Projects

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.

Just a quick note, recently i went to my favourite feel-good website www.smileygram.com to notice that it is no longer there! I dug it out of the depths of www.archive.org and i have rehosted it at www.lewty.org.uk/smileygram

I hope it makes other people smile, if you are the copyright holder of the images/site please get in touch – if you want it removed i will straight away, but all i want is permission to reproduce. There was no copyright-note on the site itself, apart from advertising sponsors – which i have removed.