Netgear Stora and Time Machine Setup
Having just got a Netgear Stora I wanted to use it as my time machine backup (I have an old ibook G4 and 10.5 so some of this may or may not work for 10.6 – i haven’t tried it!). It turns out this isn’t a simple operation (despite ease of use supposedly being a big selling feature of the Stora…). Here are the steps I eventually worked my way through to get this working:
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Open Workbench Logic Sniffer First Impressions
A while ago I spotted the Open Workbench Logic Sniffer on Hackaday. A logic sniffer . analyser is a useful tool have around the place and at ~$50 with some flying leads to make it up to the free shipping threshold. Seeing as it arrived the other day I thought I would share my first impressions of it…
Microchip Development Kit & Programmer for Sale! (SOLD)
As I no longer have any need for them I dug out my EasydsPIC4 and Microchip ICD2 (In Circuit Debugger) the other day and they have made their way to ebay. You can get the EasydsPIC4 development board/kit here SOLD and the Microchip In Circuit Debugger (ICD) 2 here SOLD. More info after the break…
Clock Faces
After spending a bit of time playing with Conky I wondered if there was a Windows option. Turns out there is – it is called Samurize and it comes with a functional GUI editor to make all your system monitors very easily. At the moment I have quite a fascination with the clock style meters. A picture of my configuration is below and you can get the clock meter configuration from here.
The bottom left circles show my hard disk usage (top circles) and my network rx/tx. The ones above that show CPU0 and CPU1 and also RAM usage.
The big one in the middle is a clock that ticks round with seconds, minutes, hours, day, month working from the outside in.
It’s quite a nice funky addition to my desktop. I like it!
Google Powermeter
A post on hackaday alerted me to google power meter and them releasing their new powermeter API. This looks pretty cool- especially for my energy monitoring project!
Taking a look at the more detailed information it looks like Google have some pretty interesting requirements for devices:
- Have to be able to do HTTPS (so need SSL)
- Have to have a webserver on the device (for configuration etc)
SSL is going to be the biggest challenge if we choose to go down this route. Once we have SSL the rest should be pretty easy. The concern with the SSL is the size of the stack and whether one can be implemented and fitted on an XMOS core.
Thankfully Google provide some libraries for the power meter implementation of their API which might go a long way to providing an initial solution – again this is going to need to be ported to whichever TCP/IP stack is used and what SSL stack is used. The current C implementation is specifically tailored for Microchip PIC libraries… so to work I guess!!
Energy Monitor – part 2
So, now I hopefully(!) have my cable which will give me access to the UART RX of the CC128 energy monitor. Time to try it out and begin processing some data with it!
Firstly, I go to the XMOS website and get the UART code and play around with it to create the UART code I want (RX only at the moment), compile it and give it a run.
But it’s never that simple! All I get are null characters. Odd I think – so I recheck the wiring, recheck the code. All seems to be ok.
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Current Cost ‘Envi’ CC128 Teardown
The “Thats the warranty gone…” aka as a ‘teardown’ post!
With the UART TX not working properly I was forced to open it up… so here is a bit of analysis and some photos of what is inside for the curious!
Energy Monitor – Part 1
My energy monitor arrived today! It’s working well – I was slightly worried about how good the reception would be for the transmitter, but I am pleasantly surprised that even with the receiver 3 floors above the transmitter it seems to register a good signal.
But that’s boring – time to start hacking!
So, first thing I need is the interface cable. The back of the unit has a handy RJ45 connector that has serial in it (see my initial energy monitoring post). This needs connecting to my XC-3 kit so that I can begin to get the data out of it. So time to get the soldering iron out!
Energy Monitoring
Was at a friends today and he showed me an energy monitor that he had bought and was using to monitor his electricity supply. I was like “hmm… this could be something fun to attach to an XCore and get some graphs out of”.
My thought is to use my XC-3 (or maybe get an XC-2) to connect to an energy monitor receiver – or hack/make a receiver and then push the data somewhere useful via Ethernet. In fact I could combine it with my network monitor, ditch the screen and have it push the all the different types of data out into some nice pretty graphs. Anyway, enough brain dump – onto the hardware!
Lasers and Submarines
Over the last few weeks I have come across some nice XMOS based projects:
1) Laser Cutter
Not massively complex in terms of software – but a pretty cool outcome. UART in – granite engravings out! Nice… Maybe an ethernet interface with a web client to upload images into it could come next… laser engraver source code here
The main purpose of the project it’s to create an autonomus vehicle to explore lakes and reefs. Aquatic Bot Explorer (ABE) its based on a ROV (Remotely Operated underwater Vehicles ) and AUV (Autonomus Underwater Vehicles ) class robots.
This bot it’s powered by an XK-1 processor by XMOS, several boards for sensing: pressure, temperature, depth, etc. Motor control, demux, ADC, etc. are developed.
Looks pretty cool… can’t wait to see what it turns up from the depths!
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