Remote booting a Lacie Fuel With a LightBlue Bean

Things change and move all the time in the software world. Especially when you have to juggle between several people asking for your attention all the time. Not to mention the other interesting gadgets and mods that are being dreamed up everyday.

In my last post, I mentioned that I have managed to reverse engineer the JSON structure and request in my modded LaCie Fuel from http://www.hackseagatesatellite.com. But trouble is that I haven’t gotten much headway in making a proper public facing app from those information yet… Work got in the way.

It is through work that I realized that in the course of using my Fuel, especially in the plane, I have had to reach into my bag in the overhead compartment or under the seat in front of me to turn the unit on/off. Wouldn’t it be nice to have some way to trigger the boot up of the Lacie Fuel using some kinda of Bluetooth or wifi connection?

Enter the LightBlue Bean (https://punchthrough.com/bean).

Its a fancy little Bluetooth v4 board I discovered that has a variety of sensors and uses an Arduino for hardware interfacing and control. I have had some experience with Arduino in the past and this gave the perfect low power wireless interface for an iOS app to talk to it. All that was needed is a simple circuit to create a transistor based relay that is controlled by one of the digital pins from the Bean to trigger the switch on the Fuel and wala! A Bluetooth capable Fuel that can be toggled on/off within the range of my iPhone/iPad’s Bluetooth.

With some testing and prototyping, I have managed to create a circuit that would do the above and posted the code up on github (https://github.com/sulph68/lightblue-bean-lacie-power). The code commit contains the iOS app, written in Swift and Obj-C bridging for the LightBlue bean SDK, the Arduino code and the circuit diagram with the parts and components that I have used to create the working circuit.

The iOS app has the ability to perform a short and long press of the LaCie power button, blink the LED on the Bean, and provides some information so that I would know when I might need to change the onboard CR2302 battery.

The Arduino code tries to sleep as much as possible so as to use as little power as possible. It would only wake up when the bean is connected to via the iOS app.

I hope the code and circuit would provide some use to others in the same situation as I am and bring an additional level of use to the LaCie Fuel… Or maybe even the Seagate Wireless!

Triggering Web Services from iOS… WebSet

WebSet is a application that helps to interface the iOS button and switch controls to any provided URL as a query string. This provides a way to easily create DIY web services that can be controlled by an iOS application.

To use this app, you have to ensure that the web service you are trying to connect to accepts the right format of a query string and response with a valid JSON. Simply add a web end-point with the relevant information, providing sample information if your end-point doesn’t require it. When adding the URL, test it and a sample of the URL that will be transmitted will be shown. Be sure that the URL connects successfully as you will not be able to change it once its added!

A setting will start off being disabled and you would have to enable it. The label colors grey, black, orange, green and red displays the web state as disabled, enabled, transmitted, responded and error respectively.\n\nIn order to read the state of the switch, it is required that one of the JSON keys returned contains “state” 1 or 0.

A sample looks like

{ “state” : 1 }

To refresh the state of the controls, drag the list view down to refresh.

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