Multiple IMs+IRC setup

Posted by on April 20, 2011 No comments

When talking about IRC/IM a lot of people ask me what I have exactly set up, so finally I visualized this. Here it is, my crazy setup to connect to different IRC servers and jabber, msn, icq and facebook messenger, using only one program from my computers; or, for the number of irc networks from my phone or any other standard irc client. There are multiple reasons for all this:

  1. For Quassel: More nice than what can be achieved over only standard irc protocol with znc: Nice timestamps, unlimited backlog can be requested from the server, multiple irc servers, etc.
  2. Multi-Client – sometimes you walk around your house with the notebook, or you want to read your backlog from anywhere
  3. For bitlbee: I don’t like how the standard jabber multi-client mode works, it never does what it should do because it is also dependent on the client on the other side, so this is nicely abstracted over IRC
  4. Jabber transports: Only to achieve multi-clients again in the end, because these other protocols don’t support it (though I must admit that I could have used facebook directly as a second account for bitlbee,.. I might just do that later)

Linux Runtime Power Management

Posted by on April 3, 2011 No comments

For more recent kernels you can enable the runtime power management for PCI and other devices, powertop shows some “tunables”, but how you can automatically activate them seemed unknown. You can find it in your kernel source dir in Documentation/power/runtime_pm.txt — but which I didn’t find on first look somehow (search for /sys and you will find it).
So I read the powertop source and I could figure it out (funny that I was too dumb to read the documentation but could figure it out by reading the source O.o):

for i in `find /sys/devices -path "*/power/control"` ; do echo auto > $i ; done;
on – power always on
auto – do runtime power management if possible

Decent Notebooks nowadays?

Posted by on January 18, 2011 No comments

Now something non-informative, but I have to blog about this (maybe somebody even reads and can help O.o).

Currently there is not any Notebook that can fulfill my needs, it seems all the companies don’t see what the market demands, or I am very special (but I have talked to others; for example, I don’t know a single person really liking the extreme wide (16:9) screens, except if they are something like 20″)

What I would need:

  • 13″ 4:3 or 16:10 screen – not that 16:9 crap, I want to be able to view my PDFs decently! I am not even asking for some especially high resolution..
  • non-glossy screen (why would anyone really want this)
  • Pointing Stick Mouse
  • Up-to-date / fast enough CPU (some i5/i7, a 1,4ghz Core 2 would be too slow)
  • Battery life >7hrs but not making it too bulky
  • Decently sturdy enough
  • It doesn’t need to have any optical drive, nor any fancy ports, I am not asking for that much, do I?

What comes close but looses in some point:

  • Dell E4300 – Slice battery is too bulky and there are no bay-battery offerings – Bay batteries, Dell?
  • Thinkpad X301 – too slow CPU, if this had a sucessor it would probably be what I search for – if it lasts long enough with a bay battery
  • Thinkpad X201 – bigger screen anyone?

If anyone can help, I would love to hear from you!

Freeduino etching at home?

Posted by on December 23, 2010 1 comment

Limitations for etching at home:

  • 2 layers only
  • Not every through-hole part you solder can be used for contacting the two sides of the PCB!

After looking for a while I didn’t found a complete Freeduino Design ready for etching at home, due to the limitations above, so I started at the point of the Freeduino for 1206 SMD parts (still easy to solder, and you have to drill less holes). I also modified it to have an external ftdi adapter, so you can do more freeduinos for less cost.
This FTDI Adapter also has the option to either provide CTS for other uses of it, or 3.3V for the Arduino.

Currently I still have problems using my etching method shown here; with less high quality pcb materials having small scratches, a not-so-good laser printout, or aligning the layers. So I might post an updated design with thicker wires and bigger vias.

All through-hole parts should be soldered at the bottom side, except some of the IC / IC socket pins for the atmega need soldering at the top – check the board layout at that part for soldering!

See the PCB and Schematic for the two boards, attached are all eagle design files:


Freeduino_at_home.zip

CC1111 Flasher (e.g. for TI Chronos Wireless Stick)

Posted by on December 15, 2010 4 comments

A while ago I patched the opensource ccflasher sourcecode to support the cc1111/1110 (it didn’t do before, for me). The ccflasher is an AVR (attiny2313) based programmer which can be used to flash some of the 8051-based TI/Chipcon RF chips, for example, the Wireless USB Stick that comes with TI’s eZ430-Chronos kit.
Upon interest I post about it here…

But first: Much thanks to Peter Kuhar, the original author, doing all the real work!

Here is the patch for the current svn (revision 15) in a zip together with the completely changed files. But I contacted the author so he can also put it on svn after a review:
cc_flasher_cc1111patch.zip

Also see the eagle design files (schematic and board layout):
ccflasher_eagle_schem_and_board.zip

Pictures of Schematic and Board layout and assembled ccflasher with Chronos wireless accesspoint: Read more »

AVR atmega8 breadboard “quick-programmer”

Posted by on December 13, 2010 No comments

10-pin programmer adapter for breadboard, atmega8, atmega48, 88, etc. – and there is still room to add a 6-pin programmer socket aside


Thanks to my brother for soldering most of it!

MSP430 Chronos more advanced altitude calibration

Posted by on December 6, 2010 No comments

By altering the update_pressure_table function in driver/vti_ps.c I made a kind of multi point calibration. I changed how the p_fact coefficient is applied to the calibration values – originally it was applied to every point in the lookup table p[] the same – resulting in a offset-only calibration.
Now the coefficient is applied the most to the nearest element in the calibration table p[].

This can lead to temporary worse performance around the spot you were calibrating, but will “evolve” to the better over time by calibrating it multiple times – maybe the calibration data should be saved to flash, so it won’t become lost when resetting or re-programming the Chronos.

Anyway this is nothing like a real advanced calibration but works better than the original one for me.

I wrote this in summer when I went hiking across different mountains in germany and austria, and didn’t see the original calibration working that good. But as I don’t travel over large altitude differences at the moment I can’t thoroughly test and develop this algorithm further.

This was a change to the OpenChronos firmware by poelzi but should also work for the original Chronos firmware.

Only the non-fixed-point part of OpenChronos was updated and is shown here in its whole form:
Read more »

[Old:] Nintendo DS Lite Display “Scanlines”

Posted by on December 2, 2010 1 comment

If you can sometimes see scanlines on either display when moving the Nintendo DS or DS Lite around try adjusting “VR1″ and “VR2″ which can be found under the battery cover where the left one is VR1 and the right one is VR2. You need a quite small Phillips/crosshead screwdriver. Don’t rotate them around for fun, it could maybe damage the displays of your DS when rotated to the extremes.

So, to get your display adjusted, open up the cover, turn your DS on and start the program/game where you can see the scanlines most easily. Then begin to carefully adjust VR1 or VR2 and look at the display, until you find the setup which don’t shows anymore scanlines (waving the DS around a little bit helps sometimes to see it better).
When you have just repaired a DS / exchanged displays between damaged DS’s, then you should also look for these VR’s and do the best for the displays – when setup to the sweet spot this does possibly also increase the lifetime of the displays (deadpixel probability, etc.).

The picture shows which variable resistors I’m talking about: Read more »

[Old:] Thinkpad X61s Asymmetric or Symmetric Dual-Channel

Posted by on December 2, 2010 No comments

I made a simple test with Memtest86+ how much asymmetric and symmetric dual channel modes differ in transfer speed: Read more »

Hello world!

Posted by on December 2, 2010 No comments

After some time handling my own website (still online here) and struggling against writing a blog, I can’t hold out any longer now. I really thought a while about this – a wiki, a blog, or enhancing my handwritten cms/blog software? – A wiki isn’t all that appropriate, and otherwise, we already have one hosted here on ghostdub. And instead of reviving my own blog software and getting headaches over a commenting system and spam filters, I thought I better not re-invent the wheel this time, and take what the nice wordpress developers made for the world :-)

I plan to at least write my own design for this site, though just now I don’t have the time for it, being busy with a lot of other things – some about which I might post here soon!

First I will re-post all noteworthy content from my old webpage, and later there will be some new stuff.

So far that would be Home PCB etching, Power LEDs, old 486 notebooks, and maybe some other things….