Hardware

Sonoff S20 v1.3 Programming

Like a lot of people I’ve been reprogramming the range of sonoff devices with alternative firmware for simpler Alexa control.

However the latest S20 socket I bought didn’t flash quite as easily as the first one I tried.

First of all soldering on the header was made a little bit more difficult due to the new construction.

1: Unscrew the 3 black Phillips head screws

2:  Separate the 2 halves of the plug

3: Take a 3mm drill bit and carefully drill out the top of the 2 plastic posts at the socket end which are holding the circuit board in.

4: Carefully turn over the PCB and solder on your header.

Connect your FTDI connector to the S20, in this picture orange = gnd, yellow = RX, Green = TX, Blue = Vcc (3.3v)

You don’t appear to have to reverse tx and rx to program these.

Load the arduino editor and the sketch you want to load, to program these you need these settings in Arduino IDE

ESP8266 module
80mhz CPU Frequency
40mhz Flash frequency
115200 Upload Speed
1M(128kb) SPIFFS Flash Size
DOUT Flash Mode

3DPrinting

3D Create & Print Issue 47 – Hood limit switch

Just a little tip for anyone else that had trouble with the screw provided with this issue as they seem to be made out of the softest metal in the world.

I drilled out the holes on the limit switch to 3mm which is easy to do as they are 2.5mm already.

This then allowed the use of some 3mm machine screws I had on hand with 3mm nuts, luckily the holes in the frame are already big enough so no further modification needed.

quads

Mini H Quad – New FC

So my H Quad just got a new flight controller, a CC3D board from banggood

2014-10-15 23.02.41

I de-soldered the headers on the rx and the CC3D board and changed them for the right angles ones you can see.

De-soldering these was a complete pain but the method I came upon was this:

You’ll need a decent pair of mini side cutters such as these

You’ll also need to fix the pcb down so it doesn’t move about.

Step 1: Cut the pins in half to reduce the thermal mass.

Step 2: Try and work your cutters between the black plastic portion to separate the pins in to individual parts, this will make it easier later.

Step 3: Cut the solder pads as close to the pcb as you can.

Step 4: Apply some flux to the bottom connections and use solder wick to remove as much solder as possible.

Step 5: Now take a sewing pin or a single header pin held between the jaws of some pliers and using your soldering iron heat the pin in the pliers and the pad in order to push the pin you’re trying to remove out.

Next time I do this procedure I’ll try and take some pictures to illustrate better.

Then is was a case of running the openpilot s/w and configuring the airframe and a quick flight to verify it.

 

Hardware

Monday morning hard drive woes

What a start to Monday.

Last week we had a drive fail in a disk array, no problem slap in the spare from the shelf and we’re good to go screwed damn drive gave error and was no good, ok box has a hot spare in it, hmm that’s showing as unconfigured bad lalalalalala

Spent Thursday afternoon and all day Friday going back and forth with IBM support and finally on Friday afternoon they agree to send out 3 disks.

Get to work this morning and the disks had already been delivered so by half 9 both bad disks in the array were changed, cold spare on the shelf and faulty drives at the gatehouse to be picked up tomorrow.

Then I noticed that the Thecus NAS is screaming at me with red lights and that has a failed disk in it too 🙁 coupled with the imminent death of my laptop hard drive last week and the non functioning replacement I’m going back to bed.