Category Archives: Educational

Educational posts that promote iP Solutions expertise.

Raspberry Pi SPI Command-line Utility 1.3.1 Available

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The Rasp­berry Pi SPI command-line util­ity, spincl, has been updated. Ver­sion 1.3.1 is now avail­able. iP Solu­tions orig­i­nally released the Rasp­berry Pi SPI util­ity in Feb­ru­ary, 2013 licensed under Open Source GNU GPLv3. This spincl update is cov­ered under the same license.

The fol­low­ing items are included in the update:

  • This ver­sion was built with the bcm2835-1.25 library. All pre­vi­ous ver­sions were built with bcm2835-17.
  • This ver­sion was tested on 2013-02-09 raspian wheezy. The 2012-10-28 raspian wheezy was used for all pre­vi­ous versions.

iP Solu­tions orig­i­nally cre­ated the Ser­ial Periph­eral Inter­face (SPI) command-line util­ity for the Rasp­berry Pi (www.raspberrypi.org) plat­form for the con­ve­nience of hard­ware debug and to indi­rectly add SPI func­tion­al­ity to script­ing lan­guages such as Bash and Python.

Although a C library exists for the Broad­com bcm2835 with an SPI Appli­ca­tion Pro­gram­ming Inter­face (API) among other things, there are rea­sons to have a command-line util­ity, which can be invoked from a shell com­mand line or from within a script. A command-line util­ity allows easy test­ing and debug­ging of SPI slave devices with­out hav­ing to develop a C exe­cutable. Addi­tion­ally, it pro­vides a sim­ple way for bash and python scripts to access the SPI mas­ter of the BCM2835 on Rasp­berry Pi. Although the raspian dis­tri­b­u­tion pro­vides GPIO libraries with the included python instal­la­tion it doesn’t include an SPI library. spincl, on the other hand, can be invoked from a python (or bash) script.

Check the orig­i­nal post for a full expla­na­tion of the Rasp­berry Pi SPI command-line util­ity and to down­load the lat­est version.

Raspberry Pi SPI Command-line Utility Update

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The Rasp­berry Pi SPI command-line util­ity, spincl, has been updated.  Ver­sion 1.3.0 is now avail­able.  iP Solu­tions orig­i­nally released the Rasp­berry Pi SPI util­ity in Feb­ru­ary, 2013, licensed under Open Source GNU GPLv3.  This spincl update is cov­ered under the same license.

The fol­low­ing items are included in the update:

  • Bug Fix:  A bug in the way the num­ber of trans­mit bytes was cal­cu­lated has been fixed.  Pre­vi­ously, if the total byte length of the trans­fer was greater than the num­ber of spec­i­fied xmit bytes then an attempt to access command-line argu­ments beyond the num­ber avail­able would occur, which causes a seg­men­ta­tion fault.
  • suid bit is now set in the install tar­get of Makefile.

iP Solu­tions orig­i­nally cre­ated the Ser­ial Periph­eral Inter­face (SPI) command-line util­ity for the Rasp­berry Pi (www.raspberrypi.org) plat­form for the con­ve­nience of hard­ware debug and to indi­rectly add SPI func­tion­al­ity to script­ing lan­guages such as Bash and Python.

Although a C library exists for the Broad­com bcm2835 with an SPI Appli­ca­tion Pro­gram­ming Inter­face (API) among other things, there are rea­sons to have a command-line util­ity, which can be invoked from a shell com­mand line or from within a script.  A command-line util­ity allows easy test­ing and debug­ging of SPI slave devices with­out hav­ing to develop a C exe­cutable.  Addi­tion­ally, it pro­vides a sim­ple way for bash and python scripts to access the SPI mas­ter of the BCM2835 on Rasp­berry Pi. Although the raspian dis­tri­b­u­tion pro­vides GPIO libraries with the included python instal­la­tion it doesn’t include an SPI library. spincl, on the other hand, can be invoked from a python (or bash) script.

Check the orig­i­nal post for a full expla­na­tion of the Rasp­berry Pi SPI command-line util­ity and to down­load the lat­est version.

 

Demand Response for California Agricultural Irrigation

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A paper by Gary Marks of iP Solu­tions, “Oppor­tu­ni­ties for Demand Response in Cal­i­for­nia Agri­cul­tural Irri­ga­tion: A Scop­ing Study” has just been pub­lished by the Demand Response Research Cen­ter (DRRC).

Link to the DRRC version

Con­tinue read­ing →

SPI Command-line Utility for Raspberry Pi

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Raspberry PiiP Solu­tions has cre­ated a Ser­ial Periph­eral Inter­face (SPI) command-line util­ity for the Rasp­berry Pi (www.raspberrypi.org) plat­form.  The util­ity, spincl, is licensed under Open Source GNU GPLv3 and is being offered by iP Solu­tions as a free down­load with source included.

Although a C library exists for the Broad­com bcm2835 with an SPI Appli­ca­tion Pro­gram­ming Inter­face (API) among other things, there are rea­sons to have a command-line util­ity, which can be invoked from a shell com­mand line or from within a script.  A command-line util­ity allows easy test­ing and debug­ging of SPI slave devices with­out hav­ing to develop a C exe­cutable.  Addi­tion­ally, it pro­vides a sim­ple way for bash and python scripts to access the SPI mas­ter of the BCM2835 on Rasp­berry Pi. Although the raspian dis­tri­b­u­tion pro­vides GPIO libraries with the included python instal­la­tion it doesn’t include an SPI library. spincl, on the other hand, can be invoked from a python (or bash) script.   Con­tinue read­ing →

Emerging Technologies Summit Presentation

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Gary Marks of iP Solu­tions was invited to speak at the Emerg­ing Tech­nolo­gies Sum­mit in Pasadena, CA on Octo­ber 15th, 2012.  He pre­sented “Oppor­tu­ni­ties for Demand Response in Cal­i­for­nia Agri­cul­tural Irri­ga­tion” to the ses­sion titled “The Untapped Resource, Demand Response for the Indus­trial and Agri­cul­tural Mar­kets”.

The Power-point Presentation

Down­load (PPTX, 1.24MB)

 

Precision Irrigation

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iP Solu­tions announces the pub­li­ca­tion of  “Pre­ci­sion Irri­ga­tion: A Method to Save Water and Energy While Increas­ing Crop Yield, a Tar­geted Approach for Cal­i­for­nia Agri­cul­ture” by Gary Marks.

Crop irri­ga­tion require­ments vary in time with weather and soil con­di­tions. Pre­ci­sion
irri­ga­tion pro­vides a means for eval­u­at­ing a crop’s water require­ments and a means for
apply­ing the right amount at the right time. Often in the lit­er­a­ture, pre­ci­sion irri­ga­tion is referred to as irri­ga­tion sched­ul­ing: That is sched­ul­ing based on envi­ron­men­tal data, whether that data comes from local field sen­sors or from more global sources such as regional mete­o­ro­log­i­cal information.

Apply­ing pre­ci­sion irri­ga­tion prac­tices offers sig­nif­i­cant poten­tial for sav­ing water,
energy, and money. Fur­ther, it has the poten­tial to increases crop yield. There is an
addi­tional pos­i­tive envi­ron­men­tal impact from pre­ci­sion irri­ga­tion in that farm runoff, a major source of water pol­lu­tion, can be reduced.

While pre­ci­sion irri­ga­tion has value for all types of irri­ga­tion in any region of the world, this paper focuses on the irri­ga­tion of Cal­i­for­nia agri­cul­ture, which uses nearly 80% of the state’s water and more than ten bil­lion Kilo­watt hours of elec­tric­ity annu­ally. That is enough elec­tric­ity to power one mil­lion typ­i­cal Amer­i­can house­holds each year. The approx­i­mate power plant capac­ity required to power Cal­i­for­nia irri­ga­tion through the months of May through Octo­ber is 2500 MW, which is equiv­a­lent to 250 Min-Nuke power plants run­ning at an aver­age of 10MW each. The car­bon foot­print asso­ci­ated
with the power is approx­i­mately six mil­lion met­ric tons of CO2 per year.

See full paper…