It’s now possible to make use of the Pinecil V2 soldering iron‘s Bluetooth LE connectivity through a web-based interface used to monitor and/or set the temperature and power of the RISC-V soldering iron.
When the Pinecil V2 soldering iron was launched with a Bouffalo Lab BL706 RISC-V Bluetooth microcontroller last summer, we were told there were main potential cases to make use of the Bluetooth LE features: OTA firmware upgrade and remote telemetry and control. The latter is now being taken care of by Joric who has written a web application to visualize telemetry data and even control the temperature of the soldering iron.
To be able to use the Bluetooth features, you’ll first need to install the latest Pinecil V2 firmware with blisp flashing utility before going to https://joric.github.io/pinecil to pair your soldering iron as explained in the wiki. Note the implementation relies on the Web Bluetooth API which does not work on all browsers at this time. Case in point, I got the following message when trying to access the web page in Firefox on Ubuntu:
Bluetooth API is not supported in this browser. What you can do:
- Windows: try latest Chome (does not work on Firefox)
- Linux: try Enabling “web-bluetooth*” flags in chrome://flags
- MacOS: try Bluefy browser (not guaranteed to work).
The user interface did show up in Chrome on Linux after enabling the feature. You can check out the interface in action in the video below showing how to pair the soldering iron, real-time charting of the temperature and power (with a small lag), as well as the ability to control the temperature from the web interface. It will also show the input voltage value.
The web interface can be quite nice, especially for people who may have trouble reading the values on the small display of the Pinecil V2, and this paves the way for other features such as the implementation of automatic ventilation control during soldering. If you want to get involved, you can check out IronOS repo on Github.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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I really hope the Bluetooth web API is released and gets supported by now browsers soon…
It is literally dangerous to use it as is, that’s why it is only in Chromium-based browsers.
Wow impressive temp holding in the glass of water!
Because everyone puts their iron in water
“…going to https://joric.github.io/pinecil to pair your soldering iron…” I get this in Win10 + Firefox: Bluetooth API is not supported in this browser. What you can do: Windows: try latest Chome [sic] (does not work on Firefox) Linux: try Enabling “web-bluetooth*” flags in chrome://flags MacOS: try Bluefy browser (not guaranteed to work). There is NO WAY I want an untrustworthy Google product like the Chrome browser on this machine. That’s not a viable option. Why would Pine64 limit themselves to the cloud via Bluetooth only due to the Bouffalo Lab BL706 RISC-V Bluetooth microcontroller? They could have used a different… Read more »
You can try With chromium, it may works.
Chromium should work, yes. All chrome based browsers will. Also, the choice of BT IC has nothing to do with this. Nordic, ESP and any others would also not work with Firefox. The only alternative to using Web Bluetooth (which Firefx decided not to support for security reasons) would be to have native Win/Linux/Mac/Android/iOS apps which would be a major increase in workload.
WiFi would work but I’d be a huge pain to configure where as web bt works without any setup at all.
PineSAM is another project that implements a web-based configuration interface for the Pinecil V2 over BLE.
https://github.com/builder555/PineSAM