Posted on

Brother P-touch QL570 on Raspberry Pi

I just wanted to use a Brother P-touch QL570 printer on a Raspberry Pi that is used as “Desktop PC” replacement for web-based applications.

Here is how to setup the printer:

1. connect the printer to power and to the PI (via USB)

2. install cups and the printer driver on the pi:
sudo apt-get install cups printer-driver-ptouch

3. set up user rights:
sudo usermod -aG lpadmin pi
This steps enables you to access cups administration pages in the next step

4. install the printer in cups:
– open a browser and go to http://localhost:631
– when asked for a password use user “pi” and password “raspberry”
– add a new printer, select the QL570 which is locally connected
– use the driver for QL550 when asked for the driver you want to use

5. finish – enjoy printing

Posted on

Building a current / flux probe for contactless measurements

In the last weeks I followed an idea to measure current without the need to cut the wires or even open a pcb trace. The solution i came up with is a hall effect based measurement.

I wrote some more about it in an article here: http://avrs-at-leipzig.de/dokuwiki/en/prokekte/fluxprobe

If you do not like to open the full arcitle here you can review the basic schematic as well as to see a foto of my first prototype:

schematic of the prototype
Foto of my prototype

The first but still impressing measurement:

flux probe measurement at 10Hz
flux probe measurement at 10Hz, 10ms/div, red: output of probe at 200mV/div, yellow current at 33,3mA/div
Posted on

day 3 of embedded world

OSADL

The final day of the exhibition “embedded world” was a bit less exhausting. We spend some time speaking to the people of the stand linux meets industry. This organisation is supporting big companies running and developing open source software as well as spreading the open source thinking.

The rest of my day was quite relaxed… we walked around a bit and talked to several companies as well as some people who were interested in the project leobots.

All in all the exhibition was a big success for the team as well as for me. We all got some great impressions what the embedded industry is like at the moment.

Posted on

day 2 of embedded world

source: http://www.embedded-world.de/de/presse/mediacenter/download/

Today I spoke to some companies that I might work for in saxony. There are quite a lot of them, that I did not know before or I did not know that they also develop hardware themselves. This is why today was a great success for me. But on the other hand the days get more and more exhausting – fortunately the exhibition ends one hour earlier tomorrow. I’m very tired right now…

After the official end of the visitor opening times there were some parties at the microsoft and ebv stand among others. Thanks to them for providing some food and drinks for us while playing music! Also thanks to the “open source meets industry” guys who are always worth talking to! Especially I was enjoying to meet Benedikt Sauter (http://embedded-projects.net/) finally after following his work since several years now.

One thing I want to show you finally is an automatic solver for the rubik cube. Basically they built a lego mindstorms robot that handles all the turning and used a smartphone to capture the recent state of the cube. These two elements are combined by a pc that solves the game and controlls the robot while capturing the images form the smartphone:

Posted on

day 1 of embedded world

Today was the start of the exhibition embedded world. I’ve met a lot of interesting people and got some offers for the practical semester starting this september. I will visit some other halls tomorrow.

Because I’m at the exhibition with the leobots team, I was also going around the halls with the robot and talking to some of the sponsors and companies who might become sponsors.

Posted on

day 0 of embedded world

Today I travelled to Nuremberg with the other participants of our exhibition stand. We arrived really early about 4pm and equipped our stand for the tomorrow starting show.

Afterwards I went to my hostel room. I took a bed at A&O Hostel in the city center of nuremberg. It is next to the main station. As far as I can judge until now it is great.

After unpacking my stuff into the tiny locker in the room, I went to buy some food. On the way to the supermarket I came along a shop that was selling used stuff. I noticed a tripod in the shop windows. They sold a really nice looking one for only 29€, so it had to buy it at this bargain 😉 Just a picture with my crappy mobile phone cam:

my new tripod

When I came back to the Hostel I tried to connect to the internet. Seems that simyo delays the booking of the umts flatrates by some hours, so that I started whatching a movie. Some minutes later a roommate arrived – he came directly from india. He is going to visit the same exhibition, so we talked a while until we decided to go to a bar and have a beer and talk about the different cultures…

Posted on

flickr photostream

Only a short note this time: I just added a widget to the sidebar that shows my recent photos. I got a Nikon D5000 about one month ago, so I hope to update this regularly with amazing photos 😉

Posted on

Kylerhea hills (2nd day on Isle of Skye)

On our second day on the Isle of Skye we went to the south of the island. There we wanted to walk along a nice route for a day trip. Unfortunately the weather was really bad with heavy wind and permanent rain from the side (yes, it was raining horizontally). Another problem was that a part of the group was not used to walk so much and so they were totaly exhausted from the walk the day before. One of them said “fuck you Chris” when he saw the ascend I planned to go up.

To make the trip enjoyable for all of us we decided to take another route. We decided to take a route along the foot of the hills  and try to get up somewhere. When we reached one of the smaller summits the wind was directly blowing towards us and was so strong that it was even hard to go forward. At this point we decided to go back.

 

view from kylerhea hills in south direction
rainbow

Unfortunately it was to rainy all the time to make more good photographs. But as usual here is the GPS-Track:

Posted on

Erster Eintrag

nachdem meine Webseite c-aurich.de nun schon Ewigkeiten brach lag, habe ich mich dazu entschlossen ihr wieder ein wenig Leben einzuhauchen. Einen Anlass dazu gibt es natürlich auch: rund um das Auslandsstudium, das ich in Glasgow angehen werde, wird es genug zu schreiben geben. Es geht zwar erst am 14.09. los, aber es gibt jetzt schon ein paar Sachen, über die ich schreiben könnte/werde.

Da es zur Zeit noch ziemlich viel zu tun gibt, muss ich erstmal sehen, wann ich dazu komme zu bloggen.