I visited Denmark in summer. This is normal grounded mains outlet I saw there. It looks just like a smiling face.
Archive for August, 2011
Smiling electrical outlet
Monday, August 15th, 2011PC 30 years old today
Friday, August 12th, 2011August 12 marks the 30th anniversary of the IBM Personal Computer. IBM released it’s first PC August 12 1981. One of the designers of PC Mark Dean blog that IBM leads the way in the post PC era. Note that IBM decided to leave the personal computer business in 2005, selling our PC division to Lenovo.
Weird Voltages in a PoE Camera System
Friday, August 12th, 2011It seems that there is a trend to convert video systems over from an old, all-analog system to a modern, IP-based system with cameras powered over the Ethernet line using PoE (Power over Ethernet).
Weird AC Voltages in a PoE Camera System post at Control Geek Blog talks about an interesting PoE (Power over Ethernet) issue I found with some IP cameras and some switches.
Weird AC Voltages in a PoE Camera System–Followup gives some more details and analysis of the problem. And if you are really interested in the details check also Interesting PoE problem discussion at The Show Control Mailing List.
Arduino UNO review
Monday, August 8th, 2011I have participated in Free Product Road Testing program by Farnell. Farnell indentified my blog to road test some of their products. I was willing to participate, because what’s more fun than free high tech products to test. The first product i got was Arduino UNO.
Arduino Uno is a a microcontroller board based on the ATmega328. It has 14 digital input/output pins (of which 6 can be used as PWM outputs), 6 analog inputs, a 16 MHz crystal oscillator, a USB connection, a power jack, an ICSP header, and a reset button. Something I am already used to see on Arduino boards. And looks what I expect from Arduino board.
The Uno is the latest in a series of USB Arduino boards, and the reference model for the Arduino platform. The Uno differs from all preceding Arduino boards with USB connection in that it does not use the FTDI USB-to-serial driver chip (like Arduino Dueminanove board I already own).
An ATmega8U2 on the board channels serial communication from ATmega328 main CPU UART (digital pins 0 and 1) over USB and appears as a virtual com port to software on the computer. Arduino Uno USB connection is designed operate in exactly the same way as a Duemilanove and maintain perfect backward compatibility with the previous model. The new Arduino Uno: what are the implications? article tells that having ATmega8U2 on the board for USB connection also means the Uno can do new things that are a problem for previous Arduino boards.
Having a dedicated ATmega8U2 to take care of the connection allows the Arduino to provide both traditional USB-serial and HID support on the same port, depending on the firmware running in the 8U2. Interesting side-note: Tiny ATmega8U2 used for the Uno USB connection is pretty much the same as the MCU used on the very first Arduino, but with hardware USB support baked in. The ATmega8U2 chip sits on the board next to he USB connector.
I only played with traditional USB-serial connection on my tests. The ‘8U2 firmware is designed to use the standard USB COM drivers, and no external driver should be needed. So in theory using should be easy. I was waiting for a painless installation. However, on Windows, things too often just don’t work “plug&play”. The problem lies in fact that Arduino Uno is being issued its own USB vendor ID, and Windows (Vista in my case) does not know about it. To make the board to work correctly on Windows the installation of ArduinoUNO.inf file from open-source Arduino environment driver directory is needed. There are some manual installation tricks that needs to be done to get things to work, but fortunately Getting Started w/ Arduino on Windows document gives the needed instructions. I was expecting to get easier installation than with previous board, but this “no driver needed” driver installation process is actually somewhat harder than driver installation for older Arduino boards. Anyway when it is once done things run smoothly.
The Arduino Uno can be powered via the USB connection or with an external power supply. I used USB power on my first tests. The Arduino Uno has a resettable polyfuse that protects your computer’s USB ports from shorts and overcurrent (mistakes can happen when you prototype and play with electronics ideas). That’s a good idea although most computers provide their own internal protection (I think USB specs ask for that). In any case the on-board fuse provides an extra layer of protection.
After some testing with Arduino environment version 2.2 I got things to work. I needed to select right serial port and right board type.
First test was to upload StandardFirmata to the board and control the Arduino UNO board with toolduino.
My opinion overall is that the Uno is a very nice board. It maintains backward compatibility while adding the potential for interesting new functionality. This is a great board for prototyping and all kinds of microcontroller hacks.
If you want to buy Arduino UNO you can get it from Farnell. Their list price seems to be 24,35 € without taxes.
Seen at Assembly 2011
Sunday, August 7th, 2011The stand for Ubuntu Linux also had some Meego people showing that Meego is still going wrong. I got my hands on the Nokia N9 prototype version (I did not get permission to take picture of it). There was also Intel Meego tablet reference platform shown on the stand. The MeeGo people from Nokia were not allowed to tell any interesting details of their MeeGo plans…
I visited the Assembly TV premises to catch up what they are doing this year and meeting the friends there. This year the broadcasting system was almost completely in HDTV format, including the cameras for main broadcast (seminars still used standard definition video). HDTV video editing and playback was done mainly using Apple computers (proven to work in this application better than PC based systems). Technology to transfer video between devices was mainly HD-SDI, DVI (over fiber optics) and Ethernet. Audio connections used RockNet technology. RockNet real-time, low latency audio distribution network using CAT5 cable. RockNet can link up to 99 devices into a single network comprising 160 audio channels. The network is self-healing for single connection failures.
Helsinki Hacklab had an interesting stand with all kinds of robots and electronics hacks. At the same stand there were also Tampere hackerspace 5w and Hacklab Turku. It is good to see that there are forming groups of people who hack things together. This is one robot on the stand. It is based on RC servos connected with servo card and Python program running on PC.
metku.net stand had also this year some interesting hardware hacks shows. This is one interesting case for a PC.
I met Kristoffer Lawson at Assembly. He told about his new on-line banking project Holvi. Holvi in essence is a new way to do online banking. With Holvi, small groups are able to tag each payment in certain ways so that a clear overall picture is formed and thus it helps these groups to better understand how their money is spent and received. This should pretty much makes bookkeeping redundant for smaller organizations and groups. Holvi is a great example of a team sticking to their guns and building upon their core expertise. There is much of Scred in there, but the shift in approach.
The main demo competition and 4kilobytes intro competitions were again high quality. You can find the entries at Assembly Archive. Some coders are really making wonders with their code.
Assembly TV 2011 is broadcasting
Thursday, August 4th, 2011Assembly TV has just started the Internet broadcasting from Assembly Summer 2011 Computer Festival. Expect to see lots of interesting material. Again this year they have some interesting ARTtech seminars worth to watch. And I expect the computer demo competitions to be high quality this year.
This year the Assembly TV people have made a nice web page report on their current AV setup on their blog so I might not need to make my own behind the scenes report like I did two years ago.
Technique: Carbon Fiber Primer
Tuesday, August 2nd, 2011It seems as though nearly everything “high performance” these days boasts some amount of carbon fiber in its construction. Originally used in aerospace, carbon fiber has moved into the mainstream.
Technique: Carbon Fiber Primer article from MAKE Magazine discusses some of the basics of carbon fiber construction and explains how to create a carbon fiber iPod case. Could carbon fibers to be useful construction material for the box for your next electronics project? Looks promising.
