Projects

It’s with a heavy heart that i announce the death of my beloved Rover 220TD. My first car, a 2 Litre Turbo Diesel, power steering, electric windows, roomy, remote central locking is soon to be no more. After what i’d call a minor bump where someone went into the back of me, the insurence company have written it off to the tune of £900. They did offer a cash settlement, however, in order to re-insure it, i would have to have undergone (at my expense) another MOT and engineers inspection – i suspect this would have made it far too expensive.

Despite the car being well looked after – full service history from new at 10k mile intervals with all required work undertaken and absolutely no issues, that’s what they valued it at. So i spent some time using all the fuel and stripping it of useful components – the newish Bosch Silver battery, GPS receiver, phone charger/holder, head unit, tweeter speakers, floor mats and other bits and pieces, including the odd momento. It also took me a week to find a new car. I had a plan. I had heard the adverts on the radio for http://www.chapelhouse.co.uk/ – offering 0%/£0 deposit 5 year finance, perfect i thought. I looked at the website, found a couple of lovely Citereon C4 Coupe’s (i think they look amazing), well within budget – one at £7,000 or £116 per month.

So i toddled off to the showroom – “I’m afraid you don’t qualify for 0% finance sir, the total repayment will be almost £9,000″. Normally that would be fine(ish if you don’t mind being stiffed for interest) but similar specification C4′s were on autotrader for £4.5-5k, i had assumed they’d just inflated the cost of the car instead of charging interest, so they could offer 0%. I told them to stuff it, i wasn’t going to pay nearly double. I could have found another dealer, on high interest finance and bought it for around £7k. However, i didn’t have time. So we went trailing around all kinds of back end dodgy dealers before i found a car.

There’s no easy way to say this, it’s a….

Cityrover.

Phew, glad i got that out in the open, i am the not so proud owner of a Rover Cityrover, or rather a Tata Indica with a Rover badge. It’s saving grace is that it only cost £995 and it’s a 2004 car which has 12 months MOT and 6 months Tax. Other than that, theres not a lot else to it, it’s just a simple, basic runabout, hopefully one which works.

It’s not without it’s quirks (let’s be honest, it wouldn’t be a Rover if it all worked), the fuel gague only works properly when turning left and the indicators don’t click in but hey, it works!

Rover made a big mistake asking £7,700 for this car (Sprite model) when they were buying them from Tata in India for £2k and they sell over there for about £3.5k. If they’d just sold it at £4.5k then it would have been massively popular.

It’s going to the garage next wednesday for a service and inspection, watch this space for how much it’s going to cost. If it’s ok then i’ll be re-instating the car pc – it’ll be the most pimped up CityRover in existance!

Bye all for now

Well, i’ve been very busy reacently, so busy i haven’t had time to blog so heres a bit of a roundup of what’s been going on:

OSPF:

OSPF dynamic routing protocol – me, matt and martin implemented this across our VPNs so that if one of us adds a subnet it’s instantly routable by any of us. Unfortunatly it works on a system of trust – i could add a subnet which is the same as one of matts and all those routes would propagate and really screw up. This sort of happened when some routes which shouldn’t be served were being served so the VPN tried to send VPN packets down it’s own tunnel! Once some filtering was sorted this now works fine and is quite an elegant solution to the problem. It does mean however we have to co-ordinate use of subnets though.

SyncToy:

Now that i’ve moved my desktop back to windows running on the 160Gb RAID-0 array for speed i have put one of the spare 160Gb IDE drives in the same machine as my backup disk. While searching for a backup solution i came across the windows Xp Powertoy – SyncToy, which is actually quite advanced – it supports bi-directional sync of changes/new files etc, one way copies (as backup), a contribute where files from both sides are combined and never deleted and a couple of other options. Running it with the -R flag just runs the backup automatically so i have it set up to run when i log in, though perhaps it should be when i startup instead. I’m also going to use it to sync the music collection on the laptop in the car.

Car Startup Controller:

I have been searching for some time for a mecahnism to auto-boot the laptop in the car, now, this can be done quite simply with a relay, resistors and a couple of capcitors but this is quite inflexible, the problem is that the relay has to close then open again after a short time as you can’t just hold down the power button on the laptop all the time as it won’t boot.

So i used one of the little picaxe microcontrollers – 08M, when it starts up, it waits 60s, closes the relay, waits 1s then opens it again. The best part of this solution is that it is reprogrammable – i can just plug it into my computer and upload a new program.

The Design – just a regulator on the 12v input down to 5v, the 3 resistors to ground on the serial in pin, then a transistor on the output pin with the relay and a protection diode.

Work:

Things have been hectic with all sorts going on, i’ve had 3 major projects to deal with in quite a short space of time -
1. Wrestle with the DirectX SDK to provide recording, playback and live interfacing to AXIS video servers – which use Mpeg4 over RTSP/RTP. Now that i’ve done it, i can now interface with almost any other DirectShow video source with minimal of fuss – simply a matter of changing the filters.
2. Alter the way our VHF recorder uses the windows waveOut/In devices for enumeration and record/playback. We had landed ourselves in a situation where we had a soundcard which had no mixer device – which we were previously using for enumaration and setup and also assumming that the waveOut/In ID was the same as the MixerID which in fact they’re not. So this required some alteration to the way we were using the API. As a side effect it actually makes the program more robust in situations where soundcards arn’t always as expected (one wave in, one wave out and one mixer device)
3. Dongle Licensing Protection – i have designed and implemented a dongle based protection and licencing scheme which will eventually interface into a full customer/order database system.

As well as those, we now have a need for a calandering solution so i looked at Scalix mailserver, but for us, all it really offers over our current setup is the calander, outlook connector and webmail. Since none of us in the office use webmail or outlook it is of limited use. Plus changing the MTA to postfix instead of sendmail didn’t seem all that simple. Instead i setup iCal’s on our WebDAV server which seems to work pretty well using the thunderbird lightning plug in. When i get around to it i’ll set up a private WebDAV area for each of us to use for our iCal plus a public one.

Apart from that there’s nothing much else going on at the mo, i’m moving house in 6 weeks back to manchester which should be…interesting to say the least.

Yup, i decided to hit the ‘upgrade distro button’. After taking all the necessary safety precautions:-

Fresh beverage…..Check.
Snacks………………..Check.
Seat Belt……………..Check.
Unplugged sensitive data HD…..nah be right, today i’m walkin’ on the wild side
Anything else? Nah don’t think so.

So i sat back, strapped in and clicked ‘Go’

Mostly successful, my bluetooth keyboard is broken – STILL! This is a *known* bug and was reported weeks ago but noone has fixed it yet, its partially caused by the missing HIDD binary from the Bluez-Tools package (think they’re going for a replacement method but it doesnt work. My lovely Logitech Dinovo Bluetooth keyboard simply won’t work – it doesnt even work fudging as a usb keyboard since Ubuntu detects the dongle as a bluetooth device – if you don’t install drivers under windows it just ‘works’ This had better get fixed soon as it is doing my head in using a PS2-USB adaptor which crashes every so often and i get stuck letters.

I just got Compiz working again finally, normally it would just max the cpu, it turns out this is a settings related issue which didnt get upgraded/disabled during the update. So that’s working again.

In an attempt to fix my keyboard and compiz i installed all of the test packages – thus breaking the entire system as it decided it wanted to change the kernel type to 386 (i only found this out later) so didn’t have the modules or the restricted modules installed. So everything broke – no hardware detection, no graphics to speak of etc etc etc.

Eventually i was able to fix it by installing the modules packages, why it changed the kernel type to begin with is beyond me.

Virtual box is now integrated into the distro which is nice, but i still have to manually do chmod 777 /dev/vboxdrv before i can run it, this is due to me being too lazy to look up how to add myself to the vbox group. Which should be done in the installer but isn’t.

Off Ubuntu…ish I attempted to use Mythbuntu (and hence the TV part of LinuxMCE) to find that neither of my tuners are supported, so that idea is just out completely. I’d like to try it properly – i like the idea of a backend-front end system (noisy server with big disks and lots of tuners in a cuboard, thin netbooting client on the front for playback) and being able to run clients all of which can watch tv all over the house. But alas no, it’ll have to wait until i buy new tuners.

Instead, i gave Vista a go on my mediacentre, it being a decent enough spec to run. It’s not bad either, the MCE seems less buggy, bit annoying to try to set familier settings as they all seem to have moved around but now bad. All my drivers were detected automatically – even the Tuner card. The RAID card didn’t work until i put the CD in (cheap designed before vista even came out hence no vista drivers) but it looked at the CD and said yes ok, i’ll use those – it actually worked. I’ll see how it goes, but so far it’s been more reliable than the last XP MCE install.

MS related, i was told about MS DreamSpark for Students https://downloads.channel8.msdn.com/ Any current student is eligible for this – either your institution must be a partner, you have an Eduserv Athens Password or an ISIC number (also on your NUS Extra-rip-off card) You authenticate your status by logging in with your Athens password (or thats how it did it, more about Salford Uni and MSDNAA later…) and you’re let in for unlimited free donwloads of things like Visual Studio 05/08 and Server 2003 Standard.

Not bad for a freebie, but not as much as i’m entitled to. Salford University, like many others are MSDNAA partners, this means they have the ability to give students access to the vast majority of MS software for free (or at least for the School of CSE) – do they allow this – NO! I suspect purely becuase of the admin overhead. Salford Uni isn’t even listed as a DreamSpark partner. Other universities give their students access to this system through their online systems (Salford has Blackboard), friends of mine elsewhere can get their hands on any MS software completely legally.

I on the other hand, am going to end up subscribing to TechNet Online – £200 a year for all the OSs and some office/server stuff isn’t bad. I’d rather have the CD Media version, but it’s twice the price.

Car wise, all isn’t bad, MOT on thursday, fingers crossed it passes. I’ve more or less sorted the Laptop in there now, i have another problem where the USB hub won’t run properly, but i’m forced to use it as the laptop only has one USB port! I found some software which monitors the power type (AC/Battery) and on switching to battery it waits 10s, closes the LCD Control App, waits 20s then hibernates. This way shutdown is automatic when i get out of the car. Start up it restores from hibernate and waits a bit, then launches the LCD control app.

I contacted the developer of LCDC, the LCD app, and asked him to put resiliency in on losing the USB/Com port, just like my Car2PC adaptor does. He said he would look into it. I’m still awaiting a response.

It’s highly likely i’ll end up developing my own, it’ll be more reliable.

I was looking at PicoITX boards – tiny little things, but i still like the idea of using a laptop – with batteries, so that i can completely cut power when the engine is off. I’ll have to replace the current machine though, with one which has a decent docking station at least – power, audio, multi usb, display, so nothing goes into the laptop itself and i can keep the ports well protected. I’ve strapped in the box of tools/fluids at least so damage is less likely.

Work wise things are going well – just sent off an order to the Isle of Man today, may be going out there to comission it in a while. Other big orders are coming up too, which is good, it keeps us busy but does get in the way of doing fun stuff!

I’ve also dug out my monitoring controller again, i finished another pair of line drivers yesterday, once i do the headphone amp and low pass filter that will be all of the audio circuitry done! Yay! I will the have to integrate switching and control, that’s a big job, i need relays, pics and usb GPIO. I have a 4-bit IR TRx module which will go in there too. I already have the light up buttons so i can get those mounted soon.

Well that’s all for now, i’ll keep you updated as and when stuff happens. TTFN

Well then, i know i haven’t been blogging much recently, i’ve just been in that new-years lull where i can’t really be bothered with anything, however, i’m working my way out of it and do i have a treat in store for all of you. This entry will be quite full, so sit back, strap in and enjoy the ride. (Geek restrictions apply.)

First off, a nice easy one – i got me a new PC! Spec:

Asus P5B Intel based mobo – lots of sata, usb and all the usual bits, although annoyingly only one IDE – my MCE has two IDE hd’s and two IDE optical drives – i changed this (see later)
Pentium E2180 CPU – dual Core 2GHz, can be overclocked to the max – which i won’t be doing as i want it to run cool (and therefore quiet)
2Gb Ram
nVidia 8400GS Graphics

Not a bad replacement spec – i put MCE 2005 on it and does it fly! I can play back 720p MKV video at about 15% CPU – the old box used more CPU to play Mpeg4! As a result i’ve been watching a few HD movies, although i will be glad when we get American TV back again (it seems shows will be returning to the air in the US in April) 1080p also doesn’t seem a problem.

By far the best footage i’ve seen is the BBC Top Gear Polar Special, in 1080p, the detail really is phenomenal – you can see individual snow flakes on the screen. It also highlights production cheats – one shot in particular i noticed that Richard Hammond was blue screened (or chroma keyed if you prefer) onto the backround – something i did not notice on the SD version.

A good investment, although it currently does not have any optical drive (due to no IDE connectors), i am seriously considering buying a Blu-Ray reader/DVD-RW drive as they are around £60-70 now and then i can purchase HD content on disc. Now that HD-DVD has properly died, blu-ray will be the leading format for some time to come.

Now that i have the guts of the machine spare, i have piled them into my old light-up case along with the PCI-X Intel Pro/1000 and the 8 port SATA controller. After installing solaris the system is all ready to go with a ZFS filestore, i just need to purchase the disks, i am planning on 3x 500GB to begin with, and expanding later.

I am well away i need to re-write the computers page of the site, as all the specs are now wrong and i will do when i get around to it! Using a new mobo in the mediacentre allowed me to remove loads of expansion cards – USB2, Sound, Network – all gone as they are on board.

I did have a problem with standby relating to the mediacentre remote control – it requires 5VSB at all times – sending the machine to S3 caused it to wake again, but disabling the remote. Simply find the 5VSB jumper for the USB port you are using and switch it – instructions are in the manual. It’s a jumper not a BIOS option!

Next Up: Car2PC

I caved, i bought one of these devices and even though its cost me somewhere near to £70-80 (due to customs charges and ParcelFarce surcharges) it is actually well worth the money…if it works…which mine doesn’t.

If i leave it in the car overnight, it stops working – i emailed tech support and they said they would get me a replacement, i’ve not heard anything since, so i emailed them again and im waiting a response. I do hope they send another, one that works, because if it’s reliable, it’s a fantastic bit of kit – being able to control the laptop from the headunit remote – and the steering wheel control is just amazing. It takes the hassle out of it all – i’m still using the LCD where the clock was for artist and track name and it all looks factory fit almost. You can even control shuffle from the headunit, the problem i have seen however though, is that i no longer have shutdown control.

If i eventually get a proper car-pc (mini ITX job) then it will be on permanant 12V so standby would suffice.

Already mentioned Solaris, but worthy of a mention again, since im only lacking disks, i have been playing with ZFS using the debug ‘file’ method (virtual disks), there is an extremely nice webgui for configuring ZFS and RAID-Z which i will make extensive use of as soon as i buy disks. I’m not sure when that will be, perhaps after easter when i get more student loan, who knows?

And onward we march, to the final main thing i have to talk about tonight – http://www.lindy.co.uk/usb-wireless-pc-lock/42940.html

The wireless RFID PC lock. Really, fantastic. If you write your own software…which is what i did. Since all this does is fudge up a HID device – on linux it emulates a mouse and makes the pointer jump randomly when in range. You can tie in quite a lot to it. I did give their own software a go at work – on windows it simply displays a full screen splash which you cant ALT+TAB round until you’re in range. This is comepletely useless since i have dual displays and i was still able to read my email even though the system was ‘locked’.

I contacted Lindy tech support asking for an API, they just said No, not even a why? how can we help instead, just No. So reverse engineering it is. After snooping the USB traffic on a windows box i noticed all the fob does is transmit a burst every few seconds of 4 bytes.

Since on linux it appeared as /dev/input/mouse3 i can pipe this into cat and into a file, therefore, all the data recieved by the fob is piped into a file. All i did was carry out a 5 second cat of the data and if the file was still empty, call xlock & to lock the workstation, if data was then detected it just called pkill xlock – effectively unlocking the workstation!

Code example below:

#! /bin/bash
RFIDPRESENT=0

export DISPLAY=:0

while test 1==1; do

cat /dev/input/mouse3 > /root/test & sleep 5s && pkill cat

FILESIZE=$(stat -c%s “./test”)

echo “starting round tests”

if test “$FILESIZE” -eq 0; then
echo “no data in file”
if test “$RFIDPRESENT” -eq 1; then
xlock &
RFIDPRESENT=0
echo “no data in file terminal locked”
fi
fi
if test “$FILESIZE” -gt 0; then
echo “data in file”
if test “$RFIDPRESENT” -eq 0; then
pkill xlock
RFIDPRESENT=1
echo “data in file terminal unlocked”
fi
fi

echo “ending round tests”

rm “./test”
touch “./test”

done

That code will loop forever, until user terminates, it’s not pretty but it does the job. It will eventually be integrated as a cron job, and also cause XMMS/media player to pause and change my MSN status to away.

All in all, a worthwhile project! Next task is getting it to work on windows! Oh and my thanks to MattJ for the bash help. There may be a video attached, if i can get it to work of the system in action. It’s pretty cool, especially given the cost. I’m quite proud as it’s my first reverse engineered device

Video here: http://www.lewty.org.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/rfidlock.mp4

So thats the main projects covered as for everything else, it’s just ticking along in the usual way, work is going well, finally finished our low bandwidth compression project and we’ve started work on another order. That’s in between me designing a fully relational database system for in-house management. I also got WebDAV working finally so we have a secure file storage facility which is quite cool.

Currently i’m working on integrating our secondary VHF Recorder product into the mainstream IRIS Radar Display – not a whole load of new code, just quite tedious and complicated to follow (a lot of what were we thinking? moments!)

That’s all for now, will try and blog a bit more often in the future, but i tend not to bother if there isn’t any big projects on.

So then, Christmas has been and (almost) gone, with just the tediousness of new year to go before 2007 finally kicks the bucket. There are a few things to report on as i sit here reflecting on 2007 and all its events. First of all let me deal with Christmas, i have a few new toys to play with which is nice, so i’ll cover them each in turn and why i wanted them in the first place.

Linksys WT54GL Wireless (Cable) Router
This is the chameleon of domestic networking kit – or at least it will be once i install the open source firmware from http://www.dd-wrt.com This is very comprehensive and as well as all the traditional features you expect to find in a wifi router it will add things such as VLAN support, OpenVPN (client and server), wifi power adjust and quite a lot more, transforming this, frankly, cheap (£40) device into somthing which usually costs much more.

Since it has 4 ports of normal switching, i am also going to replace my DMZ switch with it, as this will save a full 700mA draw on the mains power (my last electricity bill was £160).

Linksys AM200 Ethernet Modem (ADSL)
Since i have a seperate server for routing, vpn, dhcp and so on, i wanted to remove the second layer of NAT that current exists between the ISP supplied BeBox router (actually a SpeedTouch 780) this modem *should* (i will explain in a bit) allow me to have the public static IP on the WAN interface of my server – with the modem itself being fully transparent.

I say *should* since on peeking through the config interface, it does actually support NAT, DHCP and whatnot – router features and thats not what i want! On upgrading to the latest firmware, i did notice that you can turn off NAT, DHCP and put it into half-bridge mode, which i think is what i want (i read this as the modem handles connection/auth etc but hands off the public ip to the client pc) But until i get back to the Wirral i can’t try it, hopefully it will ‘just work’ but given how badly ADSL is designed i’m not too hopeful. There are many other options and encapsulations which i don’t fully understand and will need to read about, but more on that when i get back to try it.

Supermicro AOC-SAT2-MV8 8 Port SATA-II PCI-X Card
Obvious really, im going to use it for my new NAS, which i have realised is only 3  disks short – everything else on it i can buy later – case, server HW, backplanes, all i need is a machine (i can dig one up from somewhere) and some disks. However, i have been reading the Sun Solaris Admin Guide for ZFS and RAIDZ (start here http://opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/docs/) and it appears that it won’t do what i want (i need to speak to Matt as he’s the expert)

Basically i want this: a single RAIDZ array (like RAID5 but better) which i can dynamically add disks to, with the pool storage capacity increasing when it can tolerate the failure of a single drive (like a sort of dynamic RAID5). Then when i want to, be able to replace a smaller capacity drive with a larger one and again have the pool capacity increase when the array can tolerate failure of the largest capacity single drive. Simple eh? Perhaps not, maybe i’m asking too much, it appears you cannot add disks to a RAIDZ array in the future, however you can add arrays or disks to a ZFS pool dynamically, so i could add a 3 disk RAIDZ first, then later on add another 3 disk RAIDZ, then maybe even a 2 disk mirror to end on. It also seems that replacing disks with bigger ones is a possibility in RAIDZ. So it seems to do everything apart from dynamic sized RAIDZ arrays (which, to be fair, can’t be easy – i wan an 8 disk RAIDZ to tolerate a single drive failure, not asking much am i?)

Pioneer DEH-P40MP MP3-CD Car Headunit
New cd player for the car – it means i have been able to remove the other TWO head units that were in there – i had my ‘good’ Sony one which came with the car with its CD player and RDS tuner, then if i turned this unit off, the ‘amp remote’ pin would go low, allowing a relay to close turning on the other headunit, with its rubbish tuner, broken cd player BUT had a 3.5mm jack aux input – which i had the laptop connected to that’s in the boot.

The new head unit, has an aux in on the back (two in fact, one via the IP-BUS but more on that later) which is crystal clear (the annoying buzz when the laptop was off has gone also) As an added bonus the new player comes with an IR remote (must hide that from everyone) and the old wired Sony remote works with the new headunit – i’ll say that again to help the poor people who tried to google for an answer (i didn’t get anything i just had to try it) PIONEER CAR CD HEADUNITS WILL WORK WITH SONY CAR CD HEADUNIT WIRED REMOTES. There we go, all i had to do was plug in the minijack off the remote and all was well.

I’m not done yet though, i came across a project recently which was essentially a multi cd emulator unit – it emulates a cd changer and outputs over RS232 so a PC can talk to it – accepting control commands (play, pause, skip etc) and returning CD-Text and time information. This looked like a good idea – plug into the IP-Bus connector and the laptop – get full control over the music via the headunit – no more pc gamepad in the cubby under the headunit.

However, it was quite a fiddly build, with programming EEPROMs and all sorts, but help is at hand, i found a company called Car2PC (http://indashpc.org/new/adapters/car2pc-pio.html) who makes these adaptors and at £40 ($80) it doesn’t seem all that expensive (add shipping and tax and it gets to be quite a lot but still, i will probably go for it since i don’t really have time to be building one)

This would round off the front end quite nicely with full control available, it would be better with the proper Rover steering controls but getting those is both time consuming and expensive, plus you have to take the airbag out to fit it which i dont fancy to be perfectly honest.

Apart from a few other bits and bobs thats Christmas covered, i’ve also picked up a hardware USB MPEG4/MPEG2 converter (not sure why but it was £9) and an original XBOX (£25) in the hope of turning it into a Media Centre (Center, for our american friends) exetender but this is looking to be a lot harder than it originally seemed – first off the Xbox doesn’t even support VGA output! I have to hack the grapics controller firmware, and make up a custom cable to get it to work (i think i may poke around with the oscilloscope see if i can find VGA somewhere in there, although im sure someone would have documented this already if it was that simple) plus getting the software isn’t easy either, on top of all that the usb ports don’t use proper usb connectors so i cant just plug in my MCE remote to see if it works!

Looking like a bit of a waste of money now really.

New years resolutions, well, let’s see, i have decided to go on a cost cutting drive – im going to be good and not spend money on stuff i don’t need, i want to learn to cook properly – i’d like to host a dinner party in my flat before i have to move out, but we’ll see and im determined to see some of my projects through to completion – my monitoring controller for example, that only requires a few audio circuits to be made before it’s done (then the control but thats almost a seperate project). We’ll see how long it lasts, but so far i think i’m on for a good year – leap years have always been kind to me, lets see if that holds true.

Well, nothing much has been happening lately, i’ve done some work for Shock Radio (www.shockradio.co.uk), the student RSL radio station i used to manage. Theres a couple of things worth mentioning there -

Diskless Booting Gentoo
Using pxelinux i managed to build a  network bootable diskless client – all without having gentoo installed anywhere to start with – i had to boot using the live/install cd, mount the NFS target disk and build directly onto that! Then once i got it to the studio i realised i had built the kernel without support for the network card, so a quick re-compile later (with the aid of the live cd it worked perfectly…until it crashed – but that was a hardware fault.

A word from the wise though – the compile time purely for X, Thunderbird and Firefox on a PII 350 is about 5 days straight!

Compaq ML* servers
If you’re planning on getting one of these (since they go on ebay for very cheap) make sure you know about the SmartStart CD – you NEED to have this or you cannot setup the disks – forget a bios – it doesn’t have a conventional one, the only way to setup the system is using the special bootable cd – which by the way, is a 500meg download from the Compaq/HP website.

I’ve been doing some more work on the car/pc – i have discovered someone who managed to build a CD Multichanger Emulator – this clever bit of hardware allows you to talk to pioneer headunits directly over serial – including CD Text and controls from the headunit. This means i can use this to interface between the headunit im planning to buy and the laptop allowing full control through it.

There’s other emulators out there for other makes of headunit, but i like the pioneers. I’ve also picked up a DC-DC adaptor for the power side so once i get that in, i can get rid of the inverter all together which will be nice, i may eventually build it back in since having 230V in the car is quite useful.

That’s it for now really, not all that much to report, hopefully i will have a few new things to do after christmas.

So, Martin has co-located his poweredge beast into my flat – its noisy with a capital N! But i have got my own 2k3 VM on it so i can practice migrating all the users and data off my old domain controller, although right now, the whole thing has crashed so i’m getting nowhere.

Instead i cleaned the flat and finally took some photos of the setup – check out here If theres any questions about the setup then just ask me. I’ve also stuck up some more pics of the monitoring controller now that it has all its sockets mounted and the toroid bolted in.

I also finally got rid of the annoying buzz in the car when using the car pc (caused by USB hub PSU) by fitting a +5V 3A regulator onto the 12V DC meaning i don’t have to step up to mains and back down again just to get 5V – buzz is now all gone.

I might go out to it for a bit later on today as i want to fit the bluetooth as well as copy across the refined music library – im so sick of AC/DC coming on!

I fixed the car PC!

One of the wires for the power switch had disconnected itself from the mainboard of the laptop – requiring a full strip down to re-solder it on, but it’s on now and working fine, also on re-assembly added the wifi access point back in – its no longer crashing which is quite odd, though i suspect it was a winamp issue trying to check for updates or somthing. Not that it matters, its all working fine now, took it for a spin and could change tracks using my phone on wifi!!!

I went back to manc yesterday to pick up a TFT for home and check on my room – estates had closed my window (turning the room into an oven) and not locked the door properly, other than that everything seemed to be ok, but those on their own are reason for complaint but i won’t bother unless it all kicks off, in which case i have plenty of ammunition to get them. Met Matt, Martin and Paula for lunch – matt has a new stupidly powerful wifi card which can pick up anything anywhere. Fairly impressive but i’ve yet to see it in action.

Coming back to manc properly on fri, will be good to get back and get my new place sorted out.

Well, i’ve just upgraded the webserver, theres an extra 256Mb of RAM in there now, and considering there was only 64meg in thats quite a significant upgrade! The site seems much quicker, now that its not thrashing the HDD every time someone visits a page it should be less stress on the system too.

Car PC has gone tits up – the power switch is broke which means stripping the machine back down and re-soldering the connection, and the wifi point crashes the laptop every time its plugged in – i have no idea why. I think im going to get a USB dongly type WIFI and Bluetooth cards which should simplify things a bit, plus having an external soundcard in the glovebox might reduce the noise on the signal a bit.

Have to wait and see, the lack of blogs is because i’ve been at work, but i’ll try and keep posting on. TTFN

My apologies people! The website has suffered some downtime since wednesday but we’re back up rock and rolling. The outage was due to a power cut in the…ahem… ‘datacentre’ and the webserver didn’t turn itself back on again. But i didn’t lose any e-mail other than during the approx 4 hours of downtime, thats all dealt with seperately.

So, i’m back home again for the holidays, got quite a bit of uni work to do, plus i’m at work work and i’ve got to find time to catch up with friends during all that, so i think its going to be a busy time.

I did however get the chance to fit powered USB to the car, there is a hub in the glovebox powered from the inverter in the boot and it carries non-essential stuff (ie. windows doesnt complain if it loses it even though its supposed to be hot-plug…yeah..pull the other one).

Probably won’t have time to do any interesting stuff in the near future so the blog may go blank for a bit, but if somthing comes up i’m sure i’ll get it written.

Website and e-mail may be on and offline for a while in the next few weeks as im upgrading the firewall/gateway to somthing better, plus i need to put more RAM into the webserver.