Sparkfun LCD 09351 and some LEDs

Hooked up the Sparkfun LCD. It is unflashed but for now it will have to do!

Some LED flashing too ;D

Arduino robot project

10/10/12

With the helpful guys at Robonor.no, I've ordered the following parts for my project:

Arrived in the mail today, UNO R3 from Robonor

• Sparkfun Inventor's Kit for Arduino
• Arduino Beginner Tool Kit Robonor (Soldering kit)
• Digital Multimeter Electrical Meter DT 9205A
• Battery pack - 4xAA
• Serial Enabled 16x2 LCD - Black on Green 5V

Dagu 4 motor controller is on it's way from England!

I will eventually get the Rover5 4-engined robot, but as the Dagu controller card is hard to get, I have to put this on hold for a while. At the moment, I will have enough to do by going trough the basics! When the Rover is in place, I will get an Mega ADK board for my Android phone to utilize all the sensors.



I have ordered the Dagu controller from the UK along with an IR compund eye from RoboSavvy. I'll slip right under the 20 pound tax limit! This could take a cool 2 months 4 weeks though. (Seems he could speed it up a bit!?

Meanwhile,I'll get to program the Arduino controller and hooking up the LCD display.
Fun times!

Serial Enabled 16x2 LCD - Black on Green 5V

11/10/12

Got an old laptop from a friend for fixing his new one and installing games and a 'safe' browsing environment. Not too bad either, Dual core AMD Turion with 2 gigs and 256 mb shared gfx memory. Will probably install XP in this to use all the easily available Arduino tools, and run Linux in a VM to run electronics software.

Postal service reports that the package has been received and will probably end up here tomorrow afternoon :)

13/10/12

Picked up package today, everything was included as far as I can tell, except the 3-pin serial LCD, but i actually got a much better LCD with a mounted backpack, so this should be a serious upgrade! Thanks Robonor! Quick delivery too!

Graphic LCD Serial Backpack

Serial Graphic LCD 128x64

First testing footage

From the Circ-02 tutorial with 8 leds

Well, cannot complain, everything worked as expected!

14/10/12

Some connectors was badly soldered from the factory. Fixed that and now it should work. Pixels was all over the screen.

Some error in the manual it seems. It won't work from the 5.5v line, have to use Vin. Here you can see the Sparkfun icon!

Some software I probably need:
http://www.atmel.com/tools/AVR32STUDIO2_6.aspx

Rooting and modding Samsung Galaxy S2

If you just have to mess with your phone all the time and try out every option and setting, you'll probably have heard about replacing stock software with custom kernels and flashing in mods. This could expand battery life, give you new features and make your phone faster.

It can also render your latest phone investment as useful as a brick. Yeah, brick. That's what they call it when either you or some software you tried to run makes your phone shut down for good and it will never boot up again. So be warned, even though I am about to tell you how to possibly avoid it.

I DO NO TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR YOUR ACTIONS! YOUR PHONE IS YOUR OWN AND ANY OF THIS WILL VOID YOUR WARRANTY!

And don't try to be clever, the phone will tell your technician that you installed a custom binary. This feature is called the 'ROM counter'.

• First of all, some phones are known to have a bad FLASH chip, and this includes most versions of the Samsung Galaxy S2, from what I can read. 
• Personally I have the GT-I9100 which came with GingerBread 2.3.5. 
• If you, like me, have Samsung Kies installed (if not, do that NOW) and updated the firmware, you will discover that GingerBread 2.3.5 will be updated to Ice Cream Sandwich 4.0.4.

At this point, download the following:

• Siyah kernel - Will give you a temporary rooted phone. Get the correct version, and put it on your SD card.  (you do need an SD card)
• ClockWorkRecoveryMod (aka CWM)

There is a particular problem that seems to come with the stock ICS 4.0.4 when you install the 'clockworkrecovery' mod. Therefore, first of all you need to root your phone to be able to actually check your phone. (with Siyah)

• Heimdall Suite 1.3.2
• CyanogenMod verison 9 (aka CM)

You also want the Google Apps extras

1. At this point, you have to boot up into recovery mode, and wipe the phone and the cache. 
2. Then, load this binary into the phone. 
3. When it reboots, it will show you a yellow triangle below the Galaxy logo at bootup, and if you go to Settings->About Phone you will see that the kernel has been replaced. 
4. If you forget to wipe the cache as well, the phone will not boot. (It is not bricked, just repeat the process.)

Then download an app called eMMC checker from the Play Store. Move CM and Google Apps over to the SDcard.

1. Download eMMC Brickbug Check from Play Store
2. Run check. It will probably say 'Insane chip: Yes' and then you must check the memory, for which you need to have the phone already rooted.
3. If the memory check passes, your phone's flash chip is functioning well enough to flash the ROM, but it will still kill it of you skip to the CWM step now!

Note: Just to be clear, both the memory needs to be OK and the Siyah kernel must be installed or else you will have a dead phone before this tutorial is over.

1. Boot phone into Recovery Mode. (Home + Vol Up + Power.
2. Hold until logo appears, release keys.
3. You will be presented with the recovery menu. Some phones has alternate combinations.

Lastly:

1. Wipe and factory reset
2. Wipe cache
3. Install CM from SDcard
4. Install Apps from SDcard
5. Reboot phone

Now, when you reboot, the phone will be a completely different beast. Modded or not, the S2 and S3 are  formidable devices, featuring multi-core CPU and GPU processing, as well as standardized USB connectors, an array of special-purpose sensor chips and last, but not least, a Linux-based operating system to glue it all together. With the right add-ons installed, your phone is essentially a powerful hand-held computer that can be used for a multitude of uses. While the comparison  is not fair, I would guess an S2 outperforms 5 year old laptops.

I think this was everything. Please comment if I missed something.

Anyway, here's the result:

Removing and installing Widcomm drivers

Trying to cut down on my heavy headset casualty record, I needed something wireless. I got Teknikmagasinet's custom BT500 headset. My 1-2 year old Targus Bluetooth USB mini dongle would not run handsfree audio correctly under the supplied Vista drivers. Even Windows 7 pointed me to new drivers available from Broadcom, so I downloaded these drivers. This software complains about old BlueTooth software already installed, only problem is there was no uninstaller. Uninstalling drivers from device manager did not do it. After some testing, I found this to work:

On another Win7 box:

1. Disable automatic driver updates
2. Insert dongle 
3. Answer no to install WHQ drivers
4. Wait until all the USB discovering is over... could take a minute or two. (does not depend on your computer speed!)
5. Install SE software
6. Answer yes to all drivers from here on
7. I had to cancel and reinsert dongle during device verification
8. Copy Users/User/Appdate/Widcomm/Software to target machine

On target machine:

1. Repeat steps 1-4
2. Install retail drivers
3. Install software from other box

I ended up having an unknown defect device in the device manager but everything works. So it appears the old 64 bit drivers from Vista works, only the software itself needed to be upgraded. Choosing this approach was better than a system reinstall, and not even 1 hour in regedit would let me hack my way out of the Widcomm registry mess.

Recording studio box setup. (Updated)

This is a single core P4 2.39Ghz on an Intel board with a pretty standard SoundMax AC97 integrated audio, driving a secondary sound monitor.



It's centered around a EWS 88MT system (Digital 8 track recorder with external breakbox), PCI, used as main recording hardware. There's also two FireWire connectors on a PCI card I just added in case I would ever need it.


I have a ESP Ltd F200 guitar hooked to a Fender Mustang 1 guitar amp by USB in addition to regular cabling, of course. The only problem here is that the audio jack will be disabled when you connect the USB and fire up the Mustang software. So if you need the advanced amp settings, you need to store them locally on the amp it self. (Not true, I had some setup errors.) The only feature I miss from the Mustang is to be able to monitor the guitar trough the amp itself while also pushing the signal trough the jack out. (Which doubles as line out)

Also, a Creative Soundblaster Live! PCI card for driving a Sony Digital Amplifier (not pictured yet) for main monitoring.

EWS88MT front connectors

Overview

The Fender amp doesn't have a line out, but it has a phone jack which can be used.

Special cable resembling a parallell cable connects the breakbox to a PCI card. (bottom card)
It also has digital out/in jacks and a mini jack monitor output.

Drivers for the 88MT can be found at TerraTec's FTP server
There is drivers for Linux, 98->XP.
Supposedly the download for Phase88 (mixer app for the card) contains drivers that should work with Windows 7. (citation needed!)

This setup gave a very clear guitar recording. A very very slight hiss could be heard at times when I did not touch the guitar. Much better than onboard capturing that usually records PCI bus noise as well. I can't tell if the almost non-existing noise was from the amp or the computer I played it back at.

Installing a good digital amp reduced playback noise considerably as well. Initially I had a Nvidia GeForce FX 5500 card installed, but I decided to downgrade to the fanless 440MX card instead to further reduce system noise. I could also turn off both the NIC and onboard audio as well as other controllers if I wanted, but it seems pretty quiet now.

Only having one video monitor, I use Nvidia's virtual desktop to have separate desktops for recording, mixer panels, and so on. Also, I spent a good hour on setting the computer up for being mostly mouse driven. Added window autofocus, and had all studio applications pinned to the start menu, etc. This is pretty handy when you're still holding the guitar while needing to do something on the computer.

Applications used:


GNU Solfege, for ear training
Reaper for recording, has low latency, comprehensible UI and a good routing/monitoring interface
Audacity and CoolEdit for secondary editing. CoolEdit used to be my favourite (now Adobe Audition) but it did not play nice with my hardware this time)
VLC and FooBar2000 for media playback, will probably reinstall WinAmp again purely for the fact that it is the only application I know that rewinds on pressing the arrow keys. (Vital for my guitar practice)

This is now pretty much a self contained studio and could be moved around to do various recordings. It can to at least 8 tracks at once, though both the SoundBlaster and the integrated audio has more recording slots. The breakbox has one additional 9 pin mic as wel,l and it's card has two SPDIF's as well. All this at 16, 24 or 32 bits samples up to 96Khz. Seems most of the audio hardware and drivers are proper, since the CPU seems rather unaffected by activity in the audio applications.

Specs for my once planned 2007 gaming rig

So I found some notes in a worksheet about the first "Dual CPU" computer I was going to build. I thought I was going to laugh at the performance, but actually, it's a machine I'd actually rather still have! I wonder how many fully functional Tyan boards got dumped by companies :(

One option was the Tyan Thunder S2895A2NRF (image from NewEgg)

 K8WE Dual Core Opteron DDR400 SATAII Audio GbE LAN IEEE1394a USB2.0

Specs: Dual CPU, Single/Dual Core Opteron (Socket 940) 800Mhz HT, North Bridge: NVidia 2200 and 2050 as well as an AMD8131 memory controller. 8x184 pins DDR 400 PC3200 (Total 16 Gb ECC/REG RAM). 1xPCI, 2xPCI-X 100Mhz,1xPCI-X 133Mhz and 2xPCI Express x16 for NVidia SLI. 1xATA, 4xSATA 3Gbps, RAID0+1+10.Dual Gbps ethernet ports. 4xUSB2.0

That's a "Dual CPU Dual Core|" with 16 GB and SLI support. My current board has 16GB, a single hex-core CPU and two more SATA ports. Oh, and it has DDR3 and 2xUSB3.

That is an impressive rig even by todays standards. That motherboard was from 2007. The rig would be about 2300 USD. (2007 rating). That's excluding PSU, case, mouse and keyboard! The current rig I have was about 1300 USD (2012 rating).

I was going to populate it with two Opteron 225 (Single Core, the Dual Core was too expensive), two 7900GT's and 8x1GB of DDR400 RAM. Which would probably just give me 4GB since it was probably arranged so each core was linked to a bank.

The other was a Tyan Thunder S2882UG3NR (image also from NewEgg)

It had similar specs, but the first one was slightly superior for gaming. This was more of a server board.

RAID monster Redux

So the first build was a lot of work and shortcuts were made. Screws not fitted, no cable management, no extra cooling, etc.

The summer is coming and that means hotter indoor temperature. Better fit those extra fans now! It will surely extend the lifetime of both the disks and the computer.

I had a whole bunch of Akasa & Noctua voltage reducers to decrease the overall noise level of all the fans.

System seemd to average at around 26 degrees celsius according to Speccy. :D Room temperature is 25.1. So that's pretty decend. That machine runs 10 hardisks, a Phenom 960T, 4 GB of 1066Mhz RAM + 10 fans. It only runs a limited 64MB old Nvidia card at the moment. This rig draws about 197 watts, So the fitting of 10 fans increased the watt usage by about 10, even after ALL of then was fitted with voltage reducers.

Work in progres! 

80mm fan attached with softmounts, diagonally :)

Rear fans & PSU fan:

1. 2x80mm rear exhausts and a stock Phenom fan
2. 1x80mm internal intake
3. 1x80mm external intake

Front intakes: (Both covered with dust filters.)

1x120mm Akasa (SYSFAN)

1x80mm Somethingsomething (power siphoned from molex)

Cable managemnet done!

Custom fitted 120 and 80 mm fans blwing on the
side of the lower 6 disks trough chassis holes

Finished ! With a 8mm green led outtake in front of the CPU fan.

The Demise of a Harddisk

So, you don't need to be a computer expert to have realized that Maxtor harddisk are about the lowest quality disks you can buy. My stack here of about 7 broken Maxtor Disks, while almost every other disk (newer or older) works fine.

So here's how a Maxtor drive eels it way trough detection mechanisms before they go titsup without warning.

I had two 320GB Maxtor harddisks (salvaged from their horrible OneTouch external USB drives with notoriously faulty controllers)

So here is what's inside one of these:
Some custom IDE-2-USB interface
That disk is a regular 3.5" IDE drive.

When the controller fails (as both mine did about at the same time) you can take the disks out, they are still (Maxtorwize) ok.
It was two such disks that became one of the RAID0's in my file server.
I set up in RAID0 on a Medley RAID SiL controller. Suddenly my clients complain about the drive not beeing available.


Just some time before before this, I noticed that one of the drives had trouble syncing speed up to the other drive. I could hear it ticking, like 2-3 times per hour. That's how I got suspicious first. Since then, I proactively moved stuff from the drive to another drive (after a proper checksum check).

I then check out the fileserver with the RAID, and lo and behold, the controller software had issued warnings about a drive. Their SMART status was OK, but still the RAID controller was complaining.

So I am beginning to think that Maxtor drives fakes their SMART status and dies off without any warning.

Right now I am shuffling about as much as I can from the RAID :)

Anyway, after a 3rd reboot of the fileserver, and stopping other clients from accesing that RAID, I seem to be able to move files from it, uninterrupted, locally on the machine. I just hope this will hold until the disk dies. I'll reconfigure the two disks to RAID1 and wait for the first one to fail. At least then I've only lost 320GB of free space and not 640GB of stuff. (That particular RAID was purely a playground and download setup.)

I have a RAID10 setup of WD disks, let's just say I have a lot more confidence in that! Also I have a spare disk for that RAID should it ever become needed !

UPDATE: May 8th 2012:
The RAID10 actually failed! It went better than expected

So I had to do a summarization of the hardware we got going here.

CPU power:
AMD Turion(?)   x4  1.5Ghz (laptop)
AMD Phenom II x6, 3.4Ghz (game rig)
AMD Phenom II x4 3.4 Ghz (fileserver)
Intel Pentium 4         1.8Ghz (firewall)
Intel Celeron             1.4Ghz (sec)
Intel Celeron             1.5Ghz (offline)

=                                44.7Ghz

Memory:
4x1 Kingston HyperX 4.00GB
4x4 Kingston HyperX 16.GB
Laptop DDR                512 MB
Laptop DDR                512 MB
P4 DDR2                     1GB
Laptop                         6GB

=                                  28GB RAM

Disk:

320GB Raid 10
640GB Raid 0
320GB Raid 0
500GB Raid 0
5 TB External
80 GB SSD
250GB Sata
320 Sata
160 GB Samsung
30 GB Laptop
600 GB Laptop
+++

= 8,2 TB Space (More than that including Raid spares++, probably around 10TB total)

GPU: Any combinaton of these. I can run CrossFire CL and PhysX at the same time.
2x6790 2GB VRAM CF OPENCL
1x8800GT 512MB VRAM PHYSX
GeFore MX440 PCIe Edition, 64MB

Laptop GPUs
1xAMD Mobile CF2 512MB
2xIntel915 Some variants of therse 32MBx2

GigaBit Switched Network. JF4.
OS: Win7, Debian based security software, Several distros that follows rule #1 will be more than happy to accomodate your needs in case you break the ISP router. Here be dragons, if that wasn't obvious enough.

ISP 25/5 Line, no quota. :D
Power drain: Probably around 1KW per hour when all computers goes max settings and troughput.


Now the question is: Will it run Beowulf? Or skynet!

Gaming: PS2 on HDMI trough your computer!

So you have all these cool PS2 games but you have no hardware that supports a composite cable anymore, do you? No, all you have is HDMI, DVI and maybe VGA. Well there's a reasonable solution to all this!

I got something called EasyCap, which is a capturing device that goes into the a USB2 port. On the installation disk is drivers and Ulead Visual Studio. The serial code is printed on the CD.

Here's how it looks: (the black cable is a S-Video cable)

The only drawback with this cheap device is that the sound capture chip only does 8Khz mono. So what i did was attach a female-to-two-male cable from the PlayStation into my stereo. Here's my Visio skillz for the schematics:

BAM, you get good sound. They look like this: (Obviously they probably need to be longer!)

So far I have not been able to get a widescreen live capture going on in Ulead Visual Studio, but it might be some configuration thing somewhere (The program asks you on startup if you want 16:9). Maybe it is EasyCap that can't do 16:9.

Anyway, the 4:3 picture I got on the 27" 1920x1080 from the humble PS2 was at least very impressive.

How to save your AMD Phenom 960T CPU with a broken pin

So I bought this Phenon II X4 Black Edition and put it into my MSI K9A2+ mobo. Then I bought a Noctua SE fan and all was going well. Until I discovered that the Promise RAID controller on the card did not work and the advertised 1Gbit ethernet port is actually just 100Mbps, that is.

Since the retailers (komplett.no) are complete jerks I  had to buy a new motherboard.

So then I bougth the excellent Gigabyte 990FXA UD7 board, in which that new 960T actually fits if you have BIOS v7 on the Gigabyte board installed.

When the new board arrived, the old MSI mobo wasn't even cold before I started to pull out the *heavy* Noctua fan long before the cooling paste had changed to 'cold state' and at the same time the Noctua fan kind of had a disagreement with Newton. And WHOOPS I ripped the 960T straight out of the socket. A lot of the pins were bent but I did not see any broken pins. So far. BTW, this pocket knife is perfect and widely available to use for CPU pin straigthening. First run it sharp edge up, then sharp edge down along 'bent lanes' of pins:

Better than MacGyvers pocket knife!

I put the 960T into the UD7 board. No post, just a mystical hex value 0x88 on the mobo POST indicator (pretty fancy!). After some Googling, I figured out that code means dead CPU. So a pin must have broken.

I had already put my old Athlon X2 back in the MSI board as as backup computer and it worked. I then disassembled it, shook the mobo over some pieces of newpaper and wouldn't you know, a pin from the 960T had been in there at the same time as the Athlon X2 was running fine!

So the next project was of course to get the 960T working again in the old mobo.

Here's the AM2+ socket, and I circled in red which hole it is that corresponds to the CPU.

Here's a blurry (sorry) picture of the location of the broken pin (it's the opposite of the triangle-mark side)

And here is the CPU pin, which still is not in the socket slot. How come ?!

 I lost that 960T pin about 6-7 times and I could not find it when I had finally figured out a way to securely insert the pin into the AM2+ socket. So I gave up an said to myself, well I do have a an old Pentium 3 1.4Ghz lying around, I'll just snap off a pin and use that instead!

Poor Pentium III got it's pin cut off :(

Then after a lot of Benny Hilling around that night, my old computer finally posted!

My 960T finally posted! YAY!

 And that's the story of how a Pentium III saved a Phenom II X4 960T. If anyone needs any tips for doing this, I can safely say I have the know-how now!

Super AMD Spider platform achieved!

AMD Spider Components:

• K9A2 Platinum
• Phenom II X4 960T factory core overclocked to of 3.4Ghz and all four cores run at 3 Ghz.
• 2x Sapphire Radeon 6770 in CrossFire
• 4x1 GB Kingston HyperX PC8500 gives me 1066 DRAM speed too!
  
  
• 1x Intel 320 SSD at 80 GB
• 2x Samsung 160GB in SATA/Windows striped RAID 0
• 2x Maxtor 320GB in SATA RAID on independent PCI controller!
• 1x Corsair TX 750 Watt
• 1x Noctua  double fanned coppercoil hybrid cooler fan

Sapphire cards are somewhat unstable at overclocking, even factory overclocked ones.   None of the 10-12 temperature sensors stays between 25 and 50!

I did a FULL overclock of both CPU and GPU (max settings CPU at 3600, GPU at 900 etc but I got artifacts in Crysis! Going to slowly overclock bit by bit until i have a stable rig!

Oh yeah did i mention i paid under $2000 (10000 NOK) for this self build project!