Apollo-NG Mobile Hackbase
Apollo-NG is a mobile, self-sustainable, independent and highly-experimental Hackbase, focused on research, development and usage of next-generation open technology while visiting places without a resident, local Hackerspace and offering other Hackers the opportunity to work together on exciting projects and to share fun, food, tools & resources, knowledge, experience and inspiration.
Latest Mission-Log Entries
Pimp my Riden RD-6018W
This Episode will focus solely on hacking around in the Riden RD-6018W. Per default, the W version comes with a wireless interface and Ridens android app. Since that is less than useful the idea came up to see if we could flash our own firmware onto it.
Luckily Riden uses a COTS ESP12 module. Unluckily the module isn't simply flashed by plugging it into USB like we are used on the ESP32 nodemcu (and the likes) modules. The next task was to analyze and reverse engineer the module and its PCB implementation and hack a little USB-Serial adapter and breadboard magic, to flash a specific esphome firmware that talks modbus to the RD-6018 and exposes the control interfaces and log data to home-assistant.
After that was successfully done, control is now available in Home-Assistant and long term log-data is stored in Prometheus and available in Grafana.
Last but not least USB connection and working with the open-source toolkit RidenGUI also turned out to be no problem at all. All in all, this was a very successful session to get the most out of the Riden RD-6018 and the same should apply to the RD-6006 and RD-6012 models.
Random Labstuff & Chill
In todays Episode we are going to print and assemble a couple of custom designed 3D parts to finally mount the microscope camera focus unit to a cheap vesa monitor arm in order to have a movable and smoothly focussable microscope camera for the workbench.
After that we are going to update the firmware of the iCharger X6 and start playing around with the Riden RD-6018W, update the firmware with unisoft's version and try to get remote control/logging working.
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