OpenWRT and Scripting Languages, Part 1

Posted on January 10, 2012 by cg

The RGB wall light project is currently on hold due to a massive lack of time. Still, I’m taking little steps of preparation for the second phase of the project, the software intended to control the RGB matrix. I could use the gcc cross compiler for the job, but using a scripting language to develop directly on the device promises to be far more comfortable. I’d like to narrow this down to languages readily available as packages for OpenWRT which leaves me with Erlang, Lua, Ruby, Perl, and Python. Since I feel like trying something new I’m going to rule out Perl for now.

Make Room

The installation of the bleeding edge OpenWRT version called “Attitude Adjustment” on the TL-MR3220 leaves about 1MB of space for additional packages to be installed – which isn’t even close to being enough for this purpose. So, the first step is to extend that space and the currently recommended way to do this is to move the overlay mount to an external USB device: Continue reading →

Wifi Enabled RGB Matrix Wall Light, Part 1

Posted on December 17, 2011 by cg

Inspired by the so called Lampduino and several other related projects I decided to build my own version of a RGB matrix wall light some time ago. During the last few weeks I finally managed to start out on this project.

Hardware

The matrix of 64 individual cells and the LED back-plane are made from 4mm thin plywood that I spray-painted with a silvery varnish. The outer frame is made from a stronger 14mm birch multiplex board, yielding a very solid construction. I also bought some thin, white PVC board intended as the material for the front cover, but I still have to figure out how to cut that nicely.

Lacking the ambition to create my own LED driver board I settled for the “Rainbowduino”, an Arduino compatible board developed and sold by Seeed Studio. In addition to that, I wanted the matrix to be controlled and programmed over the air. One of the cheapest, easiest, and most versatile ways to accomplish this was to modify an OpenWRT based router for this purpose.

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Serial Communication Between an Arduino and the TL-MR3220 Router

Posted on September 25, 2011 by cg

Last time, I installed OpenWRT on the TL-MR3220 router and added a connector for it’s serial interface. Today, I wanted to try and connect this interface to an Arduino to make the two communicate. The router’s interface operates at 3.3V while the Arduino’s UART operates at 5V, so we need to convert between those levels. The cheapest way to do this that I could find is described here. It involves using a 74LS04 hex inverter chip to convert the 3.3V signal up to 5V and two resistors for a simple voltage divider to convert the 5V signal down to 3.3V.

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OpenWRT and the Serial Console of the TL-MR3220 Router

Posted on August 22, 2011 by cg

The TP-LINK router TL-MR3220 is a very cheap (around €22 in Germany) yet feature-rich wireless 802.11n router that supports the open source OpenWRT firmware. It offers a USB port, allowing a bunch of additional peripheral hardware to be connected. Installing the matching OpenWRT nightly build was easy enough, the original firmware offers to do so using the standard web interface.

I was thinking about connecting one of them to an Arduino in a project to come. The integrated serial interface seems to be the obvious way to achieve this. The router’s board readily exposes the interface, so I added a 4-pin header to do a few tests. The pin-out of the interface is documented in the OpenWRT wiki. Using a standard FTDI adapter I then got access to the router’s serial console. From here it should not be to hard to use the same interface to connect to an Arduino instead.