What I did was

CP2102 USB to rs232 for Arduino Clone

2011-12-04T15:11:00.001-08:00

CP2102 driving a Modern Device BBB board

I saw a Chinese USB to rs232 adapter based on the CP2102 chip on eBay for $5.95 with free shipping and thought to myself - "At this price how can I go wrong" (they have since gone on sale for $2.95)

The Problem is I have 3 Modern Device BBB Arduino clones, an Adafruit DC Boarduino and three Evil Mad Scientist Diavolinos but only one USB FTDI TTL-232 cable. Oh Yea - I do have one official Arduino - albeit an older one. :-) I have been meaning to get another cable - but when I can get another Diavolino for less money it has stopped me every time. There are other USB RS232 boards - Modern Device has one - so does Spark fun - but there are only a few dollars cheaper than the FTDI Cable.

So I took the plunge and ordered a couple of the CP2102 boards - then promptly forgot I did it. I was pleasantly surprised this week when a box arrived - it only took 2 weeks, less than normal in my experience.

I downloaded the driver and installed it on three of my computers without problem. Then I tried hooking it up to an Arduino - it took a bit of head scratching but it finally worked, once I figured out how it should be wired. I thought I would share with you how to do it.

The Board has a 5 pin connector with RST, 3v3, 5V, TXD, RXD, and GND. There is a series of holes along the side that says DTR, DSR, RTS, and CTS. The Arduino software uses DTR to reset the chip and start the bootloader when uploading a sketch. I soldered a 4 pin header into the holes and put on on the pins with the included cable on the DTR and tried an upload - I got the out of sync message, and put on my thinking cap - I tried burning the bootloader for the version of Arduino I was using - then tried again, no luck - then I changed the properties used as default for the CP2102 by setting the flow control to hardware in the drivers properties screen. I figured that the Arduino software would reset these values anyway during the sketch uploading, but what the heck. Still no luck. I switched the TX and RX pins on one of the boards, and voila - the sketch uploaded.

The one downside of the adapter board is that the included jumper wires are too short. I was going to make a long cable out of a piece of cat5 cable , but then remembered I saw a USB extension cable at the local Dollar General store - and got two (how much did they cost - everything is a dollar :-).

So now I can get the adapter up to the bench and am happily burning sketches for a total of 6.95 each cable.

So this is how it is connected. I included the colors of the jumpers I used - and the colors used for the same connection using the FTDI cable.

BBB FTDI cable colors Jumper colors CP2102
1)GND --------black---------black---- gnd
2) brown n/c
3)+5 --------red-----------white---- 5v
4)TX --------orange--------purple--- RXD
5)RX --------yellow--------grey----- TXD
6) --------green---------blue----- DTR

Pins all hooked up

NOTE on setting driver properties....
When the driver installs it show up as COM11 on my shops XP computer. Looking at the properties the driver installs by clicking on Start, then right clicking on My computer, and selecting properties. Then on the Hardware tab I click on Device manager (almost there) and select ports (COM and LPT). Right clicking on the list item and selecting properties you get a screen with the default values - I always set flow control to hardware.

My default Properties for the CP2102

Simplest serial port terminal in C# « Balau

2011-07-25T06:19:00.000-07:00

Simplest serial port terminal in C# « Balau

Inductor & Capacitor Meter (LCMeter) « MicroSyl | MCU Electronics projects

2011-05-30T03:47:00.000-07:00

Inductor & Capacitor Meter (LCMeter) « MicroSyl | MCU Electronics projects

Bench Power Supply 0-25v @ 0-5amp « MicroSyl | MCU Electronics projects

2011-05-30T03:39:00.000-07:00

Bench Power Supply 0-25v @ 0-5amp « MicroSyl | MCU Electronics projects

DangerousPrototypes.com forum • View topic - Homemade PCB, no VUSB

2011-05-28T03:29:00.000-07:00

DangerousPrototypes.com forum • View topic - Homemade PCB, no VUSB: "18F2550"

Easy to build workbench

2011-05-26T10:13:00.000-07:00

Easy to build workbench

YouTube - Shop Made Router Lift and Table

2011-05-23T10:08:00.000-07:00

YouTube - Shop Made Router Lift and Table

very clever - but basically its a z axis and that is something that is in every do it yourself CNC.

However i like this best - seems to be simple - KISS and all - now where did i put that extra stepper motor......

Weathering The Storm

2011-05-23T06:53:00.000-07:00

Weathering The Storm: "

The floods in the South are pretty terrifying and homeowners are going to whatever lengths they can to protect their homes.

It’s great to see such amazing ingenuity and resilience in the face of destruction.

2011-05-22T16:55:00.000-07:00

Duct tape RFID tag #1 : scanlime

2011-05-19T07:57:00.000-07:00

Duct tape RFID tag #1 : scanlime

bench power supply

2011-01-23T04:43:00.001-08:00

LM317 UPS power modules

2010-09-09T02:43:00.000-07:00

I was surfing eBay this morning and ran across a lot of cheap Chinese LM317s- seems lots of people wanted to sell me 50 of them for around 15$ - I was thinking about what I could do with that many - realized that since we recently converted to Century Link for my phone - and i have lots of wireless -phones i could make a UPS - but then i also realized that all of the base stations had a little DC plug that gave them their power. As well as the ADSL modem, and the wireless router. Who needs a 100dollar ups inverter when everything can be battery powered.

Looking next to me, I see the old lawn tractor battery i keep on a float charger. I could make little power modules with the 317's and hook all of the phones/router/modem and then power them off the one battery - It has scads of power and would allow lots of hours of uninterrupted Internet surfing and phone when the power goes off in the spring like it does around here. - or at least until the laptops batteries go flat. Then we could all call mom - unless she has Vonage - she would like that....

The parts should cost under a dollar (less the plugs and wires) - Lets see... blank pcb - a sharpie, some etchant and ....

Who is my Phone Company????? - you are not going to believe this

2010-07-09T09:47:00.000-07:00

Comcast sent me a $191 bill, and then a letter letting me know they were going to raise the rates again -which I decided was way to high, so I started investigating other providers for the services that Comcast Provides.

The TV part of the spectrum would be provided by one of the satellite companies, but then there is the high speed Internet.

A little background - I live in what I thought was not all that rural of an area. (close to here) The house is ~10 years old, and I switched to Vonage 5 or so years ago, and dropped my land line altogether. I used to have a DSL line before I went Cable.

I called Century Link, whom Dish Network uses to provide their Internet Connection. After quite a while on the phone with a very helpful representative it was determined that he can not provide DSL (or voice) to my address, and they were very sorry, and they did not know who did.

I called the FCC - very helpfully they refereed me to the PUC of Pennsylvania. The best the PUC could do was snail mail me a list of "providers". Seems that some communications act allowed anybody to say they were in the phone business and to bill you for the privilege, most of these people probably are nothing more than just a phone number and a billing program.. No Luck.

The PUC suggested that I call my local Municipal Building. The helpful person at the Littlestown Town Hall didn't have an exact name - but she shared that "Almost everyone around here uses Century link."

Talk about running around in circles.

Think about it - Hundreds of Thousands of tons of copper pairs strung all over the country, seemingly not used by anybody anymore!

I feel like a dinosaur - my first Job out of college was with Cincinnati Bell, planning how many people would need phone service 5, 10, and 15 years in the future. Seems that 40 years down the line, no one does.

Now almost anybody under 30 has only a cell phone number. Only old folks like me even consider a wired land line. Makes me want to build a very large hobby rocket and put up my own satellite, and give away phone service....

P.S. The next day I was perusing the Century Link site and stumbled across a slide in some presentation with the Vice President in charge of PA sales, along with his phone number. So I called him. He apologized profusely and indicated that indeed Century Link was my phone company and he would set it right. The next day a very helpful person called me.... WOW - never hurts to start at the top and work down.....

Interesting Nova - The Spy Factory

2010-07-06T16:56:00.000-07:00

After I watched a few episodes of Glee on Hulu - I wandered over to the Nova programs. I found one that the last segment was about data mining and the NSA. The things they were talking about, as next to impossible, rocket science type of stuff, we are exposed to every day via Google.

Add Words filter a message, or search results, as to content and puts a Ad for you to possibly click on. The concept of transcribing a voice message is run of the mill on Google voice. To think Google is having to do it with scads of off the shelf hardware . NSA has a basement full of Cray Super computers. Think they have a little more capability? The Nova program has quite a few of shots of Cray Cabinets lined up in the NSA. Kind neat in a techy way.

I think that everyone has the capability to listen to anyone, but we are all hiding in plain sight. Just don't attract attention to yourself with phrases like "blowing up the Whitehouse" or a phrase like "biological attack"
(Hi Adam, Say hi to Josh from me next time you see him...).

Check it out - http://video.pbs.org/video/1051968443/

How to recycle Cheese Ball Container - KittenBall !!!!!

2010-06-22T17:55:00.000-07:00

Enjoy some of the best Cheese Balls in the world.

Wash - add one kitten.

Oil Spill

2010-06-05T03:14:00.000-07:00

How much is a barrel of oil worth - one pelican, 50 lbs of shrimp - a months rent? Money isn't the object - corporate responsibility is. From what I read BP knew the blowout preventer was defective - had to reduce the pressure when testing, it was just a matter of time...

My feeling is - All these undersea shenanigans are more for show than anything else - prove to everyone that they are trying. PR. They really know that each one has a minimal chance at succeeding.

What they probably know, but won't admit, is that the only true probability of success is the two relief wells. All they got do is intersect a 5 ft diameter hole 8 thousand feet down rilling at a 45degree angle. What do you think, could you imagine it working.

More likely they feel if they get close enough and relieve the pressure by pumping out all the oil that the other leak will slow dow to "manageble" levels.

what a crock.....

Photoresistor provides negative feedback to an op amp, producing a linear response

2010-06-02T02:39:00.000-07:00

Photoresistor provides negative feedback to an op amp, producing a linear response: "View as PDF AGC (automatic-gain-control) amplifiers use the nonline..."

Live Feeds from BP remotley operated vehicles (ROV)

2010-06-01T07:07:00.000-07:00

Fascinating!!! - have been watching them rehearse for cutting off the riser pipe this morning

http://www.bp.com/liveassets/bp_internet/globalbp/globalbp_uk_english/homepage/STAGING/local_assets/bp_homepage/html/rov_stream.html

CNC - a little one at least

2010-05-09T00:35:00.000-07:00

Something i have been wanting to do for a long time, ever since I saw an instructable on home CNC was build one just for fun. Well the price of most of the materials makes it no so fun.

The pipes for the first one, would have come to 40-50$ at the local Ace hardware, so i concentrated on electronics. The board i was building in a recent post was a controller from the instructable.

I tried with drawer slides and I could never get the table square enough to do anything serious. Everything was always binding and the cheap steppers I picked up on eBay were just not strong enough to move the table without dropping pulses. The idea was still simmered in the back of my mind...

Then I ran across the Mantis 9.1. It had two secret ingredients that made it all come together. The rods/bearings idea, and the sacrificial table idea. The Rod/Bearing and match drilling made everything square up, and the bearings made everything easy to move with weak motors.

The flatness of the table was guaranteed by simply using the machine to mill the table flat relative to the spindle.

I guess the best thing about the design, was that it could be built cheap. He used 1/2" Plywood, and he evidently used a Shop Bot to cut out the basic parts. Looking over the design i kept seeing Reference line sand to here. I realized if I got a 3/4" MDF shelf it had three edges that were as square as I needed. I invested $5 on the shelf, and printed out the plans and just spray tacked them to the shelf and took after the it with a jig saw.

Couple of caveats - MDF makes a lot of dust - keep a shop vac handy and wear a mask. MDF uses up tools in a hurry. About half way through cutting the basic pieces, the cutting was slowing to a crawl. When I examined the jigsaw blade the teeth were completely worn down to nubs.

I got a cheap set of blades and kept it up. Later I realized the table saw had a blade with carbide cutting teeth, and it made short work of the rest of the square pieces.

Being the cheap person I am, :-), I wasn't about to order hardened steel bars cut to length from McMasters. I found a more than serviceable replacement in the metals bin at the local hardware store, and at Lowes. The 3/8" plated rod 36" long costs a whooping $3.69 and two is all I needed. Easily cut to length with a hack saw. The bearings cost 1.69 in brass, and 2.69 each in bronze (from two different stores).

So the initial investment in the Hardware came to all of 33$ so far. I wish the first store had more of the cheaper bearings.

The drive screw I am planning on using is standard 1/4" x 20 x 12" threaded rod I had. You have to pick over the stock to get one straight enough without nicks. I got a long nut used to join the rods and just threaded it over the selection and found one that the nut moved smoothly over the full length length.

I dry fit all the parts and took a picture. The wife took one look at it and said, "I thought it would be bigger" This mill has always been the prototype - and I don't really plan on using it for more that a try out. Refine the build, taking into account lessons learned make one for real. I'll have to make the next one bigger though - for her ;-)

Next will be finishing up the parts, mounting the electronics and trying it out. Stay tuned - film in a few weeks,

found a board / sketch-a-matic for the power section

2010-04-25T04:05:00.000-07:00

Over at general guital gadgets I found a perfect amp circuit. What I like about it is the common ground design and the usage of the 10ohm/coil.

When I worked at DAK they bought the brand of a very high end amplifier company, A common theme in all the amps was that all the ground traces went to a common point/solder point that was tied to the chassis. Prevents ground loops, and in a high gain chip power amp ground loops spell disaster. Who can hear the 1mz oscillation of a poorly designed board? That is until the magic smoke appears. This is the only circuit I found with the recommended 10ohm with a few turns of wire to prevent oscillation.

Another theme was torrid transformers - much better regulation of the voltage out, and quieter too. However i fear i will have to forgo this as a luxury. I am on a strict budget. I have some 25v ct transformers in the junque box, and the lower voltage means less power, and a smaller output heat sink - the chip is capable of ~68w - I am only looking for 10w or so. Even at that level the wife will probably yell - even if i could hear her :-)

Speaking of cheap I went yard saleing and found for $.50/ea a pair of 6" car speakers. I thought that they would do quite the job for this amp. They looked like they can handle the power, and with the full range - the acoustic guitar I am planning to hook up to this mini beast will probably sound more like and acoustic and not a buzz saw electric.

... off to google a pre-amp/tone controls for the project....

..... Googleing, Googleing .......

Found it - http://www.generalguitargadgets.com/richardo/practiceamp/practicemaneq.gif - a banaxle opp amp based design. Kewl...

Finishing up the PCB

2010-04-19T09:04:00.000-07:00

Finishing the boards what i did was:

Drilled the holes.

The Last time I tried to drill a board I used up the entire kit of bits I got on eBay, using a genuine Dremel tool in an expensive genuine Dremel drill stand. The Dremel screws into the stand and it must have not been as perpendicular as it looked. Most of the bits broke just as the drill went through the board completely. Too much flex - plus the Dremel sounds way too much like a dentist drill for me to like them much. I had even purchased a regular looking chuck adapter that didn't help matters any. Not recommended.

Since then I got a real drill press at Harbor Freight - I got it for around $50 on sale - Nice bench top unit I have used quite a bit for regular sized projects. I figured that the bits had 1/8" ends , so I mounted up the bits, set the speed as high as it would go, and drilled all 64 holes without one broken bit. Considering I spent less on the big drill press than I did on the Dremel tool, I can't recommend the bench top unit enough. Plus while I was there I spied a grab bag of small drill bits and picked up a set that I used this time.

Tinned the traces.

I was initially to intimated to try surface mount soldering, looking at the Sparkfun tutorials and then actually doing it is sometimes very different.

For those of you out there contemplating it here are a few tips. Especially if you made you own board and it's gleaming copper traces are staring you in the face.

Buy one of the flux pens. I initially put a little dot of solder on each pad to solder down the chip, however when i tried to get it aligned these little dots got in the way - the pins wanted to fall to either side. I tried to get the solder bump a little smaller, but the iron wouldn't pick up as much as I needed - then the little over the head light bulb went on and I just covered all the traces liberally with the flux (you may need to push the pen down a few time to get fresh flux flowing I did). Then all I had to do was was drag the soldering iron along each trace, trailing a small blob of solder and leaving a nice thin coating of solder. Only once in a while did i need to refresh the blob of solder on the tip of the iron.

I brushed the Flux pen over the pads again for a fresh coat. Then I heated one of the corner pins, dropped the chip down on it, checked to see that it was stuck, and did the same to the other corner of the chip. After that it was just a matter of touching the iron to each pin , and inspecting after all were touched - they all had a little meniscus of solder from the IC pins to the pads. Touching with a pin I tested each to see that they were well and truly stuck.

I have to mention the soldering station I got. A Weller WES51 Analog Soldering Station, Power Unit, Soldering Pencil, Stand and Sponge. The analog is quite sufficient, who cares if it is 600 or 611 degrees, I don't. It is a absolute joy to use, and one of its best features is that it turns itself off after no use in 99? minutes. It cost close to $100 on sale at Amazon. As they say - you remember the quality long after you forget the price. Highly recommended.

Cutting the baoards.

Well i could have done it many ways, as soon as I get a real paper cutter I will try one of those, but I have a scroll saw, and it does the job quite nicely. Wish they made saw blades designed for cutting FR4 for the saw.

Lessons learned and notes for next time

Use real tools - drill press and soldering station.
Hook up a the hose from vacuum to the drill press to catch the drill dust.
Look for real paper cutter at the yard sales.
Get a new prescription for the glasses I use in the shop, all these tiny precision tools, parts and soldering gives one a headache.

Fun in the shop etching Printed Circuit Boards

2010-04-18T05:14:00.001-07:00

I started a project of documenting and organizing all the various IC's I have acquired over time. Up till now they were in a little plastic box that I consulted time to time.

I stopped by Staples and picked up a handful of report binders with pockets - they conveniently had them on sale for $.50. The binders I was looking for had a insert for three hole punched paper and pockets. I printed out the data sheet for each part, 3 hole punched it and stuck the part into the pockets. Now I don't have to run to the computer when I pick up an IC I don't remember.

Being of an age where seeing very small parts is getting harder, I tended over time to accumulate a lot of soic parts, and they sank to the bottom of the sample box.

I finally purchased an inexpensive adapter board from dipmicro electronics that let me mount most of them for prototyping. I was suitably impressed of the quality of the board and @ a quarter a piece I got a bunch. One side lets you mount soic and the other ssop.

However there were a few parts that had wider spacing and no one seemed to have a break out board for them. Or should I say in my price range - I am, after all, a cheap son-of-a-gun.

So I decided to whip up one of my own. I bit the bullet and set aside the time to finally get proficient enough at Eagle CAD to make a passable design. After a few false starts I managed to get the libraries loaded and Eagle set up, thanks in no small part to a Spark Fun Tutorial.

First I could not find an outline for the part I wanted to use (DS2321 RTC chip). Google found a person that had designed a board with the part, and I set out to modify his layout. I got all hung up on making a library out of it for later use, after all this was just supposed to be a board for any so16wide parts. A forum post showed me how to make a library from the original. I was now drawing a hobbyist quality, wildly inefficient, but functional design. I had one in an hour or so. Now it was ready for toner transfer.

The last time I made a board I had purchased some wildly expensive coated picture paper. I remembered reading someplace someone using magazine covers, I grabbed a copy of Information week - the cover seemed a bit thin to me - but I was in a hurry and decided to try it. I found a back cover that was mostly white and it printed just fine in the laser. It took a bit to realize I was not enough of a pro at Eagle - I had managed to get some stuff on the top layer and some on the bottom - But after I set it to print both the top and bottom together, everything worked out swimmingly.

I now was on familiar turf ( I thought). I tossed a pieced of freshly scrubbed PCB stock onto an old re-purposed waffle iron to heat up - and ran around to locate that darn roll of masking tape. Finally taped it to a very warm board and ran it through the laminator a few times.

Looking through the cover at the toner - there were some supicious spots that I though had not stuck sufficiency, grabbed the Clothes Iron and cranked it up as far as it would go - folded a paper towel to made a pad, and pressed hard as I could to make sure the toner was re-melted onto the board.

When I put the board into a hot water bath I was very pleasantly surprised, the last time it took almost an hour to get the photo paper soft enough to get it away from the toner and off the board. This time the paper just peeled away in a few minutes, and came away very cleanly. Just a few wipes with a sponge was all it took to rid the toner traces of any paper residue. I guess it had to do with its thinness.

I guess photo paper is meant to last and was considerably thicker. It took forever to get soft enough and stuck perniciously to the toner. I guess I will renew that Information week subscription they keep hounding me about - if for nothing than to have lots of cover paper :-)

I could see where I had pushed too hard with the iron - it looks like the toner had smeared onto the board, a few pokes with a Xacto knife and and some touch up with a fine point Sharpie and it was ready for the etchant.

Then came the fun part where I get to dress up like a serious dork. Donning lots of protective clothing, chemical safety goggles, breathing mask, and nitrile gloves. I got out some Hydrochloric acid/Peroxide etchant that had to be almost a year old, and dropped the board into the cold solution. It went slowly, I had seen in some video where someone used a little sponge brush to rub off the disolved copper and let fresh etchant at the board. So I brushed and brushed and swore to next time I would take time to heat the etchant and I would flood fill that unused part of the board so that not as much copped had to be removed.

Pretty soon the etchant was so dark it almost looked like ferric chloride. Just about then, the door bell rang and I went to the door worrying what the caller would think with me a dressed up like a toxic spill worker. Just my Brother-in-law and my sister. The board sat there in the etchant for the better part of an hour as we discussed pleasantries.

When I got back nothing seemed to have happened to the board much, so I quickly whipped up a new batch. WOW. A new batch of etchant really works fast - like in another minute the board was completely etched.

A quick wipe with some acetone and the bare copper was exposed, and the family was suitably impressed by the little lines of copper running all over the board.

This morning when I got back down to the shop - the dark murky old etchant was a bright green and almost clear. I goggled around and found this weighty tome explaining how, just by exposing the etchant to air, it re-generates it given enough time. This was about 3/4 cup in a closed plastic container overnight- not much air - but evidently enough. I grabbed an old coffee container, for it's opacity, and poured both batches together for next time (have to get an acquarium pump)

Now its time to clean up all the spills and wash down the bench-top so I can get out the drill press and Scroll saw to do the necessary machining. Etchant is very, very, very corrosive and it will rust up any tool that it touches - last time I managed to spill some unknowingly onto my favorite set of needle nose piers - that will never happen again.

Time to go break lots of little expensive carbide drill bits.

So lessons learned, and notes for the next time

Spend some time with Eagle cad futzing around - just to get comfortable.
Use magazine covers to print.
Don't press so hard with the clothes iron, or try not using it at all.
Make sure to regenerate your etchant with a cap full or two of Hydrochloric acid before starting to etch.
Heating it up first wouldn't hurt.
Look at the yard sales for an aquarium or other small air pump to regenerate the etchant.
Find really, really, cheap place to get all those tiny carbide drill bits that are so fragile.

Photo Circuit Boards

2010-04-11T05:20:00.000-07:00

Custom Photo Circuit Boards

I have been investigating how to make precise homemade circuit boards. I have tried toner transfer and have been disappointed more time than not.

Back in the day when I had a full blown dark room setup – making boards was easier, partially because you could actually see the parts, and you could run down to any number of local distributors and get chemicals and boards. Plus a 1/16” drill did the job for most off the drilling.

25 years later I am in the mood to try my hand at it again. When there is no PCB for sale, there is usually an eagle cad brd and sch available.

So I installed Eagle Cad from here. Impressive package, a steep learning curve to make you own boards, but since I had the artwork already I just opened the files and looked at them. Printing them yields a positive – perfect for toner transfer but I am a little more adventurous.

To convert the positive to negative – I installed ghostscript and gsview. Eagle cad can output Postscript files so these applications interpret them into a printable version.

How I did that

Open the brd file in Eagle – then from the File Menu select Cam Processor. The layers ( in this case there was only one side so I selected bottom, pads and vias. Some people recommended that the fill pads be checked – but I find that it makes drilling easier if the holes are there to help position the drill.

On eBay there was a place that sold 6”x8” sheets of resist that could be applied with a laminator or with a hot iron – the critical piece of information that I gleaned from their page was you could use velum or tracing paper to creative the negatives.

A United states source on ebay (jaded_caveman) Dry Film Photoresist Sheets+Developer

Here is a link to a great video – using positive pre-sensitized boards. Circuit Skills: Circuit Board Etching

A lot of good information here : PCB Processing Manual

Christmas Lights

2009-10-19T03:04:00.000-07:00

I stopped by Big Lots and picked up some Christmas LED lights. The ones with the most potential is the battery operated strings - there are a dozen LEDs and a battery case - I don't plan on batteries - this summer i picked up cell phone charger at a yard sale that put out 5 vots @ 1amp for $.25 - an Arduino (clone) one of Adaftruit industries wave shield, a little project re-purposed for Christmas, and some power FET's - My cubby will look soooooo spiffy this Christmas. Stay Tuned - file (and pix) at 11

Kinda Scarry

2009-10-09T22:22:00.000-07:00

I started getting phone calls @ work about my loan applications... Trouble is I hadn't made any!

Plus I NEVER use my voice number @ work for any online transactions (that i remember) - That is why I got Google Voice...

Then I hear about all the passwords that someone got from Hotmail, Comcast, Gmail... Seems that I was one of the" lucky" few and they have my information - and evidently tried to get some money.

Kinda scary when everyone sends you an email with you account credentials when you signup and /or change your password - if someone gets your main email password - they have all those too...

Changed my password to something that will never be on any rainbow lists.. and will keep changing it for a while .

Hope you faired better

AVR ISP Programmer needed

2009-08-30T09:34:00.000-07:00

mega-isp

I have a Arduino clone from Modern Devices that hadn't been used in a while, and when I tried to use it, it wouldn't sync up with the Software on the PC - Either I blew it away somehow or it lost its little programmable mind - so I was looking around for a way to re-flash its brain and try again (don't you wish that you could get your brain freshened up every once in a while?)

I was futzing around looking at things other people found interesting in Google reader, which took me to this forum message which linked me to This Project @ Google.code that let you program a AVR chip with an Arduino. I have an extra shield from Adafruit - so i thought I'd try it out.

Stay Tuned - film @ 11

Its beginning to sound a lot like christmas

2009-07-20T09:29:00.000-07:00

Its half way though the year already and the Christmas lights project is just starting.

I got a couple of kits from diylightanimation.com through a group buy.

A couple of weeks ago the Lynx Express 16 channel showed up, and this week finally got the SSR4 kit(s).

I bought an old 4 channel scope (nessie) and then just this week got my first real Soldering iron a Weller WES51 - Amazon had the best price and I am a cheap.

I had gotten a couple of boards called a DMX dongle early in the year - but the 48$ price tag for the parts to populate the board has always stopped me, and with a bunch of Arduinos laying around i just thought that I could use one of those - they were microprocessors after all. The dongle just has a usb to RS232 module, a PIC chip and a very authoratative looking crystal oscillator module. I guess DMX has some pretty precise timing needs.

I did some googling and found these articles.

Ethernet DMX - that hooked an Ethernet shield and put out DMX.

Found a piece of code that appears almost everywhere - DMX Shield für Arduino.

On the Arduino Playground they have

http://www.arduino.cc/playground/DMX/Opendmx that looks promising.

I Just need the Arduino board to interface the USB to the 485 for dmx - There is pd software to drive the

Since I have an extra set of parts for a second SSR4 kit i will be stealing one of the 485 chips to drive the ssr4 and 16 channel LYNX for a while until i get enough parts together to make another order from mouser.

Tinker.it has some a library on google code that does DMX with and Arduinohttp://groups.google.com/group/dmxsimple/browse_thread/thread/ef8f246371d55c1b

Wouldn't it be kewl to use Adafruit Wave shield and some extra code to sync some amimation code from the same SD card - and drive a smallish Christmas tree or display - Me thinks that this would overload things somewhat - but what the heck - i have all the parts, and lots of time to Investigate (waste) :-)

Google Maps in C#

2009-05-30T07:17:00.001-07:00

I like to scrounge around at yard sales and pick up little bits of tech for pennies on a dollar. Given a large number of yard sales and the fact that i was not born around here and haven't a clue where XYZ street is - i have been playing around with Google maps.

You know the drill scan in the classifieds - cut and paste the address into a Google and and save the resultant map in my maps- print and take it along. The kewlest part is to send the location to the Garmin and then use it to find places.

The shortcoming of all this is the map itself - it is designed to be used online - i need a way to letter or number the markers on the map so i can see which marker goes with which address. i found this code - now i have to get the home computer online so i can use it from a Hot Spot - or find a "free" place on the web to host it. Any ideas?

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/custom-controls/LatLaysFlat-Part3.aspx

Sun rocks-n-rolls a datacenter in a box...

2009-04-12T03:14:00.001-07:00

Seems everybody (Sun, Microsoft, Google) is putting a lot of servers in a shipping container and just stack and plug in in Lego fashion to get a data center. Cheaper than building an expensive building, I guess. Lets talk about commodity data centers....LOL

Sun took one of their containers to a earthquake testing facility and subjected it to the same shaking as the Northridge earthquake. Having been dead center on top of the epicenter, I can attest that it was quite an experience - I wish my apartment fared as well...

check out the video

Anyone have a spare container they want to get rid of??? Also about a 1000 motherboards???

I especially like the single voltage power supply and battery that Google uses...

RGB 7 segment display hack

2009-04-12T03:08:00.000-07:00

Markus hacked a 7 segment display with some SMD RGB LEDs - the outcome is quite impressive.... <read more>

whatididwas

2009-03-12T16:09:00.001-07:00

EBAY Warning!!! eBay killed my machine

2009-02-23T03:12:00.000-08:00

I was surfing eBay with google chrome, and suddenly was presented with the red malware screen saying that if you continued you could harm you computer. I dutifully aborted quite a few times. But there was a particularly tasty price on a pair of blue tooth headphones, so i said to myself, "Self what harm could there be? I have the latest software both Norton and a mall ware checker", so I clicked. Got a "Aw Snap" couldn't load the page and forgot about it.

Until I went to boot my machine this morning - it was complaining that there was no operating system and that it couldn't find NTLDR. I freaked, yelled, screamed, pulled out my hair, and in general made a complete fool of myself. I felt like I deserved it. The computer had run perfectly for a year or more. Thankfully i had a second computer sitting right next to the now dead one, and googled some suggestions. However non of them worked and I had to dig out the software recovery disks and restore the system loosing all the pictures, music, Arduino code, and other stuff I wont miss until I need them again. Plus the fact that it took 5 hours to get the machine back to square one.

I know it was MalWare, because the MBR and boot software was missing, but all the partitions information, and the recovery partition was still there - just the system partition was "bad"

Oh well - stay away from eBay until they figure out how to mitigate this problem. It seems to not actually be eBay itself, but one of the third party software toolkit websites that help out eBay listings, pictures and stuff. I feel real sorry for the people trying to make a few bucks. Not all that sorry, but a little.

Favorite Software

2009-01-13T03:55:00.000-08:00

===== note to self - put in links ==== in the mean time use google

Windows XP - for my main desktop - still my favorite
Ubuntu Desktop - in a bunch of vmware virtual machines
Vmware - lets me test lots of stuff
Drop Box - dead easy way to transfer stuff around among machines and vms
Search Everything - Lets me find things in a multi terabyte storage space
keypass - In my dropbox so i can keep track of logins
ccleaner - helps keep detritus from laying around -
notepad++ - general text and source editing
synergy - shares one keyboard and mouse across many machines
google chrome - almost my favorite web browser
Firefox / Thunderbird - favorite web and mail clients
portable apps - lots of little things that don't need to be installed - just the thing for a thumbdrive - or a new vm
Winamp - listen to music - shoutcast radio mostly
VideoLAN - Will play just about everything and what it can't I use Mediaplayer clasic
truecrypt - for all my portable drives - just in case they get lost
nomp - to get the stuff from newsgroups
quickpar- to make sure I got it from the newsgroups
winrar - to unpack stuff from the newsgroups
eraser - to get rid of stuff from the newsgroups

The nack

2009-01-09T13:49:00.001-08:00

Anti burn coffer warmer - crazy idea

2009-01-07T03:37:00.000-08:00

I have this insane idea to make one of those coffee warmers turn off after a while. So your coffee won't evaporate and the warmer cook the sludge to glass on the bottom of your cup.

Not having a lot of room in the innards of the warmer - parts count becomes the limiting factor. Should be doable with a surface mount tiny2313 running on its internal clock, driving a sensitive gate triac, and a transformerless power supply. No opto-isolators will be necessary since the whole circuit will be hot, literally. Wonder what the temperature specs are on the AVR?

I found a nice APP note @ Microchip -Transformerless Power Supplies: Resistive and Capacitive with a couple of suitable power supply circuits. The capacitor circuit looked a little more inviting - if a little pricier - 10w resistors tend to be BIG.

So the first hurdle surmounted. Now all I have to do is get the Microcontroller circuit found - Any ideas?

DISCLAIMER! Not advised for the first timer, if you mess up working with this kind of circuit your coffee cup won't be the only thing cooked - you'll just be dead. And your Mom will complain about that horrible stink from little Johny's shop. So don't blame me.

Cat Planter

2008-12-31T13:59:00.000-08:00

Just click the link - it is a definite smile :-) Link

Arduino Ethernet and Pachube: remote sensors & web-control

2008-12-31T07:36:00.000-08:00

Pachube: Someone has a great idea here. Set up a website mashup of a lot of peoples remote sensor data. Can even control your arduino from their website, kewl. They have a section with code dedicated to the Arduino. It's in beta, and I have in an application. Soon you too can see how cold it is down in my shop.

I'll have to hook up that sample temperature/humidity sensor I got a long time ago.

Embarassingly Easy Arduino ProtoShield

2008-12-31T07:33:00.000-08:00

http://www.instructables.com/id/Embarassingly_Easy_Arduino_ProtoShield/

Stacking Arduino Shields

2008-12-31T06:37:00.000-08:00

Hit me like a giant duh - stack in the CENTER to get out of the way of the shield connectors and stuff.

his look a little longer that the ones I got from Adafruit

you can get them from Adafruit for $2 a set or from Digikey for around 6$ if you are ordering from there and want to save a little postage...

[via]

EDN design idea - drive a flashlight with an attiny23

2008-12-18T11:21:00.000-08:00

Article [link]

BitBang Arduino Boot Burner

2008-12-17T03:40:00.000-08:00

This looks very promising. A way to burn a bootloader (or any code I guess) into a blank mega168chip. using the BitBang mode of the USB chip and a slightly modified version of the AVR jtag program. I just HAVE to try this. [link]

Arduino Wiznet Webserver code

2008-12-08T18:00:00.000-08:00

Yes Virginia, you can have a webserver in 14K of memory (that's K as in thousand not gig or meg)

I couldn't find any example code for making a web server with the Arduino 12 IDE - so I knuckled down and struggled through writing my own, and learned a LOT in the meantime. This example displays all the analog pin's values, and lets you set the Digital output pins on or off. Its HTML web code so it is necessarily messy. There are comments, such that they are, to try and shed some light on the process.

The Wiznet can deal with more than one connection, so I had to make sure that any new page got what the current digital pins values. But had to sacrifice the ability to turn all the pins off.

HTML is a bite, and to truly do something that would be useful it would need a telnet connection so we could get some dedicated two way communication - and or a little AJAX code in the browser page to update things in real time.... That is for another day.

If you change the code - make it more useful - do me a favor and drop me a line letting me know. I'll practice now heaping praise - ohhh awwww - fantastic!!!!

Hope its helps someone....
the code is here

'duino ethernet - Thanks Limor!!!!

2008-12-07T03:07:00.001-08:00

Got one of Lady Ada's Ethernet shield - Got the Wiznet module @ Saelig Company melted a little solder and downloaded some code from arduino.cc

Had to uninstall the 328 and put the 168 back in the Diecimila so I could use the new inbuilt Ethernet library in Arduino12. Pasted in a sample and had telnet echoing back at me ...

Later in a forum post at Arduino.cc found some library code here that is supposed to work in Arduino 09 and 10 - more later - film at 11

Don't expect to come up for air until I have a web link to the little beast online and talking back to you...

Getting back the Sent to desktop as a shortcut

2008-11-30T13:12:00.000-08:00

I am obsessive about cleaning up stuff on a computer - the one in the shop lost it's send to desiktop as a shortcut link missing and I found this: here

geekgirl.tip: Missing Send To…Desktop as Shortcut

If you can't find the Send To...Desktop as Shortcut option on your Send To menu or if you accidentally delete its shortcut from the SendTo folder, here's how to get it back:

Open Windows Explorer and navigate to the SendTo folder.
Right-click in an empty space in the SendTo folder and select New, Text Document from the pop-up menu.
Name the newly created text document:
Desktop as Shortcut.DESKLINK
and press Enter.
You'll be warned that changing the file's extension may render the file unusable. Click Yes to change it anyway.

MAX6953 LED Matrix or development board

2008-11-21T11:14:00.000-08:00

http://www.electronics-lab.com/projects/misc/026/index.html

looks single sided - looks kewl

Building a Universal Remote with an Arduino

2008-11-21T05:49:00.000-08:00

http://zovirl.com/2008/11/12/building-a-universal-remote-with-an-arduino/

The kewl thing is the little oscilloscope he used - I want one!!!!

UziMonkey's blog: Using a MiniPOV3 as an AVR programmer

2008-11-21T05:47:00.000-08:00

UziMonkey's blog: Using a MiniPOV3 as an AVR programmer

Electronics hobby – the wonder of it all

2008-11-11T02:31:00.000-08:00

I started down this path a very long time ago and on the way –

Watching lights blink and buzzers buzz with a battery and a couple of wires was endlessly fascinating ...
The wonder of the first crystal radio.
The new Popular Electronics showing up each month ...
Off to college studying for an EE

Building a square root generator with discreet components (transistors for the uninitiated)
Learning how to properly bias a pentode,
Never having to study much for the first 3 quarters – most of it (except the math) I had sitting in a junk box at home – well that isn't exactly true – I didn't have any 100 horsepower motors in the basement...
A newly minted engineer– differential and integral calculus – transient waveform analysis dancing in my head. The telephone company bringing me down to earth rather rudely – just miles and miles of wire strung on poles. With the odd repeater or load box .... terminally boring.
Photography At home – building a home densitometer - trying to keep logarithmic circuits stable and calibrated in a cold and damp basement – the fun was endless..
The first DIY digital clock
Making the densitometer digital....
The smell of exploding 150,000mfd capacitors, hot acid, overheated insulation, ozone from 150,000 30,000 volts...
Headaches from watching the strobe light too much...
Numbers from the past .159 ,12BA6, 2n3055, 741, 723, 555 (now there was a part)...
Marriage/children keeping me upstairs too much – the solder oxidizing and the iron rusting over time, that is until they personal computer was published as a kit. building two and a half of them – ahhhhh 8k of memory and toggle switches on a front panel...
Mourning the passing of Southwest Technical Products...
The Radio Shack Model 1 and the Apple 2e – Opening the box full of Model 1...
Lots of pixels bouncing around on the screen and endless hours with the adventure series (on tape mind you)...
Modems and Running a BBS -

Fast forward to recent times...

Owning 7 or 8 functional computers – and scads of whale bones... Multiple monitors and flat screens, A home network that fills a full Visio page. All the software known to mankind loaded on terabytes of storage... Coding and Solving immense enterprise software issues daily...

What am I doing for wonder? I'm down in the basement – melting solder, playing with 'Duinos, making LEDs blink and motors whir, and having the time of my life...

Stepper motors and my arduino

2008-10-05T17:36:00.000-07:00

http://www.arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/StepperUnipolar has some simple unipolar stepper motor code. I hooked up some steppers that I got on Ebay and voila it works!

The motor is driven from a 9 volt supply through a 12v automobile dome light lamp as a load. The motors were dirt cheap - and with the 9v drive they are rather hard to stall with your fingers. Now i am only 1/3 the way to a CNC setup.

I have to play with full drive and half stepping a little - just because i can - to better understand the motors.

My goal is to build a cheap CNC like this.

Count to a million

2008-10-05T14:02:00.000-07:00

Now that I have the Lady Ada's WAV shield - I thought it would be cute to have it count - problem was in English we have the little problem with 12 through 19 - I found this code on the web - and will be converting it to Arduinoish

http://bytes.com/forum/thread255901.html

Ligntning trigger With an arduion

2008-06-19T08:28:00.001-07:00

http://www.glacialwanderer.com/hobbyrobotics/?p=16

Arduino WAV Shield

2008-05-14T11:33:00.000-07:00

Lady Ada has a new WAV Shield board that gives Ardy (my Arduino) a voice. My mind boggled when I saw this - a plethora of useful as well as pernicious projects came to mind.

A random wake up call alarm clock. Something that would say the weather from my weather station... To numerous to count. Ordered one and will have a code fest when it arrives. I betcha she sells out this one early ...

I wonder if you can write to the SD card with her software? That is something that could be KEWL...

Termie a C# serial terminal program & Arduion

2008-05-12T09:45:00.000-07:00

Termie a port to C# from Termite is a simple serial terminal program that does almost all the things I need to get started doing some interesting things with the Arduino and the Weather Station. Logging, hex display, and clipboard are the standouts

Am going to set up a automated dump from one instance through com0com simulating the weather station and then going on from there...

Stay tuned film at 11:00

C# RS232 Weather stations and com0com

2008-05-07T13:40:00.000-07:00

Not being able to leave well enough aalone, i had to try and build some software to talk to the Weather station.
First Things first - I know C# - so i had to track down some example code.
Found http://www.codeproject.com/KB/system/rs232ThreadSafe.aspx
Installed com0com a virtual null modem cable driver.
It installs CNCA0 and CNCB0 ports - Turns out C# doesn't like ports named like that.
I ran the cocm0com setup and reamed the ports com15 and 16.
Ran two instances of the software and voila both instances talked to each other.
Now I have to go home and plug into the weather station and see what I can see.

Other code i found
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/dotnet/DotNetComPorts.aspx
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/weatherlink.aspx
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/serialcommunication.aspx
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/GpsMapping.aspx
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/Serial_port_tester.aspx
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/IP/SerialCommunication.aspx

Have to install the coc0com hub and try talking to the WS with a couple of programs... more info and code to follow.

My Weather Station

2008-04-30T18:04:00.000-07:00

I got a LaCrosse WS-2317 weather station from Amazon. When I got it, it was $99 marked down from $279.95. Too cheap not to get.

I had been trying to accumulate parts / to build a DIY weather station using an Arduino, along with some parts from Sparkfun. Like Weather Board with pressure temperature and humidity. But at over 200$ it wasn’t on top of my list of projects.

I was impressed with what I got with the WS-2317 – a huge box with the base unit, a Rain gauge and a anemometer. Both with long (~30’) wires, simple telephone type connectors that connected to a outdoor wireless sender and a indoor LCD base unit. I finally found that you could plug the inside into the outside unit with a supplied cord, and it would power it, allowing the batteries to act as a backup.

Placing the Anemometer is proving to be a problem it likes to be higher that the surrounding structures – like at least 10’ over anything around – with a two story house and a line of 40 feet trees next to the house – I’ll just have to suffer until I get the nerve to climb the roof and put up a 15’ tower to support it. If the wife will approve (which I doubt, I just ain’t a-gona ask :0)

The included software allowed the base unit to be plugged into a serial port and get the information from the base unit. This was the primary purpose of this exercise, after all. The software included is rather disappointing – looks to be a VB app and is rather limited. But it wrote a DAT file and allowed some what of logging of the data. I settled down with Java and DOTNET to develop something better. In my wandering around the net looking for someone else that walked this path before for some pointers I found Open2300 – which was a nice interim solution – then I tripped over Weather Underground / Heavy Weather Uploader (WUHU) group on Yahoo and their WUHU application. It is somewhat astounding in that it will read directly from the WS-2317 and then send the data over to the Weather Underground, as well as AWEKAS and HamWeather.

The only problems I have had so far is that a spider decided to set up shop inside the rain gauge ceasing its functionality and until I evicted it.

I hooked up the webcam to YAWCAM and uploaded a picture out the window to the Weather underground. A nice touch.

The computer that I was using for the Weather station was my Internet computer -= partly because it was the oldest and least used – and it was the only one that had a built in serial port. That meant that I had to leave it turned on all the time – and that meant that that there were three computers on in the loft and it can get quite toasty up there, and of course it was the noisiest. So I got a cheap PCI serial card and stuck it in the HP and moved all the software over and set up shop there. The serial port installed as com18 and com19!!! – I guess that with all the USB serial cables I use with the Arduino I have instantiated a few ports. I though it was going to be a problem with WUHU but it found each and every one of the ports. Heavy Weather would not have it only knows about com1-4.

So now I can sit at work and see what's happening at home and what is going on around me in the weather world. Kinda neet - Huh?

Cheap Local LEDs

2008-01-22T10:54:00.000-08:00

A local (to me) group, Dorkbot DC, had a meeting this last weekend that I wish I had know about - They built a LED CUBE project. How come I always find out about this after the fact.

A simple 3x3 LED needs 27 LEDs - there are lots of sources for LEDs on eBay, but I needed a Local source - not in the orient - with the long shipping times. I looked at Buy Leds Online. I found them listed as a distributor from one of the China Manufactures.

But the one that I actually bought from is FCB Electronics on eBay. 100 LEDs - 25 each red, green, blue and white, and they let me order 2 packs at once for $4.50 each. Shipping wasn't bad either ~$8.00

What did the trick was that they were in the USA and shipping times would be reasonable. Plus they had a Lot of other stuff that I wanted - like 20x4 Blue LCD for under 10$ and lots of other things - this will be a test order. Their spiel is that they are in the USA and shipping times are fast. We will see. If it pans out - I'll try getting some other stuff. In the mean time I will be swimming in LEDs - hopefully soon.

Wiznet $12 Ethernet module for Microcontrollers

2008-01-22T10:42:00.001-08:00

Wiznet currently makes a $12 module that is designed to interface with micro controllers. This blog entry has a ton of information about it and the Arduino, like daughter board for its non standard connector and such...

Blinky Lights

2008-01-20T23:21:00.000-08:00

My mother would be so proud - Thousands of dollars spent on College - 20 years experience enterprise level software development - and what do I have to show for it??????

BLINKY LIGHTS - lol

How underwhelming - Then again some people collect trains...

Charliplexing or How to drive a lot of LEDs from a few microcontroller pins.

2008-01-20T02:55:00.001-08:00

A nice instructable using a microcontroller with limited pins to drive more leds that pins.

How to drive a lot of LEDs from a few microcontroler pins

Plus there is on on how to do it with old LED Christmas tree lights.... Code after I have a chance to make it work.

Cheap Custom PCB's

2008-01-13T11:23:00.001-08:00

BatchPCB.com

Looks like they batch up a bunch of files from Eagle cad and send you back board(s) for $2.50/sq inch + 10 shipping in around 10 days. Silk screened solder masked double sided boards...

WOW

Interactive Mud Hut: I have iPod Mojo

2008-01-11T23:08:00.000-08:00

Interactive Mud Hut: I have iPod Mojo

Controlling a IPOD remote with a Arduino

Kill Comercials In Vista with Lifextender

2008-01-11T06:01:00.000-08:00

The Wife has a TV card in her Vista computer - I have one too on my XP Machine - but I use SnapStream's Beyond TV to record my shows - one of BT's features that I really like, is the ability to highlight the commercials in the recordings. Now there is a free utility that will do it for vista called Lifextender To quote: Lifextender is a dead-simple commercial-removal application designed exclusively for Windows Vista Media Center users. There is ZERO configuration required, however, there are plenty of options if that's your thing.

Have to get that installed on her machine and see how it works.

SIT - kill off robot callers

2008-01-11T05:47:00.000-08:00

Lifehacker found a place that had a wav file of the SIT tone - that little tone that you hear before a recording tells you that a number is disconnected and no longer in use. Now all I have to do is to get it in my telephone answering machine (And Vonage) - should really spice it up some.

Electronics 101 hacking & Arduino

2008-01-09T17:23:00.000-08:00

I started down the computer path by taking Electrical Engineering when computers took up rooms. I built my first 2.5 computers with a soldering iron and a lot of little parts.

So it is with fondness I see a lot of people getting down to the basics again - this time with itty bitty computers - Programmable Interface Controllers (PIC) chips. Or Micro controllers. The challenge is to get something useful done in 1k of memory - are you up to it? Some examples are at the bottom.

I ordered an Arduino from Modern Device Company and while I am waiting (breathlessly) I am amassing a lot of stuff to do with it when i get it. (shameless plug:Great Price - excellent service)

More as a list of things to do.

As I said to myself - self:
An extensive list of arduino code/projects

Arduino clone, designed specifically for use with a breadboard

http://spritesmods.com/?art=inker

Electronics-Lab.com Blog

Synchronizing LED Fireflies

Reprogrammable LED Learns and Plays Back Light Sequences

Weekend Projects with Bre Pettis: Make a Joule Thief

Bristlebot: A tiny directional vibrobot

Programmable LED gallery

Programmable LED
Arduino AVR In System Programmer (ISP) Program a AVR tiny13 from an Arduino
MCU project everyday

TcTemp and Microsoft Installer

2008-01-07T13:29:00.001-08:00

I found after three unsuccessful install attempts of Microsoft Visual Studio 2008, that you can not have your %temp% and %tmp% user environment variables pointed into the tempory encrypted container built with TrueCrypt TCTEMP.

Another thing you might want to do if you are going to install Visual Studio 2008, install the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 first. Whenever The VS08 install fails it usually fails in the framework install.

Some Yutz in the Microsoft installer team is doing a ..\ or some other relative thing that is messed up and fails the install.

So as a workaround - I changed both the user Environment variables back to c:\windows\temp and added that directory to the one that is wiped by CCLEANER.

Not Ideal - because sometimes Windows holds files open in the temp directory while it is live and CCleaner can't delete it, but it will get most of the others junque that gets stuffed in there. And the temp directory get quite full over time - I mean gigabytes if you are like me and install every software package known to mankind.

Just Though you would like to know what i did...

HTML and RichText Buster

2008-01-07T11:53:00.000-08:00

Have you ever copied a text snippet out of Internet Explorer, and pasted it into an editor that understood rich-text, like Lotus Notes, Microsoft Word, or you favorite HTML Designer, and then had to remove all the formatting?? Or had Lotus Notes mangle the text?

Get a program called PURE TEXT from Steven Millers Web Page - It installs in your tray and when you want whats on the clipboard to be reduced to plain old text - you just click on its icon in the system tray, or a hot key combination that you define.

I don't know how I've lived without it.

Playing FLV (Flash) videos locally with winamp

2008-01-03T03:17:00.000-08:00

I was installing my favorite Music player, WinAmp, on the internet computer and was clicking around the options for the install, and found that it had FLV as one of the video types it could play.

Just yesterday I was looking at a blog and some programs that would Play FLV's, but didn't want to install yet another application. It completes the need for video on that computer. I NEVER use Microsoft media Player, because it will allow videos to phone home - a breach of security in my mind. I either use VLC , or for wmv videos Media Player Classic Neither of these will play an FLV file format. Usually I have to open the flv files with Internet Explorer - (using File -> Open). Now when I download a YouTube video as FLV - or create my own with Camtasia, I can directly open the video in Winamp.

More things I like about Winamp. The best is Shoutcast Radio - there are 100's of streams for every type of musical taste. At work I pop the headphones on - pick a stream that fits my mood, and zone out as I pound out the code - it allows me to block those loud hall meetings... try 181.fm - their classic rock seems to be the best - or one of the techno streams from Digitally Imported. I like the vocal ones, they at least have a melody line to follow sometimes. Since I treat all this as elevator music, and it should not be intrusive.

DIY Planner Pages

2008-01-01T04:51:00.000-08:00

A friend wanted a source to print out the pages for a Daytimer. I couldn't find my Calendar creator CD so I went looking online for something he could use. I was astonished to find DIYplanner.com - and open source solution to print those expensive pages for the books.

They have a lot of prebuilt sets as PDFs and they even have an application for mac and PC that you can customize a bit. Check it out.

I am going to open up calc and figure out if it is better to buy the pages or print them. Calculating on the cost of going to my local staples and using their copiers.

Figuring 7 cents a page * 365 pages = $25.55
My printing cost /page for my inkjet runs about $.05 - about half that for the laser printer.

Googling daytimer loose leaf pages I got http://www.officeworld.com/Worlds-Biggest-Selection/10887/07Q3/ Were they are selling a set for about $27. Seems they know how to match a price point....

Printing a booklet
- I remember a little program I used YEARS ago - it still exists - ClickBook
it prints a booklet, installs as a printer driver - says that it is vista compatible. - i bet if you combined the printing software above and this you might get something useful (and it would save LOTS of paper)

Hamachi VPN

2007-12-29T07:23:00.000-08:00

Hamachi allows me to see computers anywhere through a VPN tunnel - like my home computers from work through the firewall. I love it and it use almost daily.

I use a secure password generator to create the network password. email it to one of my public emails - then write down the non obvious network name and just for good measure copy it to a thumb drive in my keepass database.

I found this post about making it run as a service (on the home w2k3 server)

I found this post about how to get it running on a thumb drive.

More Internet Tweaks

2007-12-29T03:30:00.000-08:00

I started online computing with my first Hayes Smartmodem 300 in 1981 - 300 baud! you could actually read the text as it showed up on your screen.

Anyhow - not long after I started a BBS with TBBS and was hooked for life. One thing learned the hard way was to stay anonymous online - it save the 3am "your BBS is down" calls, or worse.

Nowadays there are lots of ways webmasters can find out who you are and it pays to make it as hard as possible for them to do that. A few of them are:

In a previous post I mentioned how to set up an encrypted temporary container that is rebuilt each time the system is re-booted Using TrueCrypt. Why not use it to squirrel away stuff from the browser. And all those installation files that clutter up your system. You history for you browser will never work again, but there is always Google to re-find something you saw last week.

Relocate the Firefox cache file into the encrypted temporary container maintained by TrueCrypt. Webshaker mentions a way - but I had to do it a little different in the current version of Firefox. After you enter about:config in the address bar - You have right click on the list of keys and select new, then enter browser.cache.disk.parent_directory into the dialog. Entering t:\firefox in the next dialog finishes up the tweak.

For Internet Explorer in the main menu select Tools->Internet Options then in the Browsing History section of the page click on the Settings button. (almost there) Next, clicking on the Move folder button will pop up a folder dialog that will allow you to browse to the Temporary container and select it. The location will then say T:\Temporary Internet Files.

While at it - why not repoint the temporary files area that Windows uses to the same place. Right click on the My Computer icon select Properties -> advanced -> environrnment variables and look for the TEMP and TMP settings in the User Variables window - edit each one and point it to T:\temp or something. Windows will want you to reboot after this tweak so be prepared - save early and save often.

Surf the net - find things

2007-12-27T13:36:00.000-08:00

http://xkcd.com/101/

http://www.kevinpereira.com/

HP Photosmart D7640 review *****

2007-12-27T07:29:00.000-08:00

I stood in line at Staples for a couple of hours on black friday - one of my purchases was a portable Photo Printer, however when I opened it up a few days before christmas to set it up for all the photos we were going to take - I was extremely disappointed that it was a dye sub printer - I took it back to Staples and they were very nice about it, and went to look at all the photo printers they had - the portable cost 99$ with a 50$ rebate - I hadn't sent in the rebate yet - so I was off to find a printer that was about the same price.

I cornered a salesman and gave him two criteria - had to print 4x6 borderless, and must have separate ink tanks for each color. I was thinking Canon or Epson and was cringing mentally - since I had had poor experience in the past with those printer brands. We stopped in front of the HP D7640 - they had it on sale for 114$ - nice price - the logo on the front had wireless, and ethernet - and I was getting very interested - but still was thinking of the cartridge cost. when the salesman opened the front of the printer and I saw 5 separate color cartridges, and a larger black cartridge, I was sold.

Of course I asked how much the ink cost - he pointed out that the color cartridges cost 9 bucks each and the black a little more (15$?). In response to my query about the kind of carts that came with the printer - he said as I expected that they were sample cartridges and that I should buy a complete set of normal. I demurred and just picked up a 100 pack of their Staples brand "premium" photo paper and headed home.

When I looked at the cartridges as I was installing the printer they seemed to be little ink tanks only - and didn't have the little gold fingers that said print head. My mind instantly went to easy refilling - I plugged in the beast and stuck the SD card from the camera into the front of the printer, and used the built in touch screen to pick out a few pix and pritn them - Impressed right off on the ease of doing this, and the quality of the prints.

I stuck the cd in the drive, took all the defaults, it took quite a while and installed a LOT of software. I was expecting minimal stuff - but was greatly surprised when I opened that software for the first time - it was like a drummed down version of Picassa - it allowed you to tag photos and even put the pictures in reverse date order. HP is a class company and always seems to give you more than you need.

The printer even has a built in web page to get at the setups Bluetooth, 80211G wireless and the Ethernet.

I installed on the wife's Vista computer and went to bed - we started printing pictures on Christmas eve - and then most of the next day ( I do have about 3000 un-printed pictures). A hundred pack of paper later - I was impressed - the cartridges were all full except for a little down on the light pink cartridge.

Print time went from 10-15 seconds for pictures with little detail - up to about a minute for something with a lot of color and detail. The pictures printed on the Staples paper are just a tad tacky right away. The pictures printed on the HP paper are dry to the touch right after printing.

When you print on the HP paper - The print seem to be darker - but the color balance is much better. On the back of the paper is a little barcode - I wonder if the printer is seeing the paper type and changing its settings? I know that it complains about paper size when it gets to the HP paper in the stack. although you just click on ok and it gets all happy and still prints.

One of the cute things about the printer is the little 4x6 photo paper tray - it is separate from the 8x11 paper and you can watch it get sucked into the printer when you are using it.

The sample print on 8x11 paper takes no time at all - it is rated at 30 some prints a minute - with the color sample - it is done in just a few second - every thing impresses me about this printer. It is as fast as the HP laser jet 6 that I use for cheap black printing - and the prints looks a bit better to boot.

You really want to use the built in software to print bordless - I tried printing from windows and it didn't expand the picture to fill the 4x6 paper - but at least it still printed. I'll get the hang of that as I gain more experience with the printer I suppose.

Quick Prints - a few seconds for 8x11 simple prints - 10-60 seconds for bordless 4x6

LIKES

Good cartridge life - 100 4x6 pictures and the ink meters said mostly full
Network printer - Don't have to leave a computer on to print
Good Software - easy to use - even the wife said it was easy.
Print From Memory card - the memory card even shows up on the network.
Touch Screen - no computer needed to print and gives better status messages when printing from a PC.

CONS

Nitpicky con - prints best on HP paper if a little dark.

So am I happy - Yes, it is exactly what I wanted and more that I expected. I give it a 5 out of 5.

Reinstalling the Internet Computer

2007-12-26T03:19:00.000-08:00

My internet computer caught something, or the hardware glitched, it is an OLD machine in any case. I was left with a non functioning junque computer to use to browse the net. So i had to rebuild it one more time - so i though i would write it all down and tell you WHATIDIDWAS

My WinXP CD was bad - kept complaining about some or the other sys file that was missing. so I logged into NEWZBIN downloaded a WinXP ISO from newshosting.com using NZB-O-MATIC PLUS. Not to worry i thought - i had a valid license and all the XP cd's are the same anyway, and i had the magic registration string on the back of the cd case. (more later...) used Nero to burn a CD, this was all done on a functioning computer of course.

Went to brew a programmer pot-o-coffee as windows did its install thing.

After XP got installed i had problems getting the network running - seems that there are 2 lan connections on my motherboard (A7N8X) - the Invidia one got zapped in a lightning strike a while back - and windows wanted to use that one for the connection - not good - so i re-installed the drivers for the 3comm chip on the motherboard and fiddled with the lan settings and finally had a connection to the net.

Note: The XP ISO i got was something that looked like Vista in a way, well at least as much as XP can - it evidently a skin that Microsoft developed for foreign versions. Problem was this one defaulted to Croatian. Fiddled with the language bar to get it to look mostly like English. I liked the shell so much i kept it, even though in a few programs that have translations it is real hard to figure out the menus. I like the date format the best 26.12.2007.

Now to deal with the license - used keyfinder to insert the proper key into windows, then was off to the Microsoft update site to install 89(!) security updates and such.

While it was busy getting and installing the updates i stuck the bare minimum of stuph on the machine to make it see the things on the net safely.

The company gives anyone that asks a Anti Virus CD so installed that. I guess its to help keeping people from getting virus at home and bringing it into work.
Installed CounterSPY , simply the best Anti-Spyware protection there is (and it is quite reasonable) - dug through some old Gmail to get the key and got it all happy and registered.
Installed TrueCrypt so i could talk to all my thumb drives.
Installed TCTEMP to protect the paging and temp files. configured the paging andd printer spool locations. Pays to make the TrueCrypt temp container VERY BIG.
Installed Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird to cover the internet and email. Realized that all my blog links were gone - have to remember to back those up somehow. (NOTE to self - set up GMAIL IMAP to my email)
Installed Hamachi to let me get to the machine when i am away from home.

If there was only one thing about Thunderbird that I liked, and there is lots to like, it would be that i can have the many different emails in their own folder(s). I have two Gmail accounts WhatIDidWas and my personal one. plus the inevitable one at Comcast and some others depending on what website i am currently working on. That way i can tell who sent what where and try, futilely, to keep my internet stuph organized.

Brewed a new pot of coffee - Christmas had gotten me a stack of flavored coffees so it was walnut vanilla this time.

Back to the installation -

I have a fetish about all the stuff people put on my machine when i install something - got to keep that all clean so CCLEANER got installed.
To delete files i use Eraser - just because it is easier, two mouse clicks and the file is GONE! No need to clutter up the recycle bin. Eraser will keep the bin mucked out too, and from the context menu to boot. Easy huh?
To keep in touch with all my friends i installed Skype, Google Talk, AIM (which is in gmail now BTW), CamFrog, and last but not least MIRC. Got the drivers to my webcam installed.
Went to PortableApps.com and installed the full suite of things - gives me a complete office installation for whenever that is needed. I know, i could have installed them as apps, but this way all i need do is copy the directory over to a new thumb drive for friends. I also picked up 7ZIP, KeePass and Notepad++.

As an experiment i Copied the PageDefrag into the Program Files and installed it. This keeps the paging file and the registry hives in check. You really,really, don't want you paging file to get fragged - but in this case it will get generated each time(?) because it is in the TrueCrypt Temp Container - but we will see. (Viola it worked - highly recommended.)

This is the bare minimum - I'll be busy getting all the development stuff installed but that is another post....

DIY NFS 0- zfs

2007-10-26T10:41:00.000-07:00

I have this intense need to test the ZFS file system. It is the latest-n-greatest that has a lot of the things i want in a file syste. I really lilke the quote - it would take more energy to fully populate a ZFS file system that it would take to boil the oceans (parapharase). Sounds like it would do the trick for me.

My goal was to plug in a few usb and / or eSata drives and play with it.

I found that you could get a developer license CD sent to you so i signed up and recieved in on the mail last nigth. I have an old athalon box with 512k in it. Not looking for rocket science (or even speed) just something to play with in the home lab)

Stay tuned....

download tools

2007-08-12T06:09:00.000-07:00

AutoUnpack - a program that tests all the downloads with quickpar then unpacks them deleting the rar and par2 files.

My secure thumbdrive

2007-08-09T06:22:00.000-07:00

Thumb drives are getting bigger and cheaper - corporate laptops are restricted as to the software that you can have on them - so I thought why not create a little set of applications that run solely from the thumb drive. Of course I had to do it in a secure way - these things are getting so small it is just a matter of time until I lose one.

It was easier that I imagined - popped over to portableapps.com and downloaded their suite of apps. (very impressive)

Stopped by and downloaded truecrypt

downloaded the enigmail extension for Thunderbird Also picked up Gnu Privacy Guard

I first used Truecrypt to create a large encrypted file to contain all the software - I allocated 75% of a 1gig thumb - figuring on leaving enough room to use the unencrypted part for sneakerneting.

Just for giggles in addition to the normal strong password I created a key file on the root and named it secret key file - why not? this stuff is supposed to be fun.

Then I installed the portable apps into the encrypted partition

Added enigmail to thunbderbird (its a plug in)
and installed its necessary GnuPG to handle the encryption.

UBUNTU

2007-07-06T04:19:00.000-07:00

Have been playing around with UBUNTU and am totally surprised, they are getting close to making it usable by John and Suzy six pack, my alias for the people that want a computer to just work. Somebody that Microsoft has been targeting since the beginning of time.

Of course I have different needs, have a home server, play toy, and want to start doing local HTML and email. Coming from the Wintel world, its a huge paradigm shift, but i am getting there.

I installed the Ububtu Feisty Fawn server edition with LAMP on an old box, plugged it into the router and was (un)officially on the net from home. Now all I have to do is get the POSTFIX and all its friends to work closely together.

Went to Go Daddy and got the cheapest domain I could, whatididwas.info($1.99). Then over to ZoneEdit and signed up for dns hosting (free) and pointed to to the IP that Comcast gave me.

Comcast manages to assign dynamic IP's with a long subscription period, at least 48 hours, and the ip is based on the networks cards address - so for all intents I have a static IP address. So there is no need to go to all the trouble to set up dynamin DNS scripts on Ubuntu. If it ever does change - its easy enough to change @ ZoneEdit.

I installed WAMP5 on the Windows development box to test scripts. I am not a fan of VI and decided to use what i know, for the time being.

Ubuntu server is quick and fast but I am not a fan of the command line. So I installed the Gnome desktop. Then I went to the System-> Administration-> Services and unchecked the box next to Graphic Login Manager. Now the system boots to the command line, I type in startx to get to the Gnome desktop should I need to, and logout from it to get back to the command line and much better performance.

I am going to (re)install Webmin so I can remotely manage the box easily. I just have to stay away from letting it install anything - apt-get is the only was that I can safely expect to get something uninstalled after I have managed to really frell up its configuration and restart with a clean slate.

Stay tuned - film at 11 (on YouTube :-)

What I did was - started

2007-07-06T04:07:00.000-07:00

Well it's like this - I need a place to place notes to myself about things I did. Hence...

My goal for this blog is to remind myself about neat things I have found, tips & tricks, and little bitty code snippets.

If it helps others - all the better.

========
I have been doing electronic messaging since around 1981, first with a BBS and then in 1995 or so using TIN and the like on the internet.

I manage to pays (most) of the bills being a corporate developer - currently doing Documentum using Java. In the past it was VB, ASP, SQL and such - have been writing code on computers since around 1970, and PC's since 1979 or so (with 4k memory!!!)