Nucu Car: Devlog 0x01

Hello everyone, A while ago I started working on a pet project called NucuCar. It’s a platform written in .NET for the Raspberry Pi in which I’m trying to implement various utility functions to create a complete piece of software that can be used to build a remote controlled car for the Pi. The project is open source and it can be found on GitHub: Since I didn’t buy a toy car and I don’t have much space in my apartment I was working only on the sensors module, which currently has support for the BME680 environment sensor and the CPU temperature sensor build in the Pi. ...

January 26, 2020 Â· 2 min Â· Denis NuČ›iu

My experience with .NET IoT (so far)

I haven’t done any embedded development in a while and I was thinking to build myself a remote controlled toy car with video streaming. The project is going to take me a while. To build it I’m going to use C#. I’m already too familiar with Python and a little challenge doesn’t hurt. To interface with the hardware, I’m going to use the .Net Core IoT Libraries from Microsoft. My idea was to create a set of .Net Core services that communicate internally via gRPC and an ASP.Net Core web application to control the car. (Now that I’m writing this I’m thinking that could possibly drop the web app and use gRPC directly from the client). ...

November 9, 2019 Â· 2 min Â· Denis NuČ›iu

A quick look at some Embedded Operating Systems

Real Time Operating Systems Real time operating systems are designed for real time applications that need to accomplish a certain tasks with as little OS overhead as possible. Tasks like reading the sensors and displaying data. You could write an infinite while loop to accomplish that but things will get complicated once you have multiple tasks. RTOS provide users with a task scheduler and several methods for synchronizing tasks and inter-task communication, as well as other stuff, not necessarily related to tasks. ...

August 21, 2018 Â· 2 min Â· Denis NuČ›iu

BLE CTF: How to flash the ESP32

Hello! If you want to do Hackgnar’s BLE CTF but you’ve been struggling with flashing the ESP worry not! I have created a vagrant developer environment just for this. The environment can be found here: To use it you need to have Vagrant and VirtualBox installed. After you got those installed, clone the repo and run the following commands on the terminal. This will start up the VM and ssh into it. [code language=”bash”] vagrant up && vagrant ssh [/code] ...

July 9, 2018 Â· 2 min Â· Denis NuČ›iu

How to use MFRC522 with Arduino

I wanted to explore the magic of RFID and I bought a simple card reader from Banggood which allows me to read and write 13.56MHz cards. The reader comes with one id tag and one card and it can be used to implement projects like a door security system or a payment system. The card and id tag that come with the board use classic mifare technology. Wiring I’m going to use Arduino Nano for this example, you can use Arduino UNO and perhaps other Arduino’s too. You can’t use any pin for the module board, you need to verify your Arduino’s pin map and map them accordingly, for example, you can only use SCK on pin D13. ...

June 30, 2018 Â· 3 min Â· Denis NuČ›iu

How to run your own OpenVPN server on a Raspberry PI

My Raspberry, serving as an OpenVPN server Hello everyone! In this short article I will explain how to setup your own VPN (Virtual Private Network) server on a Raspberry PI with OpenVPN. After we setup the server, we will setup an obfuscation server in order to disguise our traffic indicating that we’re using a VPN. This will help us evade some form of censorship. Why use a VPN? First, let’s talk about why you may want to use a VPN server: ...

April 22, 2018 Â· 6 min Â· Denis NuČ›iu

How to get started with FreeRTOS and ESP8266

Cover Photo by Matan Segev from PexelsCover Recently, I purchased a NodeMCU from AliExpress for about $4. The reason I did this was to find out what all the fuss is about with ESP8266. NodeMCU is an open source IoT platform. It includes firmware which runs on the ESP8266 Wi-Fi SoC from Espressif Systems, and hardware which is based on the ESP-12 module. Source: ESP8266 Datasheet Compared to the Arduino UNO, my ESP8266 totally knocks it out of the park when it comes to CPU power and price. ...

February 3, 2018 Â· 5 min Â· Denis NuČ›iu