Category Archives: DIY

N8x0 PowerVR Drivers!

Posted on 2009-10-16 by pappp

Since the N800 came out there has been a lot of rumbling in the community about the unutilized hardware present in the device (and it’s sibling/successor, my beloved N810). The piece most complained about are the PowerVR MBX 3D accelerator and 5MB SRAM included on the OMAP2420 SoC the device is built around. The explanation has always been a mixture of licensing issues for the drivers, and that the external Epson S1D13745 display controller was better suited to the 800×480 (still unusually high for mobile devices) resolution, despite being rather slow and devoid of 3D-capability.

With the advent of the N900 and it’s non-backward-compatible Maemo 5 OS, there is some fear in the community that the N8×0 devices will be abandoned. The N900 looks like a very cool device, but like many tablet owners, part of the appeal of my N810 was that it wasn’t designed to have a >$50/month cellular data plan. Nokia’s offical (and seemingly very classy) stance is that they will provide support for continued community developed FOSS software for the platform, which currently mostly means Mer, a community firmware/ partial Maemo 5 backport. There are also several other linux-based OS ports to the N8×0 platform, and a burgeoning effort to produce a binary-compatibility-maintaining system software update like the ones Nokia used to produce for Maemo 4 which will hopefully all cross-pollinate sources and keep the platform alive. One only has to look at how long the OpenZaurus (later merged into OpenEmbedded/Ångström) community held on, and how much they accomplished to be hopeful.

The combination of these thoughts? Nokia (and the various other relevant IP owners) announced they will be supplying drivers for the PowerVR to the community in the immediate future. With a little luck the Mer hackers will get them integrated into a release soon, which may contribute to tipping to Mer as the predominant OS for n8×0 devices over the OS2008/Maemo 4 stack Nokia provided.

I depend so much on my n810 I haven’t really been into OS hacking on it, but as it ages and the community firmwares come to the fore I suspect I’ll get more into it (if I have time). Maybe as they get cheap I’ll even end up with one of the “knockoffs” to use as a test platform in the same primary machine/beaterbox setup as my bigger machines.

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Barrel #2: Away

Posted on 2009-10-03 by pappp

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The 12-note barrel is away. I’m pretty sure everyone from Collexion involved is well and truly done with this particular stunt, but it was a neat project with some great results. This one went through the School of Music’s benefit gala to benefit the School of Music Service Organization. It only pulled in $750, but with the lower materials cost that still represents some income for the benefiting organization. The picture above is (almost) all the guts for the barrel, before being assembled and installed.

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Musical Barrel #1

Posted on 2009-09-29 by pappp

One of my hobby projects just came to fruition earlier tonight. A team from Collexion has been working on building a pair of musical Bourbon barrels to support local charity auctions. The first one (6 notes from an internal glockenspiel, triggered by capacitive touch sensors on the rings, with an excellent paint job by Sam Wilson) sold earlier tonight at Spirits of Giving, bringing in $1500 to be split between Collexion and the Nash Brigthon Project. It’s great to be doing technological art, and it’s great that it can be used to support good causes. I forgot to bring my camera, but as soon as I get sent pictures from the people who did have them I’ll throw at least one up.

Edit: I don’t have pictures, but here is a video of the demonstration.

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Dorkbotlex #6 – Results

Posted on 2009-09-20 by pappp

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It was, as always, a great show, with lots of inspiring local projects and an engaged audience. Hopefully sometime in the not TOO distant future I’ll actually get one of the hobby projects (the ones that are not so technical as to make non-engineers’ eye’s glaze over) done enough to show.

The usual, photos from the event are up on my flickr stream.

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Haiku!

Posted on 2009-09-14 by pappp

The Haiku project to reimplement BeOS just released their first alpha, and despite having less than no time to do so, I took a few minutes to play with it, and it is bringing back some great memories. BeOS was a really spectacular operating system which was floating around the edges of the market in the late 90s, with some truly revolutionary features, some of which are still not widely adopted. Remember WinFS, that Microsoft has been failing to deliver since 2003? Be had almost all the amazing indexeng/medatdata/journaling features (basically everything but encryption) in it’s BeFS in 1997. And that “new” Grand Central Dispatch thread model in the most recent version of OS X? BeOS had something analogous from the beginning (around 1995). It was, in many ways, a perfect, highly responsive desktop OS, which (if not for the anticompetitive practices of Apple and Microsoft) could have owned a large portion of the market. Probably my favorite memory of BeOS was running the classic “BeOS is more responsive” demonstration: bringing up dozens of instances of the built in media player, each playing a different mp3, on pathetic (I did it on a Pentium MMX @ 233Mhz with 192Mb of RAM) hardware… and having them all play smoothly and mix together. I’m not sure my current machine could do that under Linux OR Win7, and it is (roughly) ten times as powerful.
This OSNews Article has a good history and perspective; the quick version is that Be, Inc. was formed largely from disenchanted former Apple employees (including Joseph Palmer, an electrical engineer/ industrial designer who I’ve always looked up to), designed themselves a revolutionary platform (hardware and software), moved to a software-only model because they couldn’t afford to maintain their hardware buisness, and were actively pushed out of the market by Apple (who took action to keep BeOS from running on new Macs, and killed the clone business, ruining the market for PPC hardware) and Microsoft (who bullied PC vendors into refusing to bundle BeOS). Before Be imploded, and had their assets bought by Palm, Apple almost bought Be as the core for the “post-classic” Mac after the Copland project failed. Instead they bought NeXT (also made up mostly ex-Apple people) for roughly Be’s asking price, and that eventually became OS X.
Best of luck to the Haiku team, a big part of me hopes that progress will continue, and sometime in the not too distant future my everyday use machine will be a Haiku box.

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HDL Testbenches

Posted on 2009-09-10 by pappp

After three classes (EE281, EE480, EE585) where I should have been taught how to write real, procedural testbenches for my digital circuit simulation instead of clicking in inputs on ISE’s (ISE is the subject of much swearing and hatred) waveform editor, there was a nominal effort to demonstrate it in EE685, and between that example and the Verilog book I bought for my own edification some time ago (It’s an OK book: I’m yet to find a HDL text I really like), I finally managed to get it down. This is important for three reasons: First: NO MORE CLICKING! I can write little procedural blocks to generate counting-order covering inputs, or other arbitrary stimulus. Second: Automatic Testing! For simple modules, I can simply write two logically equivalent but stylistically different versions, and, barring any design-level fuckups, determine that they both work by telling the simulator to compare the two version’s behavior and alert me if they differ. Third (and most signifigantly) it allows me to do my check/test/verify my modules without dealing with ISE. There are a number of free Verilog tools, most significantly Icarus Verilog, a Free (GPL) synthesis/simulation suite which seems to be well liked (and builds and installs easily on my machine), which allow me to have a whole toolchain without the hassle of maintaining my own ISE installation, or putting up with the glacially slow (despite being very, very powerful; bad configuration) lab machines for longer than is required to generate a test run to turn in for class.
Icarus looks to be an interesting challenge; it definitely doesn’t go out of it’s way to be user friendly, it requires an external tool like GTKWave to display waveforms, and it’s got some features and switches that I’m not even sure what are for, but it is documented and seems to be quite reasonable.
One feature Icarus doesn’t (AFIK) have is the ability to synthesize to the various programmable chips (which are all very, very proprietary). I do have my own FPGA board, which I got in a burst of excitement after first being exposed to FPGAs, and have never had a chance to play with as much as I’d like. Somewhere deep, deep down on the list of projects is to get a decent programming cable for it (my current one is an old parallel model), and spend some quality time playing around with it, I clearly wouldn’t be alone.

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DorkbotLex #3

Posted on 2009-05-17 by pappp

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I made it to the third Dorkbot event in Lexington yesterday, and it was again a great show. This time there were four excellent presentations of the kind of artistically tenological projects dorkbot is meant to showcase. The first presentation was Clint Davis, showing a spatially aware music controller, built from an arduino, some infrared range finders, and Pure Data. The second presentation was of a solder-free LED hula-hoop by Lauren Sherrow (pictured above). There was then a showing of Aaron Miller’s Day of Defeat-based machinima piece I, Bots, about variously self-aware bots on a DoD public server. Finally, Jordan Munson showed off his work on a new generation of electronic music interfaces, including an OpenSoundControl controller on an iPod touch, and using a wiimote as a gestural interface. At the end there was a lot of discussion about organizing social/cultural events for geeks and hackers, I wish more of the Collexion folks had been there to participate.
The better of the pictures I took are up in a flickr set.

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Stepper Drivers

Posted on 2009-05-02 by pappp

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I got a set of RepRap Stepper Driver v.2.3 kits to use for my CNC project, and was having no end of trouble with them, but finally had a breakthrough that has two of the three working…and one definitely, definitely dead; the magic smoke escaped from #3. The trick: the SOIC packages were ever so slightly bent in shipping, and I was a little too conservative in the application of solder paste, so some of the contacts around the IC were intermittent. After I finally found it, which was a little difficult because the pressure of a test probe temporarily fixed the problem, all that was needed was punching down a couple pins with a hot soldering iron. With two boards working I’m now in business to finish off the XY table.

Because I’m getting proud of it, a picture of the framing and drive for the XY table in the state it was in the other night.
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All it (just for the table) really needs mechanically now are the bolts attaching the lower lead nut assembly to the middle crossbar, and the table itself to be attached to the rails and lead nut assembly on top (need to pick up some short flathead screws to countersink in for that). To be safe it should probably also have the bearing assembly/leadscrew protector/encoder mount tubes installed where the floating brass nuts are in that picture.
The workspaces in both images are noticeably horribly, horribly messy; both pictures were taken at the end of a couple hours of work, right before cleanup. I (unsurprisingly) tend to keep my workspaces compulsively clean.

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DorkbotLex #2 – Results

Posted on 2009-04-18 by pappp

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I did make it out to this month’s DorkbotLex, the few decent pictures I took are up in a set on flickr. I especially liked the Circuit Bent Toys presentation, it did an excellent job of making circuit modification accessible for those without any engineering background, although I always feel like there should be a little bit of effort to teach the underlying mechanisms when doing that sort of thing.
Some of the equipment for Senom’s DNA extraction demo were lost in transit, so that presentation has been postponed until the next event.

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DorkbotLex #2

Posted on 2009-04-15 by pappp

A reminder in case anyone else missed the announcement when it went out, the next DorkbotLex is this coming Saturday (2009-04-18), again at CPR.
According to the announce email, the topics this time are:
– Circuit bent toys – by artist + UK School of Fine Arts new media professor Dima Strakovsky
– Phonograffiti – by Lexington based sound/visual artist Jason Corder aka OfftheSky
– Hacked electronics – by Lexington based sound artist Grynden
– Garage science – a mini workshop for everyone that [Senom Yalcin] will lead: DNA extraction using simple materials
It sounds like another good showing, I hope to have time to be there, and encourage everyone interested to come out.

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