Code and other ramblings - Xamarin, C#...

I recently bought a LightBlue Bean to play around with and I have to say it is pretty cool! For fun I thought I would get NodeRed running on my Raspberry Pi and send the temperature reading to ThingSpeak.. Good times! It takes a bit of patience to get things setup but its with it in the end. There are a few write-ups on how to get NodeRed running on a Pi and I thought I would share my notes in hopes that it helps someone else on their maker journey.

Start with a SDCard formated FAT32 Download Rasbian Wheezy On OSX - Click on the "Apple" icon and then "About this Mac". Click "System Report" and note the BSD Name of the Card Reader - in my case, disk3. Use disk utility to unmount the partition on your SDCard. Open Terminal and execute the following command: (Note: make double and triple sure you pick the proper disk! You could loose data on your system or worse!) sudo dd bs=1m if="path to your downloaded image” of=/dev/disk3 This will take a while... Once done put the card back in to your Pi and power it up.

I install Occidentals using Adafruit Pi Finder but this is an optional step.

If connecitng via ssh you may need to generate a key. ssh-keygen -R "you pi IP" or ssh-keygen -R raspberrypi.local once logged in and run sudo raspi-config Expand the file system, set the local and change the password

Install Required Libraries  sudo apt-get install libusb-dev libdbus-1-dev libglib2.0-dev libudev-dev libical-dev libreadline-dev

Install Bluez  sudo mkdir bluez cd bluez sudo wget www.kernel.org/pub/linux/bluetooth/bluez-5.30.tar.xz

Unzip and Compile Bluez  sudo unxz bluez-5.30.tar.xz sudo tar xvf bluez-5.30.tar cd bluez-5.30 sudo ./configure --disable-systemd sudo make sudo make install

This will take about hour.. Yes about an hour. Once done shutdown and insert your USB BLE adapter

Verify your BLE adapter is working   cd bluez/bluez-5.30 tools/hciconfig

If adapter is down:

Enable the adapter sudo tools/hciconfig hci0 up sudo tools/hciconfig hci0 leadv 3 sudo tools/hciconfig hci0 noscan

Do a quick scan for your Bean sudo tools/hcitool lescan

Other required files sudo apt-get install bluetooth bluez-utils libbluetooth-dev

Install Node.js wget http://node-arm.herokuapp.com/node_0.10.36_armhf.deb sudo dpkg -i node_0.10.36_armhf.deb sudo apt-get install build-essential python-dev python-rpi.gpio

Install Node-Red sudo npm install -g --unsafe-perm  node-red This takes a few minutes Then run update sudo apt-get update

Install Bean-Nodes mkdir -p ~/.node-red/node_modules npm install --prefix ~/.node-red node-red-contrib-bean Takes a bit as well

Allow Noble hci-ble to run without sudo sudo apt-get install libcap2-bin find -path '*noble*Release/hci-ble' -exec sudo setcap cap_net_raw+eip '{}' \;

Start NodeRed node-red-pi --max-old-space-size=128

Install PM2 sudo npm install -g pm2

pm2 start /usr/local/bin/node-red --node-args="--max-old-space-size=128" -- -v

Open a browser on your PC and type in the ip address of your Pi along with port 1880, in my case if looked like this: http://10.0.1.20:1880

You should be all set!

My ThingSpeak feed

https://thingspeak.com/channels/39237

I thought I would start a series of posts working with Xamarin.Forms. I will be selecting UI’s from places like Dribbble.com and Captivate.com and attempt to clone them using Xamarin.Forms. 

Why you ask?? Well it should be fun and I believe you can do more with Xam.Forms than just LOB apps.

My first selection is Rooms: http://capptivate.co/2014/11/23/rooms/ This is a fairly simple layout and I think it came out well.

I really like the graphic that Xamarin created breaking down the most common UI elements for iOS, Android and Windows Phone. I thought I would make a great wallpaper but for that it needed some tweaking. So I took the liberty of hacking the original apart and sizing it for a Thunderbolt Display.

I find myself using this extension method quite a bit, so I thought why not share it.. Surely I’m not the only one who likes the blur, think the LinkedIn start screen or the gradual blur in the Yahoo! weather app.