The Cruft Of My Brain

No, I’m not talking about myself. I’ve embarked on an ambitious project that is sure to never get completed. On my way there I’m working on getting an RN-XV “cheap” WiFi adapter talking to an Arduino. I’ve had all kinds of issues getting it connected and it all comes down to spaces.

I’ll have more detail later about what I’m trying to do but, my immediate issue boiled down to my use of $ in my passphrase. The RN-XV and actually the RN-171 it’s based on has a nice feature of escaping spaces in SSIDs and passphrases with a $ by default. This took some digging to find out but once I did I was able to change it.

Connect to the RN-XV from your console. I used the Adafruit XBee adapter kit through a com port on my PC. Do $$$ to get into CMD mode. From there you can do a couple of things. For my purposes I needed to do the following:

<2.30> get opt replace
JoinTmr=1000
Replace=0×26
DeviceId=WiFly-EZX
Password=
Format=0×0
Signal=0
Average=5

You can see I’ve already changed it here but the default would be Replace=0×24 which is $ in ascii. To change it:

set opt replace 0×26

Then don’t forget to “save” or it’ll revert to the wrong character. You can also check the saved WLAN settings with “get wlan”.

Now that I have it successfully connecting, getting it to do something might be a little more of a challenge. I’m trying to work with this library but it’s proving to be a challenge. More here as I figure that out.

I made another attempt at using VT-d for my cameras by going with Zoneminder under Linux. This actually worked and seemed to work ok but I really dislike Zoneminder! I tried Motion and kMotion instead and the good news is it works…for longer. I’m still having problems with kernel crashes after a day or two. It’s encouraging but I’m not sure I want to fuss with it anymore. Maybe I’ll try Zoneminder one more time just in case the kernel wants to behave.

Yup…did it. In fact I’m typing this on the new iPad specific wordpress app and I love it!!! The keyboard in landscape mode is very nice and I can type very quickly. I think it might drive some bad habits with all of the autocorrection and not capitalizing first letters but I can get over that.

My first impression after unboxing was “this is a big iPhone”. After putting on some iPad specific apps, that made all the difference. The bigger format really is something special.

Now, anyone know if it would be possible to write a driver to allow a Bluetooth connection to the iogear bluetooth serial adapter? This would be great for data center work!!!

So, here’ my coming out for the other project I’ve been working on lately. Learning about Arduino’s. More later about why I’m doing this but for now…

I got a regular Duemilanove from Adafruit a couple of weeks ago. These things are so nice that they include all of the basic necessary components like the USB to RS232, the automatic voltage input switching, pin headers etc. I’ve been fiddling with that and learning some of how it works. I wanted to get a second for the purposes of having the two Arduino’s talk to each other. Naturally I decided to do this the harder way and assemble one on a breadboard.

This is actually pretty simple. The components you need are the Arduino flashed Atmega328p, a voltage regulator for getting your power source to a steady 5v, a clock source and a programming method. A couple of LED’s are good for power and the pin13 status. Based on several resources around the web including:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/34908673@N00/4042185019/sizes/l/
http://arduinofun.com/blog/2009/10/15/breadboard-arduino/

I’ve managed to get my Boarduino up and running without the use of a reset button and hopefully with a few extra rows available on my breadboard. I’m using an FTDI cable from Adafruit since I had to pick one up for the XBee modules I got. Yes, more to come on that as well. The FTDI cable includes the chip for USB to RS232 conversion but it does not pull out the DTS pin. Thankfully Arduino supports auto-reset using the RTS pin. I had to struggle a bit to figure out why it wasnt’ working but the fix was pretty simple. You need to enable “Set RTS on Close” on the serial port that’s tied to the cable. Check out the LadyAda article for more details:

http://www.ladyada.net/make/boarduino/use.html

From Arduino projects

From Arduino projects

From Arduino projects

Seems they don’t play well together. Sure, basic mouse functions work, including the scroll wheel. All of the extra buttons don’t seem to work at all though. I’ve been keeping an eye out for drivers and nothing yet. Also, I have yet to find anyone else crying about this. It seems strange to me that I’d be the only one with a nice Microsoft gaming mouse on OS X.

Well, I guess I better get a post in for the month of November. Ugh, it’s been a long month. Anyway, fiddling with free podcasting tools and methods and I discovered some updates in Snow Leopard that are pretty cool.

I little while ago on Leopard I found out that with iLife 09 you could use GarageBand to record a voice chat using Bonjour in iChat. That’s cool but kind of limited. I’m not certain but I think this was not extended to non-Bonjour voice chat’s. That’s not the case with Snow Leopard. Not only can you record your Jabber and GTalk sessions but it’s smart enough to create the right number of tracks if you have a group chat going on with multiple users. And yes, it’ll adjust the title picture track based on the users avatar from GTalk for whoever’s talking.

I’m a little shocked that it works as well as it does.

One thing I haven’t been able to figure out is how to start recording a voice chat and then add in additional local mic’s. It doesn’t seem to be possible so all recording must be done with the group voice chat participants. And I haven’t tried this but I’m guessing that adding users to the group voice chat will not start new tracks in GarageBand. That would be slick if it did.

As a fan of flavorful beer I often find myself facing stares of revulsion when I’m enjoying a nice glass of Guinness. What few people realize is that “dark” isn’t supposed to mean harsh, bitter or high in alcohol content. Found this great article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/28/dining/reviews/28wine.html

All you doubters should read it! You know who you are!

Ever since I bought into Unraid and started adding hard drives I’ve been thinking about what the perfect case would be. I’m using the NORCO RPC-450 4U Rackmount Server Case which has the benefit of being pretty inexpensive but only holding 10 drives without adding some drive cages.

Norco also has the much more expensive
NORCO RPC-4020 4U Rackmount Server Case
but this has some cooling problems because of the orientation of the HDD SATA plug circuit boards.

Anyway, there are various other options but they are all too expensive or poorly designed. Paying a premium for drive carriers for something that really should almost never be removed seems absurd to me. I had thought about placing drives vertically so you could run the cooling down the length of them and the cabling would easily stay out of the way. If it’s on rails it would be a simple thing to slide it out to get to the top for drive removal. And then via TUAW comes the Backblaze Pod. Clouds parted, angels sang. It was like someone was reading my mind! And they actually put the details up! 45 hard drives in 4U…wow! Cut one row out, make it more shallow and you have the perfect Unraid setup.

The only problem is that the SATA multipliers are a custom design. Well, so is the case but that could be built. The SATA multipliers are key to making this work and they would have to be sourced from somewhere.

Zoneminder, argh. I’m not sure how much time I’ve put into getting Zoneminder to work but it’s a lot. There’s just something about it that confounds me, whether it’s because of the underlying OS or hardware problems…Zoneminder seems to be the typical open source linux app. Very capable, ugly as sin and exceedingly difficult to get working right, unless you are the geek “they” designed it for.

So, I’ve decided to punt. At some point getting something done becomes more important than playing and learning. I bought my PV149 card from BlueCherry some time ago and I check back in with them from time to time. They’ve long had a reference to Blue Iris as a Windows alternative. I’m trying it out and so far it couldn’t be easier to use. I’m a little concerned that it doesn’t handle load as well and is banging on the server pretty hard, but it seems to be getting by ok.

I’ll report back once I’ve played with the motion detection and the alerting system.

Ok, so that ZoneMinder install I was hoping to do in the last post…yeah….not happening.

I’ve run into this before but I’ve decided it’s just not worth the trouble of trying to fix it. For some reason when you install the PV149 video capture card in older machines it likes to have problems with IRQs. I’ve tried this a couple of times and once before I got it to work after a lot of jockeying of IRQs in the bios and the OS. It sucks and it’s just not worth it.

The PV149 will be going in a slightly more modern and definitely more mainstream desktop motherboard. I hope I don’t have the same problem with that.

I’ve decided to repurpose the ML380 G2 for my new Trixbox. Should be enough horsepower and it’s already installed cleanly. Just need to make sure I can still apply the HPASM drivers so the fans will chill. Yar!