Silly video first…

It is quite a neat little watch for $50, the default factory firmware has enough features on it for most purposes that you wouldn’t need to touch it to use it in a typical application.  I know someone who is using it as a watch…

There’s enough information floating on the Internet about this already, with very useful information on the TI Wiki.  Annoyingly though, most of the information floating around is in bits and pieces and in some cases plain wrong.  I ended up writing a quick Python library and was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to access most of the watch functions, the main ones of being able to read the accelerometer and button press data.

With a Python library in hand, I tried using it to remote control the Mecanum Wheel Rover.  And as seen in the video above, not very impressive results and the problem wasn’t in my code.

I’m not sure if it is the 433Mhz version and the fact that there isn’t enough space for a decent antenna, but the range was horrendous.  I would lose complete control of the rover at around 2.5 metres and anything over 1.5 metres was hit and miss.  Considering the average human height, the Chronos (or at least my 433Mhz one) is pretty must useless for direct remote control purposes.  Using it as a wireless door lock mechanism?  That’s probably a good use for it  Any other ideas what I can use this watch for?

Back to WiFi/RFM12Bs and nRF24L01+s for remote control!

If anyone is interested, here is a slightly messy Python library for interfacing to it :-
TIChronos.py_2010-01-09

I’ll tidy it up later when I have time or when I come up with a use for the watch

The ‘quick and nasty’ software files are still the same as in the previous post.  Pure software test only, couldn’t resist the temptation to try it via WiFi on a stock Chumby instead of USB tethering.  As such the hardware frame is a bit too flimsy and the batteries aren’t enough to power the Chumby without brown-out resets.  These will be improved upon soon

This demonstrates the ‘touch’ (initialize) and ‘swipe’ (move/offset) control on touch screens.  Will try the DeviceMotion Javascript API on iOS 4.2 devices (iPhone 4G/iPad) if I can get my hands on that filth…

Video!

Previous Posts :-

• http://www.madox.net/blog/2010/12/19/mecanum-wheel-base/
• http://www.madox.net/blog/2010/12/24/mecanum-wheel-base-software-test/

I didn’t want to fiddle around with getting power to the Chumby, so the test is simply using my trusty old laptop and the EasySync adapter.  Only the speedometer, the tachometer and the accelerator pedal position is attached because again I’m too lazy to fiddle with my cable layout and as such its connected to the Mazda HS-Can bus only rather than the MS-Can where the goodie trip computer information is contained.

Almost every concoction of technology is used ranging from CAN, USB, PHP, HTTP, Shared Memory, XML, Flash, to an obscure programming language called HaXe.  Here is the result :-

The flash movie was set to 6 frames per second and the responsiveness of the data was superb.  I think I’ve stated before that the CAN speed data differs to the one displayed on the instrumentation cluster and this again really shows at higher speeds.

All I need to do now is to try it on a Chumby, there should be no portability issues as I’ve tested both flash and php on the Chumby before.

So does anyone have any comments and suggestions on the GUI and what else I could put on it?

Neat little package

The toys just keep coming in!  Another one of those wallet killing impulsive orders whilst I was sick in bed last week just arrived today, a USB-CAN bus converter module by EasySync that promises a great interface and should work in Linux!  This will give a little bump start to my Mazda CAN Bus / mChumby projects.

Note : EasySync UK’s online form doesn’t allow international shipping but a short E-mail or two managed that.  There is a US subsidiary with US and international shipping, but the international shipping rates on the US site is plain ridiculous [$68USD to ship a $88 device to Australia].

Note 2 : I hear the interface is mimicking the Lawicel CAN-USB interface…only hearsay…

Plugged it in – didn’t work.  Doh!  Took a peek at the manual and website, nothing on Linux other than “Linux drivers provided”… So much for the marketing material, guess I have to try make it work myself.  (Yes I got it working, read on for the quick run-down post aimed at helping others)

Sneak peek inside the box

Now with the photos out of the way, a little bit of detective work is ahead of us… why doesn’t this thing work… I paid so much money for it to replace the qprotos adapter!

A little bit of lsusb (or cat /proc/bus/usb/devices if you’ve got usbdevfs) sleuthing later…

Bus 003 Device 004: ID 0403:fac6 Future Technology Devices International, Ltd
Device Descriptor:
 bLength                18
 bDescriptorType         1
 bcdUSB               2.00
 bDeviceClass            0 (Defined at Interface level)
 bDeviceSubClass         0
 bDeviceProtocol         0
 bMaxPacketSize0         8
 idVendor           0x0403 Future Technology Devices International, Ltd
 idProduct          0xfac6
 bcdDevice            6.00
 iManufacturer           1 EasySync
 iProduct                2 USB2-F-7001 CAN-Plus Adapter
 iSerial                 3 ESNFWLPL
 bNumConfigurations      1
 Configuration Descriptor:
 bLength                 9
 bDescriptorType         2
 wTotalLength           32
 bNumInterfaces          1
 bConfigurationValue     1
 iConfiguration          0
 bmAttributes         0x80
 (Bus Powered)
 MaxPower              150mA
 Interface Descriptor:
 bLength                 9
 bDescriptorType         4
 bInterfaceNumber        0
 bAlternateSetting       0
 bNumEndpoints           2
 bInterfaceClass       255 Vendor Specific Class
 bInterfaceSubClass    255 Vendor Specific Subclass
 bInterfaceProtocol    255 Vendor Specific Protocol
 iInterface              2 USB2-F-7001 CAN-Plus Adapter
 Endpoint Descriptor:
 bLength                 7
 bDescriptorType         5
 bEndpointAddress     0x81  EP 1 IN
 bmAttributes            2
 Transfer Type            Bulk
 Synch Type               None
 Usage Type               Data
 wMaxPacketSize     0x0040  1x 64 bytes
 bInterval               0
 Endpoint Descriptor:
 bLength                 7
 bDescriptorType         5
 bEndpointAddress     0x02  EP 2 OUT
 bmAttributes            2
 Transfer Type            Bulk
 Synch Type               None
 Usage Type               Data
 wMaxPacketSize     0x0040  1x 64 bytes
 bInterval               0
Device Status:     0x0000
 (Bus Powered)

Yup definitely a FTDI device, even with the FTDI vendor ID (Did I mention I love FTDI?).  Looks like EasySync decided they wanted their own unique product ID, unfortunately that means the vanilla ftdi_sio drive won’t pick it up without a little bit of coercing.

The little bit of coercing goes like…

modprobe ftdi_sio vendor=0×0403 product=0xfac6

And bingo…

[ 6372.229046] usb 2-2: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 3
[ 6372.437247] usb 2-2: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
[ 6372.439834] ftdi_sio 2-2:1.0: FTDI USB Serial Device converter detected
[ 6372.439872] usb 2-2: Detected FT232RL
[ 6372.439934] usb 2-2: FTDI USB Serial Device converter now attached to ttyUSB0

Using putty to connect to ttyUSB0 at 115200, and typing “H” followed by “Enter” gives us

=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~= PuTTY log 2009.06.30 21:23:18 =~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=
H
List of Supported Commands
O - Open CAN Channel
C - Close CAN Channel
t - Transmit Standard Frame
T - Transmit Extended Frame
F - Read Status Flag
V - USB2-F-7001 Version
N - Serial Number of USB2-F-7001
Z - TimeStamp Option On/Off
S - Set CAN Bit Rate
s - Set BRGCON Registers
m - Set Acceptance Mask
M - Set Acceptance Filter
B - Enter Bootload Mode
L - Set Listen Mode
E - Clear Buffers and Echo Char
R - Reset USB2-F-7001
H, ? or h - Help on USB2-F-7001 Commands

Only problem is that its Mac style line endings.  Even the append CR to LF option in putty is useless because the stream seems to be CR without LF…  Doesn’t hurt too much except displaying it is a bit annoying.

The EasySync USB-CAN adapter’s pinout is pretty much standard DB9 for CAN Bus and all I had to do was connect my existing J1962 (aka OBD-II aka DLC-2) cable on and onto the car I went.

A couple of short “S6″ (500kbps) “L” (Open connection for listen mode) commands later, I had CAN data being spat back at me

t04680601FF0000000000
t04680601FF0000000000
t04680601FF0000000000
t04680601FF0000000000
t04680601FF0000000000
t20F8FFFF27104000FF01
t2118FFFF000040000001
t4B082710271027102710
t19080000000000000000

All is good…except I just deleted my Chumby Development Virtual Machine a few hours ago…ooops…another day before I use this neat little adapter for mChumby.

How to install Adobe Flash Plugin 64 Bit for Ubuntu 9.04

A lot of the tutorials/guides online will tell you to use nspluginwrapper or similar.  Adobe has released an ‘alpha’ version of their 64 bit player which is pretty stable so far…

Download it from :-http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10.html

Unpack the archive and copy the only file to the Firefox plugins folder in ‘/usr/lib/firefox-addons/plugins‘ :-

sudo cp libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/firefox-addons/plugins

How to install Skype 64 bit for Ubuntu 9.04

You would think you could just go to www.skype.com and ask for a download and it’ll be like the Adobe site detecting that you have a 64 bit system right?  Wrong (at time of writing).  Annoyingly that’ll just let you download an i386 package!

You could manually remedy this by downloading the AMD64 .deb package from :-
http://www.skype.com/go/getskype-linux-ubuntu-amd64

Everything else?

So far the respositories have been kind to me… but i’ll update if I run into any other troubles

Voila happy 64 bit Ubuntu’ing.

I hope this post is useful for other people, but its really a lazy way of me bookmarking everything in-case I have to do it again.

Before anyone I know asks “Why didn’t you use (Insert Linux Variant Here)?”, its because linux has poor language input capabilities for any language other than English.  Windows Vista has in-built character recognition for a plethora of languages and most tablets are sold with software written for Windows.

Anyway that’s probably the last pro-Microsoft paragraph you’ll get out of me…So what did I download for dad?

OpenOffice

In my opinion one of the best suites of open-source software out there, OpenOffice will basically do anything Microsoft Office will do but for free.  From doing your expenses to writing up reports and articles, OpenOffice will do it for you.

Office 2007 onwards annoyed the hell out of me with the non-intuitive ribbons interface.  OpenOffice retains the old but tried menu system so I can teach/help my dad over the phone quite easily.

Comodo Internet Security

After the collapse of Kerio Personal Firewall I switched to Comodo Firewall (aka Comodo Internet Security).  It’s easy to set up and offered free without any feature limitations by Comodo.  The Defense+ element of the software might be annoying for some users though…

Remember, the standard Windows Firewall is next to useless!

AVG Anti-Virus

Any windows machine for a new computer user MUST be set-up with decent anti-virus software.  I’ve used AVG for probably around 10 years now and it has worked great.  It may not rate the highest in detection tests and benchmarks but its free, easy to use and updates regularly.

VLC Media Player

I’m not a fan of Windows Media Player, I either use Media Player Classic or VLC.  For my dad I opted to install VLC to keep the install clean of odd-ball codecs from strange sources.

VLC will play almost all video formats except for a few proprietary ones (e.g. RealMedia).

Foxit PDF Reader

Inevitably when surfing the web one would come across articles or papers in the ubiquitous ‘PDF’ format.  Adobe’s free reader has in my opinion become bloated and slow, while Foxit’s alternative is lightweight and fast.

A new version 3 has just been released and I have some issues with this new version (program is slow to close), however you can still download and install the old 2.4 versions if you like.

Firefox

Might be going slightly out of order when I mentioned surfing the web.  I will not allow my dad, a new computer user to browse the web using Internet Explorer – it’ll just be a disaster waiting to happen.

Firefox is standards compliant and is extremely powerful when combined with useful add-ons such as Adblock Plus, NoScript, and FireGestures (just to name a few I installed for him).  Search for these via Firefox->Tools->Add-ons.

Picasa

I wasn’t a great fan of Picasa but I recently revisited it after needing to look at geodata (GPS Co-ordinates) embedded within exif data and was I surprised.  The new version 3 incorporates a very quick image viewer to replace Window’s annoying image previewer that mangles your photos if you rotate them for viewing!  The interface is swift and useable, great for my mom to view her happy snaps.

Skype

With a family scattered over the four corners of the Earth (I think there’s an average distance of 6000km between each of the 4 siblings…), dad will definitely need an internet chat/phone program.  Skype fits the bill perfectly being free and used by all my family with one of the best quality video and audio I’ve seen.

There’s even paid options to ring landlines and mobiles (overseas of local) from the comfort of the home PC using the ‘Skype-Out’ service.

That’s it folks!

That is it for the bare essentials!  There may be other software utilities such as 7-Zip other’s may consider essential, but this is where I’ve drawn my line for the usage needs of my dad.

Do you think I’ve missed out on anything (for use for the average new computer user)?

I’ve recently signed up Ponoko’s Prime account and wanted to get something made.  I rather into a rather annoying problem, Alibre Xpress doesn’t have a SVG export.  I needed a way to design something and export it as SVG.

I’ll admit the long post title is a problem too

A possible solution?

After searching the forums for a solution… I stumbled across a very promising method by using Alibre to export to DXF, using OpenOffice draw to import the DXF and then save-as SVG.  Summary result – it didn’t work.  OpenOffice had trouble opening the DXF file and so did the developmental release of Inkscape which includes a native DXF import.

Scratch that.

Google SketchUp?

Then I thought of using Google SketchUp instead of Alibre Xpress because there was the possibility that it’ll work under Ubuntu with Wine rather than me popping back to windows just to use Alibre [Which doesn't work with Wine].  First of all, I couldn’t get it working with Wine because of my laptop graphics card, but apparently it works for other people if you follow the winehq wiki help.  But I wasn’t going to give up… back to windows I go and some more googling research later I stumbled upon some interesting plugins for google sketchup.

SVG Outline Export Plugin

Flight of ideas has created a plug-in for the purpose of exporting SketchUp models into Ponoko friendly SVG files.  Go to his blog or the plug-in page for intructions on how to install and use the plugin, but here are some screenshots to get you interested.

Yup its kinda that easy to use...

Parametric Modeling in Google SketchUp?

Driving Dimensions is a sketchup plugin that attempts to add parametric capabilities onto sketchup.  I’m pretty sure this is a pretty well kept secret because there weren’t all that many people that have downloaded this plug-in (I was the 938th person).  Whilst it is an interesting concept, functionality is rather limited on the current early releases.  Basically you can add linear dimensions and angular dimensions onto lines/objects/whatever and the plugin will manage the these parametric constraints for you.  While it sounds good, in practice its still a nightmare to use because the sheer amount of (dimension) constraints you have to add to fully constrain a sketch.

So many constraints for such a simple piece

Comparison - So much easier in Alibre...

Scratch this idea too…

Alibre has a Google SketchUp export plugin!

Hidden away (I couldn’t find the navigation link at all from the alibre webpage!) and apparently only accessible if you know the exact name of the plugin and by a google search is the Alibre 3D Publisher (linked to save you the pain).  This plugin allows for direct export to Google Sketchup as a version 6 file which can be used with SketchUp 7.

Alibre 3D Publisher Plugin - Is it an STL export in disguise?

Ouch, what are all those triangles if you turn on view hidden geometry in sketchup?  It looks like everything has been triangulated and the svg plugin export picks up all those as individual faces.  One way to ‘fix this’ is to manually select these edges and delete them.  Another way is to automate the process somewhat with a ‘Ruby script’.  But both are too messy for my liking.  The plugin isn’t right for me to use for SVG exporting, but its great for getting a model into sketchup for viewing.

Back to square one…the DXF export…and it works!

While writing this I thought I’ll try the DXF export again and realised that Google SketchUp reads the Alibre Xpress DXFs pretty well.

It goes something like this…

1. Design and Model in Alibre Xpress
2. Export the ‘drawing’ in DXF
3. Import into Google SketchUp.
4. Use the Flight of Ideas SVG export plugin

Voila, SVG for ponoko… its messy but hey it works.  Maybe one day I’ll consider using Inkscape by itself…

Edit : Be careful on the Google SketchUp import because it defaults to ‘feet’ as the units!  If you modeled in ‘mm’ then things go horribly big.  Click ‘Options’ on the import open dialog before you press OK and select the right units!

Why do I need a toolchain for programming ARMs?

1. I found a LPC2378-STK development board in my room
2. I want to give ARM programming a try (PS WinAVR is great for programming AVRs)
3. I found I have some spare ARM7 LPC2378′s lying around (WTF?) and thought I’ll actually complete my Chumby Speedometer on my car project!

The compile process should be pretty straight forward, but I made a few stuffup’s along the way.

• I had originally wanted to keep it neat and install to a new directory, then the PATH annoyance thing hit me.  Setting the path under my user shell didn’t carry over when using sudo which is required to make install.  Solved using sudo -s, but then in the end i just redid it all and installed to /usr/local/.
• Realised (should have known) that you need ‘GMP’ and ‘MPFR’ to compile GCC.  Available as packages libgmp3-dev and libmpfr-dev in Ubuntu.
• Did my usual of forgetting to set up the prefix install location when configuring…minor boo boo

Setting it all up

Install any packages you need… build-essential is probably essential… GMP and MPFR could be got by using

sudo apt-get install libgmp3-dev libmpfr-dev

Set-up some directories…I opted to use create an ‘arm-elf’ directory in my home to hold both the source and build directories…

cd ~
mkdir arm-elf arm-elf/src
cd ~/arm-elf/src

Get the latest sources…

Get the latest sources for binutils, gcc, newlib, insight (click the links if you need).  The versions I used should be obvious from the filenames below.  Just be wary that the insight front page is not kept up to date but you’ll find the latest if you follow any of the release links anyway.

wget http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/binutils/binutils-2.19.tar.bz2
wget http://gcc.releasenotes.org/releases/gcc-4.3.2/gcc-4.3.2.tar.bz2
wget ftp://sources.redhat.com/pub/newlib/newlib-1.16.0.tar.gz
wget ftp://sourceware.org/pub/insight/releases/insight-6.8.tar.bz2

Unpack the sources…

tar -xvjf binutils-2.19.tar.bz2
tar -xvjf gcc-4.3.2.tar.bz2
tar -xvzf newlib-1.16.0.tar.gz
tar -xvjf insight-6.8.tar.bz2

Tweak the gcc source config…

Make a minor config tweak to the gcc source.  Edit gcc-4.3.2/gcc/config/arm/t-arm-elf and append mno-thumb-interwork/mthumb-interwork after MULTILIB_OPTIONS and normal interwork after MULTILIB_DIRNAMES.  I used nano, see the screenshot below if I haven’t been too clear

nano ~/arm-elf/src/gcc-4.3.2/gcc/config/arm/t-arm-elf

Start building with fingers crossed…

Now we can start building the toolchain.  Note my prefix is /usr/local.  First off binutils!

cd ~/arm-elf/
mkdir build build/binutils-2.19 build/insight-6.8 build/gcc-4.3.2 build/newlib-1.16.0

cd ~/arm-elf/build/binutils-2.19
~/arm-elf/src/binutils-2.19/configure –target=arm-elf –prefix=/usr/local –enable-interwork –enable-multilib –with-float=soft –disable-werror
sudo make all install

Next just the gcc part of gcc…note we configure the newlib src headers here…

cd ~/arm-elf/build/gcc-4.3.2
~/arm-elf/src/gcc-4.3.2/configure –target=arm-elf –prefix=/usr/local –enable-interwork –enable-multilib –with-float=soft –disable-werror –enable-languages=”c,c++” –with-newlib  –with-headers=~/arm-elf/src/newlib-1.16.0/newlib/libc/include
sudo make all-gcc install-gcc

Now newlib…

cd ~/arm-elf/build/newlib-1.16.0
~/arm-elf/src/newlib-1.16.0/configure –target=arm-elf –prefix=/usr/local –enable-interwork –enable-multilib –with-float=soft –disable-werror
sudo make all install

Coming back for the rest off gcc (needed newlib)

cd ~/arm-elf/build/gcc-4.3.2
sudo make all install

…and finally insight gdb

cd ~/arm-elf/build/insight-6.8
~/arm-elf/src/insight-6.8/configure –target=arm-elf –prefix=/usr/local –enable-interwork –enable-multilib –with-float=soft –disable-werror
sudo make all install

Voila done!  I should now have all my arm-elf tools!  Just a check…

madox@madox-laptop:/usr/local/bin$ ls arm*
arm-elf-addr2line  arm-elf-gcc        arm-elf-insight  arm-elf-run
arm-elf-ar         arm-elf-gcc-4.3.2  arm-elf-ld       arm-elf-size
arm-elf-as         arm-elf-gccbug     arm-elf-nm       arm-elf-strings
arm-elf-c++        arm-elf-gcov       arm-elf-objcopy  arm-elf-strip
arm-elf-c++filt    arm-elf-gdb        arm-elf-objdump
arm-elf-cpp        arm-elf-gdbtui     arm-elf-ranlib
arm-elf-g++        arm-elf-gprof      arm-elf-readelf

Yup all there and runs   Now the search for the LPC header files… argh

PS : If you copy and paste my commands, be wary of line breaks… I didn’t put \’s anywhere…

Gimp should come pre-installed with Ubuntu.  If you don’t have it installed for any reason (uninstalled?), install it using the command :

sudo apt-get install gimp

Next you need UFRaw which is a utility to read and manipulate raw images from digital cameras.  Or in our case, it is better to use the GIMP UFRaw plugin.  Get it by using the command :

sudo apt-get install gimp-ufraw

Now wasn’t that easy?  Now all you need to do is simply right click on any .CR2 file, Select Open With > Open With “Gimp Image Editor” and GIMP UFRaw dialog should appear like below.

UFRaw Dialog

I had to collapse some of the options to make the dialog appear on my small laptop (800 vertical pixel) screen, so if you can’t see the “OK” button don’t fret and resize the window.  There are a few options you can tweak with before you need to click “OK” as shown below.

UFRaw Dialog Options

There’s crop options too… but wonder why the ‘usual’ print aspects aren’t there

More UFRaw Options

And finally, the CR2 raw image makes its way into GIMP for glorious editing… I think I’ll add whiskers and cat’s ears to her face now…

CR2 image opened in GIMP

This post is dedicated to Andy Au!

 ________________________________________
/ This is a very very useful and         \
| productive program available in Ubuntu |
\ and other Debian distributions...      /
 ----------------------------------------
        \   ^__^
         \  (oo)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
                ||----w |
                ||     ||

I actually found a legitimate use for it!  It just happened that I was supposed to get a thermal printer to work over a RS232 RS485 converter over a Ethernet link all powered from 24V powered by an isolated 110V-24V converter which was fed by 240V…. Yup… Cowsay was the perfect print test material!

How do you get it?

sudo apt-get install cowsay

Usage is pretty self explanatory and the man page, but one nifty feature is that you can replace the cow with a library of animals using the ‘-f‘ option.  The list of animals is stored in (for Ubuntu anyway) in /usr/share/cowsay/cows/

List of animals…

madox@madox-laptop:~$ ls /usr/share/cowsay/cows/
apt.cow             elephant-in-snake.cow  milk.cow             supermilker.cow
beavis.zen.cow      eyes.cow               moofasa.cow          surgery.cow
bong.cow            flaming-sheep.cow      moose.cow            telebears.cow
bud-frogs.cow       ghostbusters.cow       mutilated.cow        three-eyes.cow
bunny.cow           head-in.cow            ren.cow              turkey.cow
cheese.cow          hellokitty.cow         satanic.cow          turtle.cow
cower.cow           kiss.cow               sheep.cow            tux.cow
daemon.cow          kitty.cow              skeleton.cow         udder.cow
default.cow         koala.cow              small.cow            vader.cow
dragon-and-cow.cow  kosh.cow               sodomized.cow        vader-koala.cow
dragon.cow          luke-koala.cow         sodomized-sheep.cow  www.cow
duck.cow            mech-and-cow.cow       stegosaurus.cow
elephant.cow        meow.cow               stimpy.cow

Now you simply use it by typing the following command

cowsay -f animal whatyouwanttheanimaltosayhere

The perfect case of a bad example…

madox@madox-laptop:~$ cowsay -f sodomized WTF? This is sooo wrong...
 ____________________________
< WTF? This is sooo wrong... >
 ----------------------------
      \                _
       \              (_)
        \   ^__^       / \
         \  (oo)\_____/_\ \
            (__)\       ) /
                ||----w ((
                ||     ||>>

Ok…maybe not so fun…but other more sane selections exist!  Tweaks on the animal eyes and more if you explore the man pages.