www.rolfje.com

Installing GPG keys for Debian Backports

2017-06-09 rolfje 6 Comments

For Let’s Encrypt to automatically renew certificates on your Raspberry Pi, you probably want to install certbot. The installation instructions of certbot tell you to make use of the Debian Backports packages. Following the instructions to install backports packages into apt-get on raspbian (which is a Debian Jessie), you will probably run into the following error:

$ sudo apt-get update
...
W: GPG error: http://ftp.debian.org jessie-backports InRelease:
   The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public
   key is not available: NO_PUBKEY 8B48AD6246925553 NO_PUBKEY
   7638D0442B90D010

Software

Make the ESP8266 talk 9600 baud

2017-01-022025-10-17 rolfje 3 Comments

The default serial speed on the ESP8266 WiFi chip is 115200 baud. If you connect this chip to an Arduino and want to use SoftSerial to talk to it, it will not work. The SoftSerial library is limited to 9600 baud because of hardware limitations of the Arduino. If you want to talk to the ESP8266 with an Arduino at lower speeds, you need to tell the ESP8266 to slow down.

Hardware, Software

Seeed ESP8266 WiFi Breakout Board Pinout

2017-01-01 rolfje No Comments

WiFi Serial Transceiver Module Breakout Board w& ESP8266 pinout

This is the pinout for the Seeed WiFi ESP8266 breakout board. Please be careful, it only accepts 3.3 Volt nominal input voltage and logic. Putting 5 Volts on any of the pins may permanently damage the chip.

The ESP8266 on this board is programmed to do serial communications at 115.2 kilobaud, and accepts AT commands.

Hardware

macOS Sierra SSH “Permission Denied”

2016-11-12 rolfje 1 Comment

If you used DSA keys to log in to your SSH server and have upgraded your client machine to macOS Sierra (or OSX Sierra if you like), you probably ran into this problem:

client$ ssh -p 8123 george@10.0.0.10 -i ~/.ssh/id_dsa 
Permission denied (publickey).

The answer to this problem is replacing the DSA key with an RSA key, but how do you do on the server when your only means for connecting is the OSX client machine you just upgraded? Here’s how:

Apple

Designing a Fox-hunt antenna

2016-06-19 rolfje No Comments

Many years ago, I used to do some radio fox hunting with cars. Usually these hunts are at night to make it more exciting, and can be great fun. As I got older I lost interest and moved on to other things. But last year, I decided to have a go at a popular balloon fox hunt on 144MHz. This is quite a large scale and professionally organized fox hunt by Dutch Radio Amateurs.

Hardware, Workshop

Measuring Coax Length and Loss

2015-11-01 rolfje 4 Comments

Ever wondered how well your 50Ω coaxial cable is working? If you have a reasonably fast oscilloscope, preferably up to 100MHz and a signal generator which can generate short bursts, you can measure not only the length of your cable, but also the return loss at a certain frequency. From that, we can learn the attenuation of the cable.

This blog post describes the classic time domain reflection measurement using the following setup:

Measuring TDR

Hardware

How to get your users to install JCE

2015-09-04 rolfje 3 Comments

In every Java project where I need to do strong cryptography, I run into these dreaded unreadable stacktraces which send you into the woods. After a long search I usually discover that the Unlimited Strength Java Cryptography Extensions are not installed. To prevent frustration of users of your software, you can simply add a bit of informative logging to help him/her solve it when the solution is known.

Uncategorized

Ashley Madison in perspective

2015-08-24 rolfje No Comments

However I disagree with sites like Ashley Madison and the way its owners scam people, last week I have noticed something far more disturbing. As I understand, Ashley Madison was charging people for their profiles to be deleted, and then did not (promptly) delete them. I guess some of it’s “hackers” got caught up in this and decided to attack Ashley Madison for that. Up to this point, merely a quarrel between two parties which may have better been solved by legal procedure.

Uncategorized

Solving the JAXB “unexpected element” problem

2015-06-08 rolfje 2 Comments

If you are using JAXB in a maven/java project to unmarshal an XML document and you get:

javax.xml.bind.UnmarshalException: unexpected element (uri:”urn:iso:std:somestuff:xsd:somestuff”, local:”Document”). Expected elements are (none)

Or if you are using JAXB to marshal an XML document and you get:

com.sun.istack.internal.SAXException2: unable to marshal type “generated.somestuff.Document” as an element because it is missing an @XmlRootElement annotation

You have probably fallen victim of the fact that JAXB does not do “Simple Binding” by default. If your project is a maven project and you generated classes based on an xsd file, this is how you fix it (without changing the xsd file):

Software

Better modulation for the Baofeng UV-5RA

2015-05-10 rolfje 16 Comments

Undoubtedly the Baofeng UV-5Rx delivers a lot of radio for your buck. However some models in the range have a bad reputation for the transmitted audio sounding soft and muffled.

In 2013, Remco PA3FYM obtained the schematics of the radio and devised a modification where transistor Q17 of the VOX is re-purposed as preamplifier in the microphone audio circuit. It works wonders for your radio. For people needing a bit more visual guidance, below is a walktrough of how I did this to my Baofeng UV-5RA.

Hardware