Toyota Expansion Board - Software

Once the hard part of the project was done, it was time for the fun part - microcontroller’s firmware development. Because there’s not a lot of stuff to do on the software side and due to available MCU resources, I didn’t need to constrain myself so much on the size optimization side and went with C++14 for the firmware language. After a rough start, I managed to get the first bits working and few weeks later I got a fully functional device - it’s time to wrap it up.

Published on 09 May 2021

Toyota Expansion Board - Hardware

The setup consists of several PCBs: two boards for the steering wired wheel remote, two for expansion board and one for the microphone. All of them were made by hand using a thermo-transfer method and hand-soldered. In this post I’ll go into details of board schematics, manufacturing process and end results.

Published on 05 March 2021

Toyota Expansion Board - Design

The project goal is to replicate a wired remote functionality with ability to distinguish short and long button presses, perform outside temperature readings and show it on OLED display. While prototyping a solution I also throw in the mix improvement to unit’s microphone (which had a very poor sound quality). In this post I’ll show project core concepts and components that will give you a basic idea about it.

Published on 24 February 2021

Toyota Expansion Board - Intro

I’m an owner of a Toyota Corolla E12 from 2002, as of time of writing this post, it’s 19 years old. While old age doesn’t bother me (for a 19 years old car it’s insanely reliable and cheap to repair), multimedia capabilities does. Stock radio isn’t capable of either playing MP3s, play audio via Bluetooth or allow hands-free voice calls. Natural solution would be to replace stock radio with a more recent unit with all the features I needed - and that’s exactly what I did, but that wasn’t the end.

Published on 21 February 2021

cxxblog - evaluation

It’s been nearly a year since I published cxxblog as my latest C++ project. Given just a few posts written since the beginning, it’s time to evaluate the state of the project and blog itself.

Published on 12 February 2021

PC as a home server - Part 2

When your server is encrypted, you have to type a password each time it boots - in order to do that, you need a monitor and a keyboard hooked up to the server. You can imagine that it would be super annoying to go to the server physical location just to type a password. In the case of a server being off-site, encryption would be a deal breaker. But there is a way around it - SSH.

Published on 13 June 2020

PC as a home server - Part 1

I’ve used a QNAP TS-212 NAS for about 6 years. During that time I had two disk failures (and the first one taught me that RAID1 is not a waste of space), second happening last autumn. Since this setup was bugging me for quite some time, I decided to build a PC that will replace it. With this post I’ll describe installation process of Fedora Server Edition on double software RAID1 - one for an operating system and another one for a data storage.

Published on 29 April 2020

cxxblog - an excuse to start a blog

Given the current situation with COVID-19, it so happened that I have a whole lot more free time to spend on side projects. One day I was reading a reddit cpp thread about web development in C++ where I stumbled upon library called Wt. As I have lots of experience developing desktop GUI applications, Wt caught my attention - so I started learning more about it.

Published on 23 April 2020

Surveillance camera based on Raspberry Pi

Back in 2018, when construction of my new home began, I ended up driving to construction site almost every day - that was wasting approximately 1 hour every day just to drive back and forth. Because of that huge time waster and obvious reason that “things” gets “displaced” on construction sites, I’ve decided that I need some kind of surveillance on-site.

Published on 01 February 2019