Tag Archives: Leonardo

Update: The kits have landed, roll-out plans & Arduino vs Raspberry Pi performance

We posted another update a couple of days ago covering many of these points, but it seems to have evaporated (Maybe I forgot to hit the ‘Post’ button).

We know some of the kits have arrived locally in Ireland. However, one backer reported that the packaging was ‘compromised’  but that the components were OK. He sent us some photos & we will now update packaging on all future kit shipments. If any backer experiences a problem with the packaging, email us and we will sort it out. We plan to post the next batch of kits over the weekend or early next week.

On the Raspberry Pi front we have learned some differences compared to Arduino. For what we are doing with AnalysIR, Arduino appears superior, which was initially surprising considering the 16MHz vs 700Mhz CPU speed. But apparently, it’s because Arduino is dedicated exclusively to IO & RPi is a linux based OS doing lots of other things simultaneously. I believe RPi may perform better with kernel patches or over-clocking, but we don’t want to go there yet.

Yesterday we got the measurement of IR modulation frequency working on RPi using GPIO. This may be a world first for both Arduino & RPi. The only downside is that we cannot decode the signal & measure the modulation frequency simultaneously on the RPi, which we can on the Arduino. So for now, we will just provide a command line facility on RPi for measuring modulation Frequency. We have also written a script to take the raw output from LIRC on the RPi and convert it to AnalysIR format via LAN, which means we can also use LIRC as a real-time recording mechanism on RPi. (In theory, it should be easy to extend this to every other Linux platform with LIRC installed)
One bonus with the RPi is that we can already decode & analyse IR signals over the LAN, a feature which the Yún will also provide via WiFi. We also read the blog post on the upcoming Arduino Yún release and can’t wait to get AnalysIR running on it…… The Yún should work out of the box, via serialUSB as it also has a Leonardo on-board and we will have to write up some small script to enable the WiFi part (Oct+ time-frame for WiFi).

Regarding our planned roll-out (circa 9th Sep), we plan to stick with a 2 phase approach as outlined on the main campaign page. If there are additional slots available for the initial phase we will contact backers directly. The reason is to avoid wasting time for 100+ people with a new release.

I would like to finish off by thanking you all for supporting AnalysIR.

Update: 50% of Campaign target reached

Great News – we have passed 50% of the minimum target, but with lots of hard work remaining to get to 100%.

We had a great weekend with the Maker Faire & coverage on the Arduino Blog. I believe we also got coverage on Adafruit yeaterday, all of which really helps to get the message out for AnalysIR.

Thanks again to our backers who shared the link to our project (see earlier post on how to) – it really helps and we can see the impact via the analytics.

We will make another update once we have fully recovered from Maker Faire (Great fun and very very hard work on the day and in preparation).

This morning we were pulling our hair out using the Leonardo platform, but it seems that unlike other Arduinos you need to properly close the serial port in the windows application before exiting, otherwise the Leonardo is visible as a COM port but unusable. It took hours to debug this and we will make a post on the Arduino forum in case others hit the same problem.

……more later and a BIG welcome to all of our new backers.