I was inspired by several DIY projects. The ESP8266 WiFi 802.11 b/g/n Module is a self contained SOC with integrated TCP/IP protocol stack that can give any microcontroller access to your WiFi network. The ESP8266 is capable of either hosting an application or offloading all Wi-Fi networking functions from another application processor.
This post describes step-by-steps instructions on how to program ESP-01 board in the following chapters:

1. HW Setup
2. SW Setup (Arduino IDE)
3. Uploading a programm to ESP8266

I wanted to keep my existing configuration and programs on my Cubieboard2 with Linaro Lubuntu, but at the same I wanted to upgrade the packages since the Lubuntu 12.10 is quite outdated. This post describes my steps to upgrade my Cubieboard2 to the newer version, which can be done in 3 steps:

1. Update repository list to old-releases derivatives
2. Upgrade Ubuntu 12.10 (Linaro 13.04) to Ubuntu 13.10 (Linaro 14.01)
3. Ubuntu 13.10 (Linaro 14.01) to Ubuntu 14.04  LTS version (long time support)

You can find several breadboard adapters for ESP8266 WiFi module or nRF24L01+ RF transceiver and also several DIY manuals how to create your own, but I decided to use my new WiFi WSP8266 and NRD24L01 as soon as I got them, so I used only breadboards female headers to start my home projects. 
Check my my first IoT ESP8266 temperature humidity sensor project and my own ESP8266 ESp-01 programmer board.

Google Blogger is very simple and easy to start with blogs unless you start to think of custom plugins, widgets, tools and more advanced themes. Many of us are following this path that starts in google blogspot and then migrate to WordPress. You can find several pages comparing these two platforms and also many howto pages describing the WordPress installation. In this this post I will list plugins that I found necessary to run my new WordPress blog, describe how easy it is to migrate posts from blogspot to WordPress and also describe changes in my old blogspot to redirect traffic to the new self-hosted WordPress post. 

I have read several posts to reduce the power consumption of micro-controllers and learned that the althought you can minimize the power consuption of arduino, usually you have other sensors/chips that cosume more power then customized low power arduino.
The idea now is to use ATtyni13A – Atmel picoPower 8-bit AVR RISC-based microcontroller as a timer switch for the all other circuits especially for projects, when you want your circuit run once an hour or less for only some seconds (data loggers,..). In this case the ATtyni13A is up and running 24/7 and everything else is without the power, so the consumption of the rest of the circuit is 0A. ATtyni13A consumption is only 0.005mA (5µA) in a sleep mode.

Programming ATtiny micro-controller is quite easy if you have all the needed information in one place. That is the reason to put all needed files, hints in one post so next time I will need it, there is no need to google it again from various sources. At the same time I hope, this post will be useful also to someone else trying to program ATtiny13A.

Wiring Arduino Uno with ATtiny13A

There is quite uses full post describing the wiring of arduino UNO with ATtiny13A. LED with resistor is added to test the basic blink test from Arduino IDE.

Kippo is an SSH honeypot written in Python. Kippo is used to log brute force attacks and the entire shell interaction performed by an attacker so I have installed it on my cubieboard2 Lubuntu version. According to wiki a honeypot is a trap set to detect, deflect, or, in some manner, counteract attempts at unauthorized use of information systems.

So lets start to install and test my first honeypot.

The sun is shining for free out there so why not to use it at least to charge the cell phone. I’ve searched cheep but usable solar panel for this purpose and tested it.

Specification of the solar panel from eBay for 8€:

• Voltage: 6 v
• Power:3.5W
• Electric current: 580-600mA
• output:USB 2.0
• Net weight: about 110g
• Size: 16.5 * 13.5 *0. 2cm
• Application: fit for all the electronic products charging (iphones,all mobile phones, MP3 MP4 PDA and Tablets ect.)

The notice is marked:
This device can not store electricity, but only can charge your cell phones in the sun and this item must be under the strong light , otherwise the voltage is very small and many smart phones have battery protection so it can’t charge it.

I have read several forums regarding the disconnecting the Arduino power from the Lithium Ion battery by itself (measuring the battery voltage and when the low limit is reached the Arduino signal turns off itself).

In my Cubieboard2 I use Lubuntu. Since I have connected barometer and arduino to my cubieboard, I read data from that devices and store it to cubieboard2 filesystem. Since NAND memory is not quite suitable for such frequent changes because of wear-out of the memory cells over time, I’ve created temp space in RAM memory. Cubieboard2 has 1GB DDR memory so there is some space for it.

I will use TMPFS and not older RAM disks – ramfs. Tmpfs is supported by the Linux kernel from version 2.4 and up. On reboot, everything in tmpfs will be lost. The memory used by tmpfs grows and shrinks to accommodate the files it contains and can be swapped out to swap space.
To get more comprehensive info regarding those filesystems read this post or this post.