.

Note to future self

Today is a regular day of July 2014 with the exception that I am writing a few lines for my future self.
These days the technology is moving very fast. Everyone has or want what is called a smart phone. The market is dominated by Apple iPhone and Google Android. In a not so close third place there is Microsoft with the windows phone.
Apart of phones home electronics is getting everyday more strong.
Just wanted to tell myself that no matter how cool technology may be there are other things more important. As am engineer we need to understand that at the other end of any software or hardware there is a person.  Is on those humans that we need to think.
When you read this,  Samsung may not have any galaxy phone but there will be people and your family will be at your side.
Keep what is worth, there is no undo checkout for missing life moments. Today I am a happy person and for sure in the future will still be.
The crime is worst every day like the economy.  We are holding up for better days to come. Always happy and together with the family.

Today I got a Beaglebone Black

Just a few hours ago it finally arrived. My long wait for a Beaglebone Black is finally over. This is a BB that actually has some future. 

There is something about a small and slow Linux computer that got me hook. It is too soon to actually doing something useful with it, so there is not much to say. The only news for now is that I just realized how used I am to Debian. After a few years with Ubuntu and now Mint you get used to a lot of the "helpers" Ubuntu provides, there is so much Debian does for you. The Beaglebone uses Angstrom as the default Linux distro and it is quite different. A few years ago (about 10+) I tried Gentoo and told myself there is now way I go back to that and now I am very close to it once again. It will be interesting using a different distro. The small beagle has very limited resources and I want the power on my apps not in the OS, so Angstrom will stay.

Hope to get back with a new post with more progress.

Right now I will be upgrading the factory firmware and setting up the wireless.

Update:
Few days with the Beaglebone now. For the wifi tried successfully with debian from the sdcard however not from the eMMC with the Angstrom. On Angstrom I manage to get the usb wifi recognized but not associated with my network. Still not giving up, tried with two different usb dongles. Will continue banging my head with the wifi until success is achieved.

Update:
Finally make it work the wifi on the beaglebone black on Argnstrom. Used the tutorial from adafruit http://learn.adafruit.com/beaglebone/wifi with a modification for my WPA2 network. Just put the Security on the wifi.config as wpa like shown bellow.

[service_home]
Type = wifi
Name = ssid
Security = wpa
Passphrase = my_password