Maytech remote and MakerX VESC

Building the tow boogie I am using the Maytech MTSKR1905WF Remote and the MakerX Hi200/75V VESC together with the Flipsky 65161 motor. Here are som some quick notes about the settings I have used to get things to work as I want.

There is a circuits diagram on the Maytech page which makes it easy to connect the remote receiver and the VESC together using the pinout picture on the MakerX page.


VESC App settings:

  • if you are using firmware version 5.03 (VESC TOOL 3.1) or above – turn off the phase filter, see here for more details
  • Set App to Use to UART – gives much quicker response than the Maytech recommended UART and PPM.
  • Use the Maytech recommended Control Type: Current No Reverse under VESC Remote
  • For quicker response on the remote, change the Input Deadband to something like 3% under VESC Remote

VESC Motor Settings:

  • Set Motor Current Max to 140A
  • Do not set Motor Current Max Brake to 0A but some negativa number like -1A
  • Set Absolute Maximum Current to 180A

Here are some screen dumps to better explain the settings

App to Use: UART
VESC Remote settings
Motor Settings


Support RPM filtering?

Started flying FPV in October 2020 but have since then blown a couple of ESC. And each time I’m going to setup the new ones I ran into problems so this time I write down some notes to not have that happen again…

The most common problem I run into is that I turn on Bi-directional DShot in BetaFlight but then I get RPM_FILTER Disarm disabled flag turned on!! And cannot figure out why??

The answer and solution is quite simple. The default ESC firmware does not support bidirectional DShot! And this article describes how to get it. The ESCs I have one need to use BLHeli_S firmware. On my Nazgul 5 2 HD the ESC has the G H 30 configuration and currently I’m using version 16.73. So I download the G_H_30_REV16_73.HEX firmware and use BLHeli Configuration to flash it. Other versions can be downloaded from https://github.com/JazzMaverick/BLHeli/tree/JazzMaverick-patch-1/BLHeli_S%20SiLabs 

Installing Xiaomi XiaoFang with OctoPrint

I wanted to have a live video stream from my Snapmaker 2.0 since it now has got a space in a closet. After a couple of tries to use a live video stream from the XiaoFang camera I realized it would not be a good solution. Quite a lot of tweaking to get it to work and it would require quite some resources from the Raspberry and thus might affect prints. But I still wanted to use that camera since I already had it.
OctoPrint video

After looking through the OctoPrint forum I saw that some people had used a special firmware on Wyze cameras to just make them into webcameras and connect directly to the Raspberry. The Wyze camera and the XiaoFang are the same camera, but wonder if it would just work to use that firmware? Found an article indicating it should work so gave it a try. Went to the firmware page and followed the instructions. Built a USB A to USB A cable and connected the camera to my PC. Wow, it is a webcam! Connected it the the Raspberry and entered the default settings for camera. Voila!

Xiaomi XiaoFang T20(or rather T20L)

Last summer I got a Xiaomi XiaoFang 1S camera from Magnus. Tried to get it working then but never succeeded but today I got some inspiration and managed to get it working and stream video over RTSP! It was not so hard. Just go to the GitHub project Xiaomi-Dafang-Hacks and follow the instructions but one must know that it was a T20L so start with those specific instructions.

One thing also that might have made a difference, now this time I did this on my Windows machine and not my Mac. And really made sure the SD card was formatted as a FAT32 drive.

 Also found this firmware that looks interesting; OpenMiko

Let’s Encrypt auto renew only fails for the server domain

I had a bit of struggle with Let’s Encrypts certbot today. Somehow it got 403 Forbidden each time it tried to authenticate the domain for my server. All the other website it worked without problem.

I created a simple text file in /.well-known/acme-challenge to see if I could access it. Yes it worked externally but then I realized I got 403 Forbidden when I tried to access from the server!

After lots of digging and testing I checked the apache general error.log and saw these lines:
[Sun Jan 20 21:52:32.754574 2019] [authz_core:error] [pid 2238] [client 2001:4b98:dc2:47:216:3eff:fe9b:cec6] AH01630: client denied by server configuration: /var/www/

Seeing that IPv6 address gave a clue and soon I found out it was due to that my webserver is not setup to listen to IPv6.
<virtualhost 185.26.124.99:80 [2001:4b98:dc2:47:216:3eff:fe9b:cec6]:80>

Adding it to the Virtual host listen config it solved it!

Spela Spotify på Amazon Echo

Lånade hem en Amazon Echo för att experimentera lite vad man kan göra med den och se hur bra röstgränssnittet är. Någon hade nämnt man kan använda den för att spela musik från Spotify och hittade rätt fort var man skulle ställa in det men valet var utgråat!! Gick inte välja. Varför?

Efter lite googlande hittade jag att det beror på att ens Amazon konto är registrerat i fel region. Men hur ändrar jag och vad är rätt?

Den här artikeln gav tillräckliga ledtrådar för att inse var man ändrar det. Dock enklast är att först lägga in en ny USA adress(det är den region som du måste valt för att få upp Spotify valet visade det sig). Men vilken adress skall man fylla i? Random addresses ger ett par slumpmässiga men dessa ville inte Amazon acceptera. Jag tog dock ett av resultaten och klippte in i Google Maps och sedan klicka på en annan del av gatan för att få en giltig adress.

Sedan nästa steg var att göra som beskrivs i artikeln, klicka där det står Hello, Karl-Petter(ditt namn) och sedan välja Your Content and Devices. I artikeln står det att den heter Manage your Content and Devices men den heter Your Content and Devices numera. Sedan är det bara följa instruktionerna och välja din nya USA adress. Sedan får du vänta ett tag innan din Echo har fattat att du bytt region. Sedan är det bara följa denna guide.

Upgrading postgres version

Suppose you made a brew upgrade and postgres got upgraded. Follow then these steps to upgrade your old DB data to the new version.

Start to move of your old data directory:
mv /usr/local/var/postgres /usr/local/var/postgres_96_20171110

Initialize a new fresh DB with the new version of postgres
initdb /usr/local/var/postgres/

Check which postgres services are running and stop all
brew services list

Stop all postgres services, one command for each:
brew services start postgresql

Run postgres upgrade tool(-b and -B are the bin directories for old and new version, and -d and -D same for data directories):
pg_upgrade -b /usr/local/Cellar/postgresql\@9.6/9.6.6/bin/ -B /usr/local/Cellar/postgresql/10.1/bin/ -d /usr/local/var/postgres_20171110 -D /usr/local/var/postgres

Start the postgres service again:
brew services start postgresql

Debug Magento 2 using PhpStorm

I had to spend some time to get my PhpStorm working with debugging a Magento 2 store we are developing. This is a short notice of what I found out and how I got it working.

A couple of weeks ago I had a working setup where I could debug both command line commands and pages using PhpStorm. Last weeks I have been developing a command line but swapped back to some page coding now and it did not work. In my initial setup I mainly followed this setup but since I use MAMP(none PRO) this article was helpful.

After a bit of struggling I found out the reason why it was not working any longer. Because of some mysterious reason I had checked the “Use path mappings…” check box. DON’T!

And as you see above it works just fine with using localhost in the servers configuration.

Another useful things to solve this was to add xdebug.remote_log="/tmp/xdebug.log" to the two php.ini files and restart MAMP and then look at the log with tail -f /tmp/xdebug.log. I noticed I had a couple of lines like this:
I: Connecting to configured address/port: localhost:9000.
W: Creating socket for 'localhost:9000', poll success, but error: Operation now in progress (19).
W: Creating socket for 'localhost:9000', poll success, but error: Operation now in progress (19).
I: Connected to client. :-)

The lines starting with W(guess meaning Warning) should not be there. It means the connection was not completely successful even though reading the line indicates some sort of success but there is the error too.

And while we are at it. I have not yet figured out the meaning of this button.

There seems to be no need to listen for PHP debug connections using this setup.

Configure WLAN on Raspberry Pi Z W

To setup my Raspberry Pi Z W I have combined two different guides since editing the files on the SD did not work, nor did I had the energy to setup Vagrant.

Start by flashing a micro SD card as described here using Etcher.

Insert the card into a Mac or PC and add enable_uart=1 to the end of config.txt as described here.

Insert the SD card in the Raspberry Pi and boot it as described here using a USB serial cable. Then in a terminal window run screen /dev/tty.usbserial-A7005Gpd 115200 (change to your device tty) to connect to the serial terminal on the Raspberry Pi.

Now you can follow this guide from step 3. Though I did not configure mine for two networks and here are how my configuration files look like:

sudo nano /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf


country=SE
ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev
update_config=1

network={
ssid="SSID_OF_NETWORK_1"
psk="password"
id_str="home"
}

sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces


source-directory /etc/network/interfaces.d

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

iface eth0 inet manual

allow-hotplug wlan0
iface wlan0 inet manual
wpa-roam /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf

iface home inet dhcp

Ta bort plast som fastnat

Fick ju lite problem med skrivaren på grund av felaktiga inställningar och var lite fundersam till hur plockar man isär den och sedan sätter ihop den för att få bort plast som fastnat. Som tur är har andra redan gjort det och det fanns bra filmer på YouTube. Denna tyckte jag var bäst.

En sak som är viktig vad gäller PrimaCreator skrivaren är att den säljs under flera olika namn och det vanligaste verkar vara MonoPrice Select Mini och söker man på det hittar man tex denna utmärkta Wiki med gott om kunskap om skrivaren och instruktioner.