So I looked at the weather forecast this morning which promised sunshine later in the day. This made me happy, so I charged up all the pure gliders and hoiked myself off to the field. 2 hours later, had managed to find zero sun, zero thermals, and generally a pretty dismal day for flying. I had the 3.7 meter all ready to zoom, but no decent air to zoom it into. *sigh*.

So my current DSL provider sucks seriously. I found another DSL2+ provider that covers my address (yay). Started the process to change over, accepted to swallow the contract break fee, signed up with new provider, and then found the fine print about "maybe take up to 10 days to connect service". business days. No broadband internet for 10 days. !*&^!*&^*&! Worse, it's actually still worth to it to avoid the truly amazing Telstra suckitude.

So the boy normally sleeps for 2 hours in the middle of the day. This led to me planning to put the boy down, which would give me two hours to put together the new electronics boards that arrived yesterday. After 40 minutes of the boy wailing, I gave up and picked him up again. Trying on and off for another couple of hours just led to my frayed nerves and a very annoyed boy. And zero progress on anything else.

So the wife arrived back home and took all the children off my hands for a while so I could do the planned soldering. I break out the magnifying lens and start assembling parts. And then find that the circuit I designed to use the AD8656 rail-to-rail op-amp wouldn't go together very well today because the parts that digikey shipped were actually the AD8565. Spot the difference. *sigh*. Even more depressingly it looks like my mistake rather than theirs.

Fail. I haz it.

http://www.digispeaker.com/ looks like an interesting project. digital audio everywhere, internet connected amplifier.

So now I have 3 working 1-wire temp sensors, two of them at the end of 30+ meter cable runs.

See

The wavy bit on the green line is the air conditioner oscillating between the set points. The red line is the temperature of the cupboard that houses the file server.

So now I just need to finish adding the other sensors, and start connecting the results to the air-con dampers...

Ok, I'm very worried now. I think I've just incurred a huge karma debt...

So I finally upgraded the kernel for the NGW100 board I have. And it worked without need to break out the JTAG programmer. Spooky.

And then I logged in and did 'modprobe i2c-gpio; modprobe i2c-dev'. Which just worked. Really spooky.

So I write a tiny program to send and I2C message on the bus. Which compiled using the AVR32 toolchain without any breakage or mysterious messages of complaint from the depths of gcc. And it generated a binary !!!! I'm getting pretty freaked out here.

So I plugged my new expansion board I'd soldered up into the NGW100. And it didn't catch fire!!?!!?!!

So I run my program. Words fail me.

/tmp # ./i2c
opened device i2c-0
0x00000018

That's data! The first time I ran it, it give me data! Actually real data! The actual status register from the DS2482 chip! And it works every time I run it!

I need to go have a lie down, and morn the disaster that must surely be coming my way.

So I built a 1-wire master board for the NGW100.

Which has an I2C interface.

Which means that the kernel on the NGW100 needs to be upgraded to get the new i2c drivers that can handle it.

Which means I need to compile a new kernel for it.

Which means I need an AVR32 tool chain.

Which there aren't convenient packages for F9, so I need to compile them.

And then the kernel image is part of the root jffs2 image for the NGW100, so I need the root environment as well.

Which means compiling all components such as busybox et al.

Which is why I'm watching the best part of a gigabyte of source code compile, all so I can upgrade the 2 megabyte kernel, so I can run a 12 line program, which will produce 2 bytes of output (current temperature).

Yay.

The only bright spot in this is that compiles go amazingly fast on modern quad-core machines.

This is slowly, but steadily driving me insane. I just want a touch screen that I can wall mount that will drive the home automation system. And I don't want to pay $6000 for it. You wouldn't think it was that hard to do!?

So far too many hours later I'm wondering if building a custom 4 layer PCB replete with 40Mhz signals would really be such a bad thing...

So I bought a new 1 terabyte drive yesterday (for less than $250). And this morning, I added it to the study computer without even a reboot. Screw in drive, plug in SATA power, plug in SATA cable. Linux immediately notices a new drive and brings it on-line. No power off, no reboot, no nuttin'.

No fuss, just another 1 TB of storage. Partion, mkfs, all done.

Oh, and did I mention you can get a 24-bit, 200KHz, 4-channel ADC for under $8. I mean, wtf!? It wasn't that many years ago that you couldn't even get a 24-bit ADC, now it's the low end of the market. I'm mildly amusing that the most expensive item in a sensitive microphone array is the PCB holding the parts together.

So I have a few "GrandTec IP Camera III + night vision" IP cameras. They're (very) cheap, support 100Meg ethernet, have IR LEDs for night view, and support 640x480 at 30fps.

Sounds nice, right. Unfortunately, the software running on them is complete rubbish. The MJPEG video stream off them has about 1% of the frames corrupted (as in JPEG fails to decode with wild errors), and about 1% of the frames that do decode have significant artifacts (randomly, about 1/3 rd of the image is inverted).

Now, I've got motion detect software that compensates for all these (fairly easy to do), but it's still annoying. So I pulled apart the firmware see what it was inside. (These are mostly notes for myself).

The firmware I have is 00062705_FW_V108.bin which is 2 concatenated zip files with a 12 byte header.

$ dd if=00062705_FW_V108.bin bs=1 skip=12 count=528502 of=kernel.zip
$ dd if=00062705_FW_V108.bin bs=1 skip=528514  of=fs.zip

Unzipping the kernel gives a uClinux 2.4.20 kernel (linux.bin) compiled for an ARM 7 core, and unzipping the filesystem gives a romfs that has a bunch of web pages, a few random binaries, and then a big one called 'bin/httpd_ipcam'. Despite the name, it does basically everything, including FTP upload, writing to flash, NTP, etc etc etc.

It's a BFLT executable, but you can get the binary by the fairly normal:

$ dd if=httpd_ipcam bs=64 skip=1 | gunzip > ../../httpd_ipcam

and then strings is your friend.

The actual video camera looks like a Philips something; It appears to use a rack pcw driver. There's actually a ov51x driver also compiled in, but the httpd mentions Philips, so I suspect that's the one.

The kernel looks like it's come from a dev kit of some sort, as it has many, many things compiled into it (including NBD and PPP; very useful in a web cam! :)

The actual camera appear to spit out a JPEG compressed image over USB. Possibly even a YUV420 compressed image.


That's as far as I'd gotten for now. Dinner time.

Making bavarian cream. Requires making a stirred custard.

Do 10 minutes of stirring this damned thing. And then it splits.

&*^*(&^*(&!!!! &(*&(!!!!

I blush to confess that Katie copped some harsh words because she misbehaved at the wrong time..

So start over again. Eggs, sugar, boil milk + vanilla, add milk to eggs, transfer to saucepan. Lots of slow tedious stirring.

And then... split!!!

f**k!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

So I google away and find out that I need to heat it to more than 70 celsius, but MUST be less than 77 celcius.

And now I can't find my nice IR thermometer.

I'm just cursed today.

I bought an SPA3102 (little VoIP box) thinking it would be good to setup CallWeaver and do some VoIP routing.

Well, after something like 9 hours of bashing away at the problem, I can now dial zero to get the PSTN line and make a call.

I mean, !!!!?*&^!*^!!?????.

Configuring Asterisk is a genuine nightmare, made so much easier by the total lack of any meaningful logging, and the genuinely awful configuration files. Configuring the SPA was helped by the terrible documentation, the way it took hours to even find the real manuals, and the mostly useless junk the manuals are filled with.

*sigh*.

Well, after all that, I do finally have the home phone talking to callweaver, and it's doing VoIP on the outbound path (the inbound path skips the VoIP bit at the moment).

Now I just need someone to talk to that accepts VoIP. :)