I’ve made no progress on my robot project, but the makeblog linked to Wiper Motor Page, which had a LOT of useful information about using wiper motors. Stashed for future reference.
Category Archives: My Projects
Learn Chinese Characters
Thanks to Susan for telling me about zhongwen.com, really cool site for learning chinese characters. I’m not sure how long this particular brain worm will last, but until it does fades, I’ll have a nice online reference for my exploration of Chinese characters.
If you know zero Chinese (like me), you can still use this site to find characters by using stroke count (the number of strokes in a character). For instance, I saw this character on the menu for my local Chinese restaurant.
Neat, huh?
Gift for Baseball Fans
I wanted to get a file with the schedule for all the major league baseball games this season, but remarkably, it seemed difficult. Sure, you can surf over to each team in the league, and by clicking through their websites, eventually get to a file with comma separated values in it, but it’s fairly tedious, and there seems to be no rhyme or reason to the files that are produced.
But, I went through all thirty teams anyway, and did it.
The result is a master CSV file with the dates, start time and who is playing in each game. There is almost certainly a problem or two remaining, a couple of duplicated times, but it still should be useful, and the price is right.
First Bootable (Barely) itsyBSD .ISO file
I’ve got a very simple LiveCD of FreeBSD booting off of CDROM. If you are brave, you can surf over to itsyBSD.org and download the iso image, burn it to CD and give it a try. It doesn’t install anything to any hard disks, so nothing can be hurt by giving it a try, but as usual, no warranties are granted. Try it at your own risk.
It’s got a number of problems, but I should iron them out over the next few days.
itsyBSD
Well, I’ve decided on a name for my tiny FreeBSD LiveCD project: itsyBSD, pronouced “itsybitsy”. 🙂 I haven’t got any files to download yet, but if you click the link you’ll end up at a wiki which will hold my documentation for the project. Hopefully in the next week I’ll have an iso you can download.
Minor Project Success
Well, I figured out why my attempt to create a LiveCD for FreeBSD was dying: init was compiled with shared libraries, and something was apparently screwy. I replaced it with a version of init which was statically linked, and then found out that all my other binaries were also still dynamically linked, and they failed too, but when I added /libexec/ld-elf.so.1 to the boot image, all was well and I was able to successfully boot my miniaturized, stripped down version of FreeBSD without any further difficulty.
When I’ve created some better scripts to generate these images, I’ll post a link to the resulting toy .iso file.
New Cholesterol Numbers
Congratulations and huzzahs for me. By dropping 67 lbs and exercising over the last year, I managed to cut my total cholesterol from 262 to 200, with my LDL going from a high 202 to a much more reasonable 138. Still got a ways to go on the weight loss, but things are looking good!
Towards my own LiveCD…
Well, I’ve bit the bullet. I’ve decided that I have a couple of projects that could benefit from my own ability to produce a customized version of Unix that can boot from a CD (or alternatively, a flash memory device), so I’ve embarked upon trying to follow the path of others who have gone before and produce one.
I’ve thought about using Linux and following in the fine tradition of DSL or Knoppix, but I really am more comfortable with FreeBSD, so I thought I would give it a go. I went into /usr/ports/sysutils/freesbie and installed the scripts there, and then tried to figure out what they were all about. They put a bunch of files in /usr/local/share/freesbie including a directory called miniBSD. Ahah! I’ve seen mention of this project before, where someone produced a small version of BSD ready to run on some small Soekris boxes. I thought I might start there.
Well, there are a few problems. The kernel config file that it uses (MINIBSD.5) isn’t really set up for booting from CD, so if you use their scripts to build an ISO and burn it on a CD, it really won’t work. I know, because I made four coasters playing with it last night before I stumbled upon the idea of using a system emulator. I compiled the one I knew about, bochs, but it died while running the emulated boot loader in a way that my real system wasn’t. Now I’ve got qemu compiled and running, and it gets through the boot all the way to running init, which it thinks dies with a signal 6. That’s just what the real CD does currently, so I’m happy I won’t need to make so many coasters to debug this thing.
After that, I had to go to bed.
I’ll keep you posted when I get it to work. This .iso image won’t be much bigger than a typical podcast. 🙂
Chinese Calligraphy
You know, the thing I really like about Chinese calligraphy isn’t that I have an abiding interest in China, or in learning the Chinese language, or even in trying to become more comfortable with a brush and ink.
It really is just that for the couple of hours that our classes tend to last, I literally can’t think of anything else. It really requires an odd combination of both concentration and relaxing that seems hard to achieve with other activities, even ordinary drawing.
Of course, I’m not really any good at it, but that’s beside the point too.
An aside: this character is (supposed to be) YONG (æ°¸), meaning “forever” or “eternal”. It contains eight strokes, and is said to contain all that you need to know to master Chinese calligraphy. Seems really simple, doesn’t it? Try drawing one that looks good, perhaps with some online instruction. It’s trickier than it looks.
Damn Small Linux Update
I installed Damn Small Linux onto one of those 64 megabyte USB dongle thingies, and walked it around to various machines to see if I could get it to boot. Results:
- My old Shuttle SV24: no dice, didn’t boot.
- My laptop: sadly no, doesn’t boot.
- My HP desktop machine: yep, boots and works fine.
It’s too bad, I really wanted to boot my laptop to Damn Small Linux occasionally. Guess I’ll just have to carry one of those tiny CDs around.
Robot motors have arrived!
The motors that I ordered from American Science and Surplus arrived this morning. I got a pair of Trico windshield wiper motors, originally destined for installation in a Saturn, but now pinched to serve a more noble purpose. Haven’t powered ’em up yet, next stop: a deep cycle battery or gel cell.
Nothing like the smell of fresh grease to get those creative juices flowing.
Quest for MythTV…
Well, I am now closing in on a working MythTV installation (I hope), although a few problems remain. The quality of video coming from this old Brooktree 878 card is terrible, and as yet I haven’t been able to get sound working reliably. Besides prebuffering incorrectly, something having to do with the mixer is wonky: you’d think with all the experience I have with recording my podcasts, I’d be able to figure it out, but so far it has eluded me.
In the end I don’t really want to use the Brooktree card at all: a couple of days ago I found a pretty good deal on the WinTV PVR 150 cards, which do hardware MPEG2 compression for $63 via Amazon. It should ship next week, and hopefully this will provide better quality. Hopefully. If I get this working acceptably well, I’d probably like to shift the entire thing into a smaller, quieter box. Or maybe I could just find a quieter fan, or throttle this one back. Oh well, I’ve got to stop tinkering with this.
I’m off to Radio Shack to pick up a second microphone for my next podcast: stay tuned! A special guest will be joining me for a change of pace. I hope you all will like it.
Hardware Mysteries Resolving…
Underneath my relentless attention, I believe I’ve figured out one of the problems with my SV24 computer that I complained about earlier. I complained that something appeared to be shorting out. Closer thought told me that it sounded like the same sound the computer makes when the reset button is pushed. Worth checking out, think I. 4 hex head screws later, and the front panel was off to reveal that indeed, the reset switch is narrowly installed in a small gap between the power supply and the case. Even closer inspection revealed a barely visible gap in the insulation. Ahah, think I. Some quick application of some tape, and reassemble, and… voila! No more problem.
I also took the opportunity to swap the DVD drive out for a different one, with no apparent change in my ability to install Fedora Core. I did notice however, that the DVD that I’ve been trying to install was a prerelease DVD. Now I’m downloading the real release version, in the hopes that some minor glitch in hardware compatibility occurred during the release process.
I’ll keep you all updated, wish me luck.
Argh, Debugging…
What do you do when you have the flu? Well, I sit down and try to debug a computer system which has become unreliable. In particular, the little gem is the gadget pictured on the right, my old SV24 with an 850Mhz Celeron Processor in it. I’ve thought about turning it into a MythTV box, since it largely goes unused, and I’m vaguely nervous about the predicted death of Tivo.
So, what’s the problem. Well, I’ve had difficulty installing software on it. I put a DVD drive in it awhile back, and sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. I burned Fedora Core 3 onto it, and verified that the disk would boot and check in another machine (Fedora nicely includes a checksum routine to verify disks during install), but it fails with hdc media errors in this box. Repeatedly. Predictably. I’ve tried changing every bios thing I can figure, disabling DMA, doing all sorts of stuff, no dice.
This morning I swapped the drive for an old 10x CDROM that I had lying around. For some reason it doesn’t want to boot at all from this device (powers up, but when the CDROM probe happens, no love). Grrr. Not happy.
Strangely enough, I think there might be something electrical which is wacky in the box. If I leave the case off, sometimes the machine refuses to boot at all, instead just making a series of short clicks as if the reset button were being pushed. What’s that about?
I really don’t want to retire this box needlessly, but I’m beginning to get a bit annoyed with it. Anyone have any ideas and/or expeirence which might be useful?
Flu is a bit better. I’ll probably try to work a half day today.
A possible brain for the brainwagon robot?
Glancing around the surplus market yielded the following computer which seems like it would be entirely capable of driving my as yet unstarted robotics project.
Dell Optiplex GX1 PIII 450Mhz./ 128MB/ 6GB/ CD(Desktop)
I found out that tigersurplus has the same sort of systems for less money, but it’s about the same when you add in shipping. I think I’ll travel down south and have a gander at one of these this weekend.