BPI inside

Tag: Personal

  • Upcoming project: LED Cube 8x8x8

    As already hinted last time my next electronics project will be a monochrome 8x8x8 LED Cube.

    I chose this from a long list of possible interesting projects because its construction involves many of the areas in which I intended to work on something at some time.

    • Raspberry Pi programming
    • enhancing my basic electronics and soldering skills
    • beef up my electronics prototyping set
    • interfacing an uC/SBC with external hardware/components
    • creating an electronic circuit without step-by-step instructions
    • understanding and using an IC
    • designing and creating a PCB, maybe even etching it myself

    LED cubes in particular striked my attention a few years ago but at that time Ialways repelled by the sheer complexity and number of components in most of the LED cube building instructions. But when I saw some another building plan for a LED cube I realized that I could use my Raspberry Pi to create a much simpler control circuit. And so the decision was set.

    My plan for the next steps is to build a prototype (3x3x3) to test my whole concept, get comfortable with all the stuff and then scale it to 8x8x8. At first I’ll set up everything on breadboard and maybe, if I’m sure that everything is finished on the hardware-side, make a permanent and smaller control PCB version. Probably as a Raspberry Pi shield.

    The progress of this project will of course be documented on this blog.

  • Teaser

  • Building Adafruits Ice Tube Clock

    As I’ve already hinted on in the past weeks I’ve tackled and completed one of my planned mini-projects.

    I assembled the Ice Tube Clock from Adafruit Industries:

    From Building Ice Tube Clock

    This kit has been on my list for some time now, I stumbled over it on the internet two or three years ago and since that time I regularly checked if it was still available. After I finished my university degree the time was due and I ordered it the instant when there was one available at one of the distributors. When it arrived a few weeks later I prepared my soldering stuff and equipment and built it during two nights.

    As my last soldering has been already quite some while I decided to practice a bit with the Pi Cobbler which also arrived with the same order.

    From Building Ice Tube Clock

    When I was comfortable with soldering again it was time to unpack the parts of the clock and check if everything was complete according to the parts list.

    From Building Ice Tube Clock

    The soldering and building of the clock was pretty straightforward and easy. I carefully read the build instructions and had no trouble with the bending, soldering and checking the intermediate results. So here are just a few impressions from the build process. I also tried the suggestion to cut the wires of the VFD tube in different lengths, every wire a bit shorter than the preceeding one, before trying to thread them into the connector PCB. I think that this really helped a lot and made it much easier to finish.

    From Building Ice Tube Clock

    The last final steps could be completed similar to the previous ones. I only had some slight difficulties with the casing because I initially did not recognize the seperate page for the enclosure-assembling on the webpage but puzzled around a bit and eventually built it correctly without instructions. Manuals are for wimps 😉

    From Building Ice Tube Clock

    Setting the time and date finished off this neat project. Nice 🙂

    A few mini-statistics:

    • 6h effort in two nights
    • 43 parts assembled
    • 1.5m solder needed
    • 1 solder-accident (although easy to fix)

    Some possible improvements are still possible. Although I ordered the kit from a distributor in Italy it still contained only an american 9VDC power adapter. In my opinion shippings within Europe could already contain a proper european power adapter to spare the need for a US/EUR converter. Furthermore the assembly instructions on the webpage do not reflect the process 100% accurately but seems a slight bit outdated. For example there has been a change on the layout of the PCB as the capacitors C5 and C6 have a slightly different placement on the board than on the images in the solder instructions. Also the screws and nuts are not made of metal but of black nylon.

    In the end I enjoyed this mini-project very much. It’s comparable to the experience I had some time ago during finishing my Master thesis, where I had to code some stuff and had the feeling that I missed real deep code-writing at work. I also missed tinkering with stuff and crafting small things. Since finishing the clock I did also some mods for my mother. Enhancing an electronic candle which ran on a single CR 2032 for ~5 days to use two AA’s instead, running now the second week on the first cheap pair of batteries and still pretty bright.

    Currently I’m already planning my next electronics project. This time I will not take a kit which can be assembled by following instructions. Instead it will be something where I will have to deal with electronics, ICs and integration with my Raspberry Pi. And it will be not something which is build after instructions but will be designed by myself.

    But more on that in a later post…

  • Decision on photo hosting platform

    I’ve just finished one of my postponed small projects and when I began preparing the posting of the results here I hit the issue that I’m not sure how to share photos into this blog.

    In the past my solution was to upload all my photos I wanted to share to Flickr and cross-link the images in this blog. But the times have changed and I’m nowadays much more integrated with Google’s services which also includes a photo hosting service. Furthermore also Flickr has changed its policies on photo reuse so that reusing images from that platform is not as easy anymore as it had been in the past. But that’s also not really much easier with Google Photos as it involves some non-intuitive access to the images for sharing. But it would greatly ease up the uploading and processing stage for images and also allow much easier download of the collections in case I wanted to transfer it again to another platform.

    Another point to consider is that up until now I have (more or less) successfully been able to seperate this "anonymous" blog from my real names and more personal social media interactions. Looking up my real name wouldn’t reveal contents from this blog and vice versa. Using images from Google’s platform would require to include a link back to my Google+ profile, making it easier for others (advertisers, stalkers, search engines?) to connect this blog to my real world presence. I’m not really sure if I’m ready to take this dent in the freedom of this blog or add the influence of the information contained in this blog to my professional life. But that’s another issue I’ve been tinkering for some time already…

    Well, for now I think there is no clear conclusion for me yet. I’ll think a bit more on that and also the privacy-issue mentioned above. Maybe I’ll post an update for the project in the meantime using Flickr even if I’m undecided but no guarantees on that.

  • Achievement Unlocked: Leisure Time

    YES.

    Last Thursday I took the final step in my current education and science activities and finished the Masters’ degree exam. This was the goal I’ve been working towards for the previous two years. Especially the last six months have been pretty tight on time as I have been writing my diploma thesis and preparing for the additional two complementary subject exams which are part of the degree exam.

    Well, as the topic already gave away, I have succeeded and passed the exam. With that job done the only remaining duty for me at the University is to attend the Graduation Ceremony in mid-October.

    As this now frees up my spare time from almost everything I’ve been using it in the last years, I can finally begin to flesh out the many small plans I’ve collected over the years for "the time after University". These plans are manifold and cover topics spanning from finally watching movie recordings over a reboot of sports activities to even tackling some electronics projects. Also more regular activity in this blog is on the agenda.

    I’m still unsure on the order of the stuff I’m starting to burn the reclaimed leisure time. But I think I’m not in a hurry currently and may even continue to sleep late 🙂

  • The light at the end of the tunnel

    knockknock* Someone here?

    Yes I know, this blog’s heartbeat is currently beating very quiet and slow. But I can assure you it’s still beating. It is just one of the many victims of my extremely tight schedules both at work and in my personal life. But things will change soon. I’m in the last stretch of my professional education at the university and I’m pretty busy writing my Masters Thesis.

    If everything works out as planned the schedule of my private life will receive relief at the end of September. Then I think I’ll relax for some time and after that I try to recover many of my suspended projects and activities from their zombie states. There’s quite a list of stuff which I have planned to do after I’m finished with university, a pile of books to read and many people to have a beer with after a long time.

    And of course one of the bullets on my list is to resume regular blogging 🙂

  • Received my RasPi

    I finally received my Raspberry Pi which I’ve ordered in the first quarter of this year. It’s an interesting piece of hardware and even smaller than I expected.

    Sadly I’m still unable to spend more time with this. I just took some nights and compiled OpenELEC and put it on a newly purchased class-6 SD card to boot. I chose a self-compiled OpenELEC because initially I only had a 1GB card available and it seems that there is no precompiled image available which fits on cards smaller than 2GB. (In the meanwhile I’ve purchased some additional cards with reasonable sizes.)

    It took some attempts for me to be able to control the XBMC media center on my flatscreen TV but on the second day I’ve been successful to play some HD videos from the little gadget. The issues I had to deal with were

    • a dependency error in the OpenELEC sources (should be fixed by now)
    • unexpected long build duration on my machine
    • correctly partitioning the SD card manually, configuring the boot-parameters file
    • me not recognizing that the TV should be set to HDMI before turning on the Pi

    But these were already all of the issues and since development for the Raspberry Pi is extremely fast I expect things to become faster and easier day by day. And this is currently just for my goal of getting a media center up and running, I wonder what will be possible when developers are going to put these GPIO pins into top gear…

  • Fitness reloaded – somewhat

    Since my accident two years ago physical training has not really been one of my priorities. While I initially planned to catch up again at latest in autumn 2010 that didn’t quite work out. This may or may not have been influenced by my continued University studies but at least it’s a better excuse than plain laziness. There have been a few tries that year and 2011 again but in the end I didn’t manage to come up with a regular schedule for any activity.

    Nevertheless. A few weeks ago the announcement for the Business-Marathon was sent out in the company’s email. I was asked by some people of my team and without much consideration I’ve been in a group of 8 who were to run 5.25km each. The marathon was still many weeks ahead and so a training plan was set up for two 5km-distances each week. As it’s with every plan it also broke down (weather, work and other reasons) and in the end I had about five training rounds before the marathon took place.

    During these rounds I experienced a buildup of my endurance which I haven’t experienced this visibly ever before. The first time on the 5km I only ran for a few hundred meters before I had to slow down to walking for a break. And I had some serious muscle aces for the following two days. But already the on next run I could extend that distance quite a bit and had no muscle issues afterwards anymore. This tendency kept up all the time and during the marathon itself my first (of two) walking-breaks was at about 3.5km. It took me 36:10min for the 5.25km distance during the marathon btw, not a great time for a regular runner but a pretty good time for my 6th run ever I guess.

    In the end I’m pretty happy with the results. During the training rounds I shortly thought of a personal goal to finish one full round without having to take a walking-break but I skipped that when it became clear that I could not take more training-rounds.

    Currently I’m still in the mood to continue with this or a similar physical workout but what I need for that is really somebody else who joins me and leverages my motivation to the point where I actually get moving. I’m a group person and while it’s possible to motivate me to almost any activity with others involved it’s a rare occourence that you see me doing something on my own and alone…

    Seems that I have to find some folks who are willing to join me and prevent me from falling back into laziness mode again.

  • What an interesting week

    The past week has been a very interesting and productive one for me.

    In terms of education this week is the last week where I’ve been busy with a project assignment at the university where we had to check a webshop for security. To make it short, the webshops walls fell after roughly 2 hours of work. This was my first real attack on a webserver and I never expected it to be so easy. After this I’m more surprised not of the simplicity of the breakin but that real hacks on other webpages do not happen more often than it’s visible in the media. Since these two hours would not be worth a lot of project work we continued with our efforts and tried to find other holes in the server. The second hole took a bit more time and research but nevertheless it was worth much more doumentation. Some more attacks were also unsuccessful or not applicable because we had to target a virtual machine which was not completely reserved for us. Nevertheless, this project work was a very interesting one and we even had fun during the process.

    The second interesting topic is that this week I was finally successful in compiling my own working kernel from scratch for my LG Optimus 2x smartphone. In the end it boiled down to having the wrong compilation options for my environment which was resolved when I received some help from an experienced kernel modder in the forum. I also created a small guide on how to set up a compilation environment for compiling stock kernels for the LG2X. Maybe it can help others in also taking up some development on this phone. What I already recognized in the kernel is, that it is compiled with a lot of unneeded features and fully turned on debugging features. Nothing which is really needed in a production environment and therefore leaves quite some room for tuning.

    The last thing I’ve been busy with was the launch of the Raspberry Pi. This is a nice little computer on a PCB which provides HDMI output at an incredibly low price. This new device was so hyped and limited (only 10k pieces) that the webservers of both worldwide electronic component distributors went down within moments after the official announcement that they will be responsible for selling the thing. I also participated in this "DDoD" but was (as most others) unsuccessful in the morning. Later in the evening one of the shops was reachable again (more or less) and I could place a preorder. The other shop only allowed a "registration of interest". Just received a confirmation of this an hour ago 🙂 I hope that I don’t have to wait too long for this to be available for me. As if I had time to play with it…

    Ah yes, one more thing. I got promoted at work, finally. I hope it also materializes well on the paycheck and not only in officially increased responsibility.

  • Nothing to see here… Just a small Thank You

    In the past weeks I’ve become less and less active in the social networks I’m in. I’m not exactly sure why I’m currently leaning just to passive consumation of the information stream from those channels.

    Maybe there is just to much on my mind. Maybe it’s the other way around and I’m just trying to concentrate on some things while fighting procrastination with more our less success.

    What has become more clear to me is that if I have stuff to do, it’s much more probable to get done if I’m not alone but there is someone else around who also had work to do. One motivates the other. And while this approach is quite effective, at last for me, it is impossible that there is always someone available for providing mutual motivation when I need it until my studies are finished. So I still have to somehow manage to get my stuff done on my own.

    Nevertheless, I’d like to thank those people who spent many hours on the past few weekends togheter with me working on our stuff and helping me with getting my stuff forward. THANK YOU!