Month: October 2017

Forcing a screen resolution of an Ubuntu guest OS in VirtualBox

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I figured that doing this would be nontrivial but turns out it took a little work:

I’m trying to emulate an official 7″ Raspberry Pi Touch Display in a VM, so for this post the target resolution is 800 x 480. If you want to change it to another resolution swap in yours for the rest of this guide.

First, make sure Auto-resize Guest Display is deselected in Virtualbox:

Run the following command in your terminal:

The output should look something the the following, starting with Modeline…

Copy the text after Modeline so in this case it would be

And paste it after the following command:

NOTE! You may want to change the 800x480_60.00 to something without an underscore in it, it was causing problems on my system. I changed it to pidisplay. The resulting command for this example is:

You should be able to run the above command without error. Next, run:

You’ll be greeted with output similar to this. Note the name of the display device, in this case VGA-1.

With that output name, enter the following two commands:

After running that second command, the window should jump to it’s new resolution! You’re done!

Hey! This post was written a long time ago, but I'm leaving it up on the off-chance it may help someone. Proceed with caution. It may not be a good idea to blindly integrate this code or work into your project, but instead use it as a starting point.

#codehell 2 – THERMAL RUNAWAY Errors on Prusa i3 MK2 3D Printer

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This time we’re trying to work through a hardware bug!

Without warning, my printer would stop it’s current print and display “THERMAL RUNAWAY” on the display screen:

This would happen once every couple of prints or so.

According Prusa’s Docs a common cause of this is problems with the thermistor connection. They show a graph that has very erratic readings from the sensor:

 This seemed like a good place to start so I re-seated the connector and used octoprint to generate my own graph:

No erratic readings, the temp would drop off and then start heating back up.

The problem ended up being the connection between the terminal lug and the wire on the heater in the hotend. To fix this, I cut off the crimp lug and stripped away some insulation. I put this into the screw terminal block. I’ve done a couple of prints and had no issues after making this modification.

Hey! This post was written a long time ago, but I'm leaving it up on the off-chance it may help someone. Proceed with caution. It may not be a good idea to blindly integrate this code or work into your project, but instead use it as a starting point.

Automatically run Electron application at reboot on Raspberry Pi

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Here is a quick  way to have an application built on electron run at boot on a Raspberry Pi. This worked for me running Raspian Stretch with Desktop.

Edit /home/pi/.config/lxsession/LXDE-pi/autostart with nano:

Add the following line:

The file should now look somewhat like this:

Save and exit nano and reboot. Your app should open after the desktop environment loads. Yay!

If you want to be able to get access to the terminal output of your application, install screen with:

And then swap:

For:

In the above code snippets.

After the pi boots, you can run screen -list to see what screens are available to attach to then attach to yours with screen -r yourscreen. Here’s an example:

Press enter, and then see your terminal output.
For more info on how to use screen, check out this link:

https://www.gnu.org/software/screen/manual/screen.html

Hey! This post was written a long time ago, but I'm leaving it up on the off-chance it may help someone. Proceed with caution. It may not be a good idea to blindly integrate this code or work into your project, but instead use it as a starting point.

CHAMP: Compliant Hook Arboreal Mobility Platform (Senior Thesis Project)

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For my senior thesis project at WPI, myself and two colleagues (Rachael Putnam – RBE/ME and Mead Landis – RBE/ME) designed a tree climbing robot. I was in charge of designing and implementing the electronics and controls software. I was the most intense project I have ever worked on, both in terms of difficulty and potential impact. Here is our poster for project presentation day:

Here’s a video of the prototype climbing:

We did a blog during the project, here is the best post I wrote:

The report is massive, check it out below:

CHAMP_REPORT

 

Hey! This post was written a long time ago, but I'm leaving it up on the off-chance it may help someone. Proceed with caution. It may not be a good idea to blindly integrate this code or work into your project, but instead use it as a starting point.

Find distance between two zipcodes, dump the result in an excel file

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I recently wrote a piece of software for a friend working on a project, you can find it on github here. The following is from the README.md:

zipcode-distance-excel

This is a command line utility to automatically calculate the distance between two zipcodes and then put the results in an excel (.xlsx) file. It works for US postal codes only.

It was developed to help a colleague and is very application-specific.

Prerequisites

Downloading is easy git, which is already on most systems, on ubuntu use:

For everyone else:

Installing

A step by step series of examples that tell you have to get a development env running

Say what the step will be

Usage

in a directory with the .xlsx file that you want to modify, run:

The program skips the first row in the spreadsheet to avoid headers.

Example Usage

Before:

Before

Terminal output:

After:

After

Authors

  • Devon Bray – site
  • Miranda Lawell – site

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License

Hey! This post was written a long time ago, but I'm leaving it up on the off-chance it may help someone. Proceed with caution. It may not be a good idea to blindly integrate this code or work into your project, but instead use it as a starting point.

#codehell 1 – Electron cannot be started from an SSH session

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Update: If you run export DISPLAY=:0 in the terminal prior to npm start, the application runs just fine on the remote device. Thank you Alex!

In working on an project for work, I have figured out the hard way that Electron has to be started from a terminal session on your target device (ie the computer it is to be viewed on). I am developing an embedded system based on the Raspberry Pi that does not take user input but displays information on a screen.

Upon downloading the electron-quick-start example, everything installs correctly without error and can be done remotely via SSH. Upon running with npm start, the following error is thrown.

I spent most of the evening trying to debug npm ERR! code ELIFECYCLE to no avail. On a lark, I connected a keyboard to the device and ran npm start and it ran without error. Sigh.

The remote development alternative for doing this is to use Remote Desktop Connection a client comes bundled in with windows. The software can be installed on the remote system (the Raspberry Pi) using apt-get install xrdp. Upon connecting, opening up a shell in the RDP client, and running npm start, the example application works just fine.

Hey! This post was written a long time ago, but I'm leaving it up on the off-chance it may help someone. Proceed with caution. It may not be a good idea to blindly integrate this code or work into your project, but instead use it as a starting point.