Why raspberry pi zero is not for faint hearted?

The story starts with family wanting to watch streaming TV as Digital terrestrial TV is not the best with us. I read an article about using Kodi on a Raspberry Pi. Raspberry Pi 3, Noobs MicroSD and old USB keyboard with a few hours and I had one media player. Exhalent but it got me intrigued….

After a bit of searching on the net and I found £4 for a Raspberry Pi zero and I was sold what could go wrong?

Well a lot really first one I ordered would not work checked the microSDs in the Raspberry Pi 3 ok.  Ordered a replacement (impatient me) and was about to send back the first so started checking simple stuff like power and clocks.  I work in the trade so have access to equipment. Power was coming up and then dropping from 3v3 to 2v8 odd?

When I looked under a microscope, I could see filaments of solder around the regulator chip. Wiped them off and it booted. Second Zero booted first time.

But the zeros would not boot off some microSDs that worked on Raspberry Pi 3 anything bigger that 16GB in my collection of microSDs would not boot. I even ran Raspbian Jessie Lite on a 4GB from an old phone. If anyone knows a source of 32GB microSDs that work in zeros let me know.

The zero only has one USB port so you need a hub, I also have a collection of these. It does not have WIFI or Ethernet so to make it connected you will need a hub.  Odd things happened here I used one of those OTG shims to connect to USB hub flashed the light on the hub and showed the wifi icon on the screen but no working keyboard or mouse. Keyboard worked without hub?

To set stuff up I used the serial terminal see this link http://elinux.org/RPi_Serial_Connection. Now I could go in and set up USB WIFI dongle got two different ones working but that’s a different story.  Now I had network I could use VNC (https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/remote-access/vnc/) works sometimes and not others. I can now do stuff with it, via serial terminal and VNC. 
You can do so much. I have for example:

·         Programed Arduino boards.(http://openenergymonitor.blogspot.com/2013/12/developing-for-arduino-remotely-on.html , http://pblog.ebaker.me.uk/2014/01/uploading-arduino-sketch-from-raspberry.html )

·         Set up PHP web servers.

·         Samba file and media servers.

·         Connected sensors ( acceleration, magnetic, humidity, air pressure and temperature)

On the whole a very useful box but if you want a desktop get a Raspberry Pi 3.

MBED non standard Boards

I was put off MBED by the fact you have to by board for the listed ones on the site.
Then I found this post https://developer.mbed.org/questions/7443/Using-mbed-with-generic-STM32F103C8T6-ch/ and this article https://developer.mbed.org/users/hudakz/code/STM32F103C8T6_Hello/

I have a number of STM32 board left over from sample dev-kits. So I picked out one that was not really good for much. Enter the M24SR-DISCOVERY http://www.st.com/content/st_com/en/products/evaluation-tools/product-evaluation-tools/st25-nfc-rfid-eval-boards/st25-nfc-rfid-eval-boards/m24sr-discovery.html
which was made to sell the M24SR64 device for RFID.  RFID was all the rage recently but turned out to not give all it promised. To cut a long store short I have a board with LCD and very little IO pulled out to pads.

Using said board and info in links I did my own project on MBED,
https://developer.mbed.org/users/lloydg/code/M24SR-DISCOVERY-testbed/

it currently shows some graphs and port reads. I have not looked at the M24SR64 device as I can't think of anything to use it for.

Check out other post on using non standard Boards on MBED.
https://developer.mbed.org/questions/53937/STM32F3-Discovery-or-STM32F4-Discovery-a/
I have a stm32f4-discovery not the one with MBED support built in so I selected  a Arch Max board with same processor but I need to add my own library to handle pin functions for the different peripherals.
See this post- https://developer.mbed.org/questions/68507/Following-STM32F4DISCOVERY-KIT-FOR-STM32/

If your ever stuck signed in to github?

https://github.com/logout

will save you.

Some old browser let you sign in but you can't find sign out dropdown.

This did not come from help or search, I worked it out.

first try was
https://github.com/signout

but this is a user??
hope no one choses logout. what will we do then?
Don't even think about it!!

Arduino cores

If you are one of the few who don't know what one is look here: https://www.arduino.cc/ This is the Swiss army knife or sonic screwdriver of the micro world. With a simple IDE and libraries for any sort of hardware you can think of. The basic Arduino is a ATmega 8-bit Microcontroller. The real Big Idea in my mind is that the code can be ported to other micros and platforms or cores in Arduino parlance. Here are some that I have looked at: https://github.com/rogerclarkmelbourne/Arduino_STM32 https://github.com/esp8266/Arduino And others I've not, see this list https://github.com/arduino/Arduino/wiki/Unofficial-list-of-3rd-party-boards-support-urls

Hardware Hacking with Javascript

Been working on a little connected ESP8266 project  with a web based front end and came across this.
hardware-hacking-with-javascript-internet-of-things
Had not thought about JavaScript but it looks promising.