2016-11-13

Smallest, cheap ON-OFF switch for RC cars using a servo

A few months ago, my friend Erwan showed me his recently acquired RC car which was very powerful and quite fun. That was enough to convince me and my other friend Benoit to buy one each :

They are so fast and powerful that you definitely need some large places to play with them. We tried them on a parking on a late afternoon but night started to fall and I found that some light was missing. Given that there's an unused 3rd channel with a dedicated on/off button on the transmitter, that made me think that an obvious mod was going to happen in the form of LEDs.

The receiver has 4 channel outputs for servos. Only the first two ones are used, so I needed to connect a device accepting servo commands. I quickly checked on the net for RC ON/OFF switches replacing a servo but found very few which were quite expensive and large for what they are (around $8 minimum). In fact, you can find some small entry-level servos for less than $1. I thought "after all a servo will make it fine".

A servo contains 3 parts :
  - a motor
  - a potentiometer attached to the motor
  - the signal decoder, moving the motor in the same direction as the signal so that the potentiometer matches the signal length.

The signal decoder can drive a motor so it can deliver at least around 1 amp under 5V, which is perfect.

The signal is a 500-2500 microsecond pulse every 20 ms. I checked with my oscilloscope, and the OFF pulse is around 1300 microseconds, and the ON pulse is around 1700 microsecond large. Given that the center for servos is 1500 microseconds, I just need to detect the position around the center. That could be dealt with using a microcontroller but the servo approach looked cheaper and simpler. Thus I ordered a few of these servos and disassembled them. It's quite easy, there are only 4 screws. The servo looks huge here but all the photos were taken in macro. The servo is only 23 mm wide :
The PCB is extremely small (7x11 mm). Fortunately both the potentiometer and the mtor are soldered using wires, meaning their removal is trivial. It seems like the manufacturer thought about my use case, because the potentiometer pads are exactly aligned and spaced like common SMD resistors, and the motor pads are large and 2.54mm spaced, perfect to place a jumper header. Any pair of 1-10k resistor will fit, as we only want to pretend the potentiometer is at the center so that the controller sends the current either in one polarity or the other.


Just put that into some heat shrink tube :


And the circuit is complete! It's so small that it will easily fit on top of the receiver in the closed box in the car. A quick test shows that it works perfectly, it outputs either +5V or -5V depending on the selector position.

For the next step, I drilled a plastic tab of the appropriate width, I attached 4 white leds in parallel, each with their dedicated 150 ohm resistor, and screwed this at the front of the car. A 2-pin 2.54mm connector and a pair of wired was soldered to the leds, and plugged to the circuit :


That's only $1 and one hour of work in total to put front lights on this car. More importantly there was only 5 minutes of work on the signal decoder so it's really not worth buying a more expensive and larger board.

2016-10-16

Extreme power TV-B-Gone

Purpose

Almost every electronic hobbyist knows about the TV-b-gone project. For those who don't know, it's a nice little device which iterates over many TV ON/OFF remote codes and sends them to an IR led to turn off many TV (appreciable in noisy places or just to have fun).

I wondered if it was possible to build a really high-power one, to shut TVs in the neighborhood or across the street, so I ran a few experiments and finally built one such device. One point which started to make me think about it was after noticing that vegetation (such as tree leaves) appear white under infrared light, so they reflect infrared very well. I thought that if I could send a strong signal to trees, they could reflect it all around.

Example of photos of trees and grass in infrared

Selecting hardware

Not having a TV myself, I wanted the device to be portable for obvious reasons, and will have to be battery-powered. I found some code capable of running on ATTINY85 devices so I used one of my Digispark boards (17x20 mm) :

I made some experiments to drive high power LEDs from an ATTINY85 GPIO. After quite a numebr of tests and fried transistors, I came up with this design which works pretty well and provides clean square signals up to a few hundred kilohertz :

I needed some high-power IR LEDs. The highest power/price ratio I could find using 940nm LEDs (most common wavelength used by TVs) is found when buying packs of 10-20 3W LEDs. These ones need to be soldered on a plate and to use a lens to focus the beam. I found some aluminium PCBs for high power LEDs featuring 20 and 50 places. The 20-LED one was both cheap and small enough to be hand-held so I picked one, with 20 3W LEDs and as many 15° lenses.

Realising the driver

I'm a bit old-school when it comes to realizing PCBs, not even having a printer doesn't make it easy. So I picked the components, placed them like on the schematic, then draw the PCB with a pencil and etched it.

  

Installing the software

A working TV-B-Gone software can be found in Adafruit's Github repository. I performed a few changes such as setting the default region to EU instead of US, and looping forever between the two regions instead of doing a single round. I also changed the LEDs assignment so that the debug LED connected to PB1 can be used to monitor the activity. Then I flashed the device using my Bus Pirate board in order not to depend on any boot loader and have it boot fast. The modifications are available here. The original device uses a 8 MHz ceramic resonator because the internal RC oscillator is supposedly not accurate enough. But I think that receivers are not accurate either and it's not that much of a problem. So I went with the simpler solution consisting in using the internal RC oscillator only.

Assembly

I stuck the boards on the back of the aluminium plate using some double-sided tape, placed an ON/OFF switch, a capacitor and 4 Li-ion batteries providing 14.8V. The aluminium plate is very convenient as it serves as a LED support, a PCB support and as a heat spreader. The most painful part was to solder the LEDs because the solder cools down very quickly and you don't want to put too much of it otherwise there's no more room for the lenses.



Initial tests

I made a small IR detector based on an IR receptor and a green LED. When powering the tv-b-gone on, the receiver immediately receives the beam and blinks, showing the emitted signal. I found that it was possible to catch the signal in any room in my home provided the doors are not completely closed. This proves that the IR signal is powerful enough to be reflected multiple times on the walls.

I started to make some measurements. For this I soldered a 0.05 ohm resistor in series with the LEDs and connected my oscilloscope on it. I noticed that the signal was full of noise on the input, because the capacitor wasn't strong enough to withstand the high current pulse and easily falls by 2 volts when the LEDs emit a pulse. And indeed, this 4700 µF capacitor was warm... I also noticed that the current coming from the batteries is very low, a few hundreds of milliamps on average. The initial lenses had a 45° beam which I found was too large, so I replaced them with a 15° beam.

Modifications

I replaced the capacitor with two low-ESR 3300 µF capacitors. These ones now stand the load much better. The voltage across the 0.05 ohm resistor shows 0.7 volt during pulses. That's 11 amps under 13V, it's 143 Watts! IR LEDs generally support very high power pulses. Here there's 60W of LEDs (20x 3W) arranged in 4 parallel blocks of 5 LEDs. But under 13V  the current raises to around 2.7A, or more than twice the rated current.

I hesitated to add an extra battery but I didn't want to fry the ATTINY module's regulator, supposed to be limited to 16V. So instead I got rid of all these heavy batteries and replaced them with a DC-DC boost regulator calibrated to 15.7V. That's lighter and it provides even more power. Now the LEDs take 14A under 15V, that's 210 watts, or 3.5 times the ratedpower, and 3.5A flowing through each LED! It's interesting to note that the aluminium plate now warms a little bit after one minute.


New tests

I wondered how far the beam could be received. I ran a small test. I placed the device on one window, facing the trees in the garden, and picked my detector. I could receive the signal anywhere else in the house whenever it faces the garden, while there's no direct visibility between the windows, so it was clear that the signal was reflected on the trees :


I brought it to the office where we have a TV in the meeting room. I could turn it on and off from the corridor. But my best surprise was when I went downstairs and found another one turned on! It got the signal after multiple reflections on the walls across one stair! I could run another test with the device placed in my coat's pocket and facing the opposite direction relative to the TV. The TV would turn on again, so the signal was powerful enough so that my opaque coat would let a little bit of it escape and be detected by the TV.

I tested with my brother and could turn on and off his TV from the street (about 50m away).

I noticed that some TVs do not react at all. I don't know if it's because they use a different wavelength (like 850 nm) or because the signal is too faint or no code works. I replaced 4 LEDs with 850nm ones just to see if it makes a difference but have no successful reports for now (it's hard to find TVs in line of sight, and shops don't use them anymore for advertisement). One important point to note is that at this power level, the 850nm LEDs emit some pretty visible faint red flashes. It's normal, their spectrum curve is not perfectly straight and when you drive them to 10W, you can expect to see one milliwatt in the visible spectrum.

Future improvements

I thought about trying a much smaller design using an IR laser diode. I bought a 850nm 1W laser diode. By using a detuned, slightly divergent beam, one could expect having a few centimeters wide "spot" at a few tens/hundred meters. The problem is that IR not being visible, it's very hard to aim, so by having a larger spot it should help. But in practice a camera or smartphone sensitive enough to IR is required to aim the spot because it's very hard to aim with a few centimeters precision at a few tens of meters. So for now I don't think it's that good an idea in the end.

Some 100W 940nm LEDs can be found on the net nowadays. But they're still very expensive ($100) and operate at a high voltage making the circuit harder to design (>30V). Also it's important to consider that we want to overdrive them, this means something like 40-50V pulses, so it's really not a good idea. It seems for now that the 3W LEDs are the best fit. Additionally, many so-called 100W LEDs are only rated for half of this power, so that become quite expensive for something possibly less powerful than the current design.

Maybe this device could be installed in a torch. The electronic parts are quite small, and if someone were to do it from scratch, the ATTINY could be directly soldered on the driver board.

A test could be run with an external ceramic oscillator to see if it provides better results than the internal RC oscillator.

Last words

It's totally useless but was fun to build. It's small enough to put in a pocket and to carry in one's hand. However if you get caught outside or in a shop with this, you'll have a difficult moment trying to explain what it is :-)

2016-09-15

Installing Linux on a SolidRun Clearfog+eMMC board

A few months ago Marvell and SolidRun kindly offered me a Clearfog-A1 (now called Clearfog Pro) board. It is a nice development and/or production board adding an impressive connectivity to quite a powerful Armada388 SoC. This SoC contains two Cortex-A9 CPU cores and high performance I/O like its predecessors but provides 3 GigE ports. It makes me think of the ArmadaXP but consumes much less power and is significantly faster. I've been keeping that board in my bag with all my stuff and using it for kernel testing and various performance tests on ARM.

By wandering on the SolidRun web site recently I noticed that SolidRun had made a new board of half its size and still with all the connectivity (they removed one PCIe slot and the Ethernet switch). The board is amazingly appealing as a small network development board, being fanless, supporting wide voltage ranges, and affordable. So I ordered one. I decided to pick the eMMC version that will save me from losing the micro-SD card all the time.

When I received it I was quite disappointed. It wouldn't boot. No message, nothing. I exchanged the CPU modules between my two boards and found that the CPU module was the culprit. While leaving the board powered on and unattended, I noticed a message "Trying UART" which made me think it wouldn't boot from my micro-SD card and would be trying the UART port instead. After a few exchanges with SolidRun's support, they confirmed that the same lines are used for the eMMC and the micro-SD so the CPU cannot use the micro-SD at all when eMMC is soldered on the board. Not fun at all. I was disappointed that no bootloader was flashed on the board before it was shipped, but for their defence, the board is very new and apparently still being worked on.

But this message "Trying UART" I saw reminded me of the Mirabox. Thus I thought I would try the same procedure I used a few years ago to unbrick it. I first started by trying all possible 32 combinations of the SW1 DIP switches to know which ones allow to boot from what device. Some combinations never returned anything, but the apparently valid ones are reported below. It's a very long and tedious process because most of the time the messages appear after a failed attempt. Values are indicated with switch 1 on the left, switch 5 on the right, OFF = 0, ON = 1.


First valueLast valueDevice attempted to boot from
0000000101SPI flash, not working
00010-SPI flash, working!
00110-MMC but unusable ("card doesn't respond to voltage select")
00111-MMC, working!
01001-UART
01010-NOR
0110001101NOR
1001010111NAND
11000-NOR
1101011011PEX0

Thus I've set the board to value "01001" to enable booting from the UART. And now here's how to proceed.

What you need

This howto assumes that you have a full-featured, networked Linux-based machine with superuser privileges, a properly working ARM toolchain built with soft float (ARMv5 will work fine), Git, a micro USB cable, the usb-serial driver supporting the FTDI chips, a terminal client like "screen", "minicom", "cu", a TFTP server and a network cable.

Build the U-Boot boot loader

Let's first download the Marvell-enabled U-Boot boot loader :
$ git clone https://github.com/MarvellEmbeddedProcessors/u-boot-marvell
$ cd u-boot-marvell
$ git checkout u-boot-2013.01-15t1-clearfog

Pick a soft-float toolchain. Here we use an ARMv5 toolchain. If your toolchain was built with hard-float only support, the build will fail due to some unexpected VFP registers at the end. Configure and build the boot loader for the clearfog board :
$ make CROSS_COMPILE=/toolchain_prefix armada_38x_clearfog_config
$ make CROSS_COMPILE=/toolchain_prefix -j 8 u-boot.mmc
...
 Ext. headers = 1, Header size = 79360 bytes Hdr-to-Img gap = 0 bytes
New image size = 0xd6350[877392] Source image size = 0xd634c[877388]
====>>>> u-boot.mmc was created

The image now needs to be repackaged for U-Boot for booting over UART and from the on-board SPI flash. It requires changing the first byte of the image header and recomputing the image signature. The "doimage" utility does it automatically for us :
./tools/marvell/doimage -T uart -D 0x0 -E 0x0 -G tools/marvell/bin_hdr/bin_hdr.uart.bin u-boot.bin u-boot.uart
./tools/marvell/doimage -T flash -D 0x0 -E 0x0 -G tools/marvell/bin_hdr/bin_hdr.bin u-boot.bin u-boot.flash

Configure the board to boot from the UART

As indicated in the table above, the SW1 DIP switches have to be set to 01001 or OFF,ON,OFF,OFF,ON. You can use a toothpick for this, it's better than a pen and will not leave ink on the switches. If you don't do this, it will still work but will take ages because the BootROM code will first try to boot from the configured devices. If you run a terminal emulator on the serial port, you should see the following appear after a few seconds when powering the board up :
BootROM - 1.73

Trying Uart

If it doesn't appear, it may indicate that the SW1 DIP switches are not properly set and that the board is trying to boot from another device. Don't worry, it will eventually try the UART after it times out on the other devices. It can take up to 3-4 minutes sometimes, thus why it's best to properly configure it.

Upload U-Boot to the board

Now connect the board's to your development machine via the micro-USB connector. A usb-serial device should appear :
# lsusb
Bus 001 Device 101: ID 0403:6001 Future Technology Devices International, Ltd FT232 USB-Serial (UART) IC

The "usbserial" and "ftdi_sio" modules usually need to be loaded to support this board.
In order to upload the image, it is necessary to send a "magic" header to the serial port (assumed to be /dev/ttyUSB0 here) and wait for an ACK (0x15) from the board, then start to send the data using the Xmodem protocol. Since we don't have any flow control here and we don't know when the header will be detected, we send it in loops over the serial port until we receive the ACK indicating the board is waiting for us to upload the boot loader :
# (while :; do
    printf "\xbb\x11\x22\x33\x44\x55\x66\x77"
    if read -t 0 && read -rN1 && [ -n "$REPLY" ]; then
      set -- $(echo -n "$REPLY" | od -tx1 -An);
      [ "$1" = "15" ] && break
    fi
  done) </dev/ttyUSB0 >/dev/ttyUSB0

Once this command is started, connect the power to the board. After about 5 seconds, the loop above returns to the shell. It means the board is ready to receive the boot loader.
If you make a mistake and have to try again, do not worry, just press the reset button (close to the power connector), and run the script above again.
We can then use the "sx" utility to send the UART image of the boot loader using Xmodem. It will take about 90 seconds to upload about 950 kB at 115200 bps :
# sx u-boot.uart </dev/ttyUSB0 >/dev/ttyUSB0
Sending u-boot.uart, 7464 blocks: Give your local XMODEM receive command now.
Xmodem sectors/kbytes sent: 2556/319k

After the file is transferred, the board immediately boots from this boot loader sitting in memory. Since there's nothing installed on the eMMC, the boot loader cannot boot and will stop at the prompt, waiting for your commands.

Connect to the boot loader

Use your favorite client to connect to the boot loader via the serial port, for example here with "screen". Press Enter, you should see the "Marvell>>" prompt :
$ screen /dev/ttyUSB0 115200
Marvell>>

Now the board is alive and you control it. Here there are multiple possibilities, one of which consists in loading a kernel and an initrd via TFTP, boot the machine and complete the installation. However, the risks of getting it wrong is high, and having to reboot via the serial port again is painfully slow. The board also features an SPI flash, but U-Boot doesn't seem to be able to use it at the moment, every attempts results in a system freeze. So we'll flash the boot loader to the eMMC instead.

Flash the new boot loader to eMMC

Before having to connect many cables, we'll reuse the "sx" utility to send the boot loader over the serial port again, but the MMC version this time, that can be flashed. First, let's make U-Boot wait for a file to be sent over Xmodem :
Marvell>> loadx
## Switch baudrate to 115200  115200 bps and press ENTER ...
## Ready for binary (xmodem) download to 0x02000000 at 115200 bps...

Now you need to quit the terminal client. For "screen", it will be Ctrl-A, "\" then "y". Or "killall screen" from another window will do it fine. Then from the command line we send the MMC image :
# sx u-boot.mmc </dev/ttyUSB0 >/dev/ttyUSB0

At the end of the transfer, reconnect the terminal client, and verify that the image was properly transferred. "AE 01" at the beginning indicates an MMC image :
Marvell>> md.b 0x02000000
02000000: ae 01 00 00 98 69 0d 00 01 01 00 36 00 36 01 00    .....i.....6.6..
02000010: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 01 a6    ................
02000020: 02 01 50 35 02 00 00 00 5b 00 00 00 00 00 00 00    ..P5....[.......
02000030: ff 5f 2d e9 c1 02 00 fa 00 00 a0 e3 ff 9f bd e8    ._-.............

The mmc command supports 512-byte blocks. Here we've uploaded almost 1 MB, or 2048 blocks :
Marvell>> mmc write 0x02000000 0 2048
MMC write: dev # 0, block # 0, count 8264 ... 8264 blocks write: OK

Verify the copy by reading to another address and dumping it again :
Marvell>> mmc read 0x03000000 0 2048
Marvell>> md.b 0x03000000
03000000: ae 01 00 00 98 69 0d 00 01 01 00 36 00 36 01 00    .....i.....6.6..
...

Configure the board to boot from eMMC

As indicated in the table above, the SW1 DIP switches have to be set to 00111 or OFF,OFF,ON,ON,ON.

Boot the board from eMMC

Start your terminal and press reset to boot the board from eMMC. It will display a lot of useful information and wait for your prompt. The board will be able to be rebooted as often as needed without all this complex procedure now :
# screen </dev/ttyUSB0 >/dev/ttyUSB0
BootROM - 1.73

Booting from MMC
BootROM: Bad header at offset 00000000


General initialization - Version: 1.0.0
Detected Device ID 6828
High speed PHY - Version: 2.0

Init Customer board board SerDes lanes topology details:
 | Lane # | Speed|    Type     |
 ------------------------------|
 |   0    |  3   |  SATA0      |
 |   1    |  0   |  SGMII1     |
 |   2    |  5   |  PCIe1      |
 |   3    |  5   |  USB3 HOST1 |
 |   4    |  5   |  PCIe2      |
 |   5    |  0   |  SGMII2     |
 -------------------------------
PCIe, Idx 1: detected no link
PCIe, Idx 2: detected no link
High speed PHY - Ended Successfully
DDR3 Training Sequence - Ver TIP-1.39.0
DDR3 Training Sequence - Switching XBAR Window to FastPath Window 
DDR3 Training Sequence - Ended Successfully
BootROM: Image checksum verification PASSED

 __   __                      _ _
|  \/  | __ _ _ ____   _____| | |
| |\/| |/ _` | '__\ \ / / _ \ | |
| |  | | (_| | |   \ V /  __/ | |
|_|  |_|\__,_|_|    \_/ \___|_|_|
         _   _     ____              _
        | | | |   | __ )  ___   ___ | |_ 
        | | | |___|  _ \ / _ \ / _ \| __| 
        | |_| |___| |_) | (_) | (_) | |_ 
         \___/    |____/ \___/ \___/ \__| 
 ** LOADER **


U-Boot 2013.01-gc1d6f3e (Sep 28 2015 - 00:17:00) Marvell version: 2015_T1.0p11

Board: A38x-Customer-Board-1
SoC:   MV88F6828 Rev A0
       running 2 CPUs
CPU:   ARM Cortex A9 MPCore (Rev 1) LE
       CPU 0
       CPU    @ 1600 [MHz]
       L2     @ 800 [MHz]
       TClock @ 250 [MHz]
       DDR3    @ 800 [MHz]
       DDR3 32 Bit Width,FastPath Memory Access, DLB Enabled, ECC Disabled
DRAM:  1 GiB
MMC:   mv_sdh: 0
sdhci_transfer_data: Error detected in status(0x408000)!
PCI-e 0: Detected No Link.
PCI-e 1: Detected No Link.
USB2.0 0: Host Mode
USB3.0 0: Host Mode
USB3.0 1: Host Mode

Map:   Code:                    0x3fed1000:0x3ff974d4
       BSS:                     0x3ffef15c
       Stack:                   0x3f9c0f20
       Heap:                    0x3f9c1000:0x3fed1000
       U-Boot Environment:      0x000f0000:0x00100000 (MMC)

Board configuration detected:
Net:   
|  port  | Interface | PHY address  |
|--------|-----------|--------------|
| egiga0 |   RGMII   |     0x00     |
| egiga1 |   SGMII   |   In-Band    |
| egiga2 |   SGMII   |   In-Band    |
egiga0 [PRIME], egiga1, egiga2
Hit any key to stop autoboot:  0 
Marvell>> 

If nothing comes, wait a few minutes and you may see it tried to boot from a different device, indicating you got the switch wrong. Just fix them and reboot.

Boot a Linux kernel

With a working boot loader, it becomes possible to boot a kernel from the network. Everything is not perfect yet but it's getting good. There are a few issues to be aware of that will save you a lot of time. First, regarding the network boot, U-Boot will default to using port 0 (the closest to the USB port). But after any network transfer error, U-Boot will automatically switch to the second port which never works. So it's important to always start a sequence by forcing the active Ethernet port to port 0. Second, there is a bug in this version of U-Boot. It can load a kernel, an initrd and a device tree. But if you pass it an initrd, it will ignore the device tree and will silently fail without any message on the serial port (since the kernel doesn't even know where to speak). The workaround against this is to always append the DTB to the zImage and never try to load the DTB from U-Boot.
Here is the boot sequence I used and which works for me :
Marvell>> setenv ethact egiga0
Marvell>> setenv bootargs 'root=/dev/ram0 rootfstype=squashfs console=ttyS0,115200n8'
Marvell>> kerneladdr=0x2000000 ; ramdiskaddr=0x6000000 ;
Marvell>> tftpboot ${kerneladdr} zImage-38x.dtb
Marvell>> tftpboot ${ramdiskaddr} uInitrd-clearfog
Marvell>> bootz ${kerneladdr} ${ramdiskaddr}

Your TFTP server will have to accept connections on IP address 10.4.50.38 from address 10.4.50.170.

Moving the boot loader

Since I wanted to partition my eMMC, it would overwrite U-Boot. I noticed in the error messages I faced initially that the BootROM code looks for the boot loader at two places on the eMMC memory :
  • 0x00000000 : this is where an MBR could be installed.
  • 0x00200000 : address 2 MB, there will usually be nothing there
It makes sense to properly partition the eMMC and skip the first 4 MB so that the address at 2 MB can contain the boot loader. That's what I did with a first partition starting at sector 8192 (4 MB), and I flashed the boot loader at the address above. It can also be done during the very first installation with the mmc write command.
Additionally I thought it would be a nice safety measure to install the boot loader on the SPI flash (4 MB). I did it from Linux since U-Boot cannot see it. But by default the DTS doesn't enable the SPI flash, so it needs to be modified for this to be done. I will cover this in a later post.

That's all for now

Please note that for now I'm using my own kernel and initrd which work fine on the my clearfog board. I may document later how to build a working kernel for this board but as long as you use a kernel more recent than 4.5.x, you won't even need to patch it and a working default config is present in mainline. Otherwise you can download some debian or ubuntu images from the SolidRun site, and extract the kernel, device tree and initrd from there.

Migration to blogspot

After many missed opportunities to share some quick information about new hacks in progress or discoveries due to the difficulty to update my web site, I decided to migrate the articles to a platform like blogspot. I'm not fond of the blog format but the editor is hassle-free, uploading photos is very easy, and I can put labels on the articles to help navigate through them, so I hope in the future I'll feel less reluctance against posting news when I have things to share.

I tried hard to keep the original post dates, it seems to have worked. There are quite some other (now old) stuff I never published that I may or may not add later (mostly electronics stuff).

Future experimentations with build farms and small servers will be posted here instead of polluting the Ant-Computing Wiki with something looking like a changelog.