yoursunny blog
computer, Internet, and life

Oregon Vacation (4) Hillsboro and Outlets

Junxiao Shi

Jun 08 afternoon, I visited the birthplace of geocaching near Estacada, Oregon. My dinner is scheduled at Copper River Restaurant & Bar in Hillsboro, where I can attend a geocaching event.

GEO June 2019 Meet & Greet

Geocaching is generally a solo sport, except when I run into other geocachers on the trail. However, the "event cache" is an opportunity for geocachers to meet other participants of the sport. When I was planning my Oregon trip, I kept searching the event listing every week, until a suitable event showed up: Geocachers Exploring Oregon (GEO), Oregon's geocaching community, has a meet & greet on Saturday evening. Therefore, I planned my dinner to be at this event.

After spending too much time on the Un-Original, I drove 79 minutes to the event venue. Copper River is a large restaurant with more than 100 seats, and GEO is the largest group in the restaurant. I arrived at 18:02, just as the "official program" was starting and a president-level figure picked up a loud speaker to make announcements. I received a blue raffle ticket, and later won a geocoin.

I found a seat in the middle of a 30-person long table, and introduced myself as yoursunny to people around me. longtrails, who's seated to my left, remembers my name because I signed his challenge cache this morning. We chatted, and he offered me a document of driving directions to some of Oregon's historical caches.

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Oregon Vacation (3) Birthplace of Geocaching

Junxiao Shi

Jun 08 morning, I found GC12 and GC17, two oldest geocaches in Mt Hood National Forest, Oregon. I returned to GC17 trailhead at 12:19. It has been five hours from when I left the motel, I have chewed two protein bars, so it's time for lunch. Google Maps says there's no restaurant in the middle of the forest, but there are some near my next destination. I entered the address into HERE WeGo, ate a third protein bar, and started driving.

Here we go again, HERE WeGo commanded me to "turn sharp left toward SE Brian Ranch Rd", a narrow, steep, and unsafe road through the ranches. I ignored this command, and continued on SE Wildcat Mountain Dr. An hour later, I arrived at View Point Restaurant & Lounge, Estacada, OR. I need a burger right now.

view of Clackamas River from View Point Restaurant

Original Stash Tribute Plaque

World's first geocache, then known as "GPS Stash", was published by Dave Ulmer on 03 May 2000:

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Oregon Vacation (2) GC12 and GC17

Junxiao Shi

On Jun 07, I flew to Portland, Oregon and started my 7-day vacation. Oregon is where the sport of geocaching got started, and my primary goal in Oregon is to find some of the world's oldest geocaches. Saturday Jun 08, the weather was less than perfect compared to next few days. However, I couldn't control my excitement and decided to nab the important geocaches first.

Planning for GC12

GC12, formerly known as GPS Stash #8, was hidden on 12 May 2000, nineteen years ago. It is Oregon's oldest active geocache, and as I later learned, the second oldest active geocache in the world.

When I was doing my initial trip planning, Google Maps says I could drive right to it. Upon closer inspection, oh well, I would have to drive over a "road block".

Google Maps route for GC12

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Oregon Vacation (1) Planning and Departure

Junxiao Shi

I had a 7-day vacation in northwestern Oregon in June 2019. This is the biggest solo road trip I've ever had so far.

Why Oregon?

Earlier this year, Alaska Airlines messed up my flight, and then I received a $200 voucher. The voucher entitles me to a free flight to west coast.

Alaska flies to five cities on the west coast:

  • Seattle, Washington
  • Portland, Oregon
  • San Francisco, California
  • Los Angeles, California
  • San Diego, California
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How to Install OpenWrt 18.06 on Onion Omega2 Pro

Junxiao Shi

I bought a GL-AR750 home router (paid link) last year, and was very happy with the flexibility of its OpenWrt operating system. The base system has enough functionality as a home router: it has a web-based configuration interface; WiFi works out of box without fiddling hostapd.conf. On the other hand, the system is extensible that I can install additional packages to add VPN server, file sharing, etc. When I decide to start hacking, I noticed a problem: the GL-AR750 is now part of my "production" network, and I don't want to change it too much to affect my normal life. Thus, it's time for a second OpenWrt router!

After some online search and comparison, I chose the Onion Omega2 Pro. The strengths of Onion Omega2 Pro are:

  • The CPU is MIPS architecture, allowing me to gain some experience with this unfamiliar architecture.
  • It has 8GB eMMC storage, giving me plenty of space to install packages.
  • It has LiPo battery port, USB host port, and pin headers with SPI and I2C, leaving possibility of building battery-powered IoT projects.

Shipment arrived two months later. I plugged it in, and found that the Omega2 Pro runs OnionOS, a customized version of OpenWrt. Apart from GUI differences, it uses a custom WiFi driver wifi-warp-core that has several flaws. Most notably, my WiFi SSID is + (a plus sign), and the Onion would not connect to it.

screenshot of OnionOS on Omega2 Pro

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Geocaching is All About Expanding My Comfort Zone

Junxiao Shi

I started geocaching as a hobby in 2013. Since then, I have found more than 1000 caches across 18 US states as well as in China. During these years, I stepped out my comfort zone several times, and became a more experienced geocacher.

Puzzles

Geocaches come with different types. Traditional is the most common type: the webpage of a Traditional cache has its coordinates, and I can straightforwardly find the physical container at that location. Another common type is a Multi: I need to visit a location, collect information such as reading text from a plague or counting the number of windows, and then find the physical container at a different location whose waypoint is computed from the answers from the first location. I'm quite familiar with these types.

One geocache type I'm uncomfortable with is Mystery puzzle cache. These caches are published with bogus published coordinates, but the webpage contains clues to find the real coordinates of the physical container. The puzzle could be a piece of cipher text, a crossword puzzle, a strange picture, or something else. Although I know a thing or two about classic ciphers, I could not get a hold of them.

This all changed when Geocaching HQ assigned me a mission to find a puzzle cache in August 2014:

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Air602 Weather Indicator

Junxiao Shi

Air602 is a 2.4GHz Wi-Fi module based on Winner Micro W600 system-on-chip. Being a new release, it has limited software support. It took me more than a day to make it blink.

Naturally, the next step is to connect a sensor. I decide to reproduce the ESP8266 weather indicator but with Air602 instead.

Air602 Board Pinout

The Air602 development board, labelled EVB_W602_A11, has six pins:

Air602 pin W600 pin
IO PB08
CTS PB09
RTS PB10
RX1 PB11
TX1 PB12
GND GND
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Air602 Hands On and Blink with C SDK

Junxiao Shi

I hear there's a new WiFi microcontroller that is cheaper than ESP8266's "unbeatable" low price tag. It is the Air602, a 2.4GHz Wi-Fi module based on Winner Micro W600 system-on-chip.

Buying an Air602

Currently, Seeed Studio is the only seller for this module. It comes as a bare module for $1.90, or a development board for $2.90. The bare module lacks an antenna and requires surface mount soldering that I'm not comfortable with, so I purchased the development board version that comes with antenna, power regulator, and USB-UART chip.

photo of Air602 development board

My order was shipped from Hong Kong, and it took about two months for the order to arrive United States.

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Is Junxiao in the Room? Presence Detection with nRF52 Bluefruit

Junxiao Shi

I recently obtained some Adafruit Feather nRF52 Bluefruit LE (paid link) boards. The main chip on this board is the nRF52832 from Nordic, which offers Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) communication, but does not have WiFi. Adafruit made a nice Arduino core for nRF52, so that it can be programmed easily with the familiar Arduino environment.

Incidentally, this isn't the first BLE device I have. Many small battery-powered devices, including the Fitbit Alta HR tracker (paid link) I wear daily, uses BLE for communication. This means, I could use the nRF52 board to answer one question: is Junxiao in the room?

#include <bluefruit.h>

// UUID of Fitbit Alta HR: ADABFB00-6E7D-4601-BDA2-BFFAA68956BA
const uint8_t FITBIT_UUID[] = {
  0xBA, 0x56, 0x89, 0xA6, 0xFA, 0xBF, 0xA2, 0xBD,
  0x01, 0x46, 0x7D, 0x6E, 0x00, 0xFB, 0xAB, 0xAD,
};

unsigned long lastReport = -1;

void setup()
{
  Serial.begin(115200);

  Bluefruit.begin(0, 0);
  Bluefruit.setTxPower(-40);
  Bluefruit.autoConnLed(false);

  Bluefruit.Scanner.setRxCallback(scan_callback);
  Bluefruit.Scanner.useActiveScan(false);
  Bluefruit.Scanner.filterUuid(BLEUuid(FITBIT_UUID));
  Bluefruit.Scanner.start(0);
}

void scan_callback(ble_gap_evt_adv_report_t* report)
{
  unsigned long now = millis();

  Serial.printf("%09d ", now);
  Serial.printBufferReverse(report->peer_addr.addr, 6, ':');
  Serial.printf(" %d\n", report->rssi);

  Bluefruit.Scanner.resume();
  lastReport = now;
}

void loop()
{
  digitalWrite(LED_BUILTIN, millis() < lastReport + 5000);
  delay(100);
}

This sketch initializes a BLE scanner. filterUuid asks the scanner to invoke scan_callback function whenever it receives an advertisement from a Fitbit Alta HR, identified by the service UUID ADABFB00-6E7D-4601-BDA2-BFFAA68956BA (readable by Bluefruit app for iPad). useActiveScan(false) configures the scanner to passively listen for periodical advertisement packets without transmitting "scan request" packets, to conserve battery on my wristband. When a "report" (scan_callback invocation) is received, the red LED is lit for five seconds.

In practive, it works OK. When I'm within 10 meters from the Bluefruit board, the LED lights up frequently, but it's not consecutive because the Fitbit does not advertise itself very often. If I put my Fitbit into the microwave (paid link) acting as a Faraday cage, the onboard LED no longer lights up. Oops, I got to run before my Fitbit gets fried in the microwave!

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