This is already quite aged product, but as I’ve used it before on various devices and stumbled across a killer deal at ebay for 10 units, so I couldn’t resist it. Now I’m already designing a multiple new solutions to use these in. The module in question is a small ARM7 based ethernet device by Digi International – and they also have an upgraded version of this, based on ARM9. I like these a lot, it has proven to be very solid design and the supplied Net+OS very stable and quite easy to understand.
And what to do with it? For example, ethernet-enabled lightning control and movement sensing unit. Easily timed and controlled remotely. Powering can be done with POE, so it’s all standard equipment and cabling needed to use it. More on this when I’ll have time to write some more code for it.
Here’s also a pic from my test setup for outdoor led-lightning. Would be nice if it was a bit warmer in tone, and picture again makes it seem colder than it is actually. Plan is to add ~6-8 of these units in a similar fashion to light up the front yard, so it would prove enough light to see at night time but not be too bright.
Kaikki kirjoittajan juhas artikkelit
The day they broke imdb
I’m a regular user of imdb, when I notice an interesting actor or when I ponder if I should watch some film or not, I usually dig it up from IMDB. Now this actual incident is not very recent, but it has bugged me more than anything in a little while. Now in my opinion movies should, by default, be listed in their original title – and it has been like this for ages. During this autumn someone has had a brilliant idea to bring up the translated titles by default from imdb.
Let’s give an example, I was looking for some actor and his particular listing of movies looks like this:
This poses many problems. The biggest problem is that someone assumes all connections from Finland should want titles in Finnish! Next thing is, that if you buy a film ”Paavo Pesusieni” (or whatever translated animation / cartoon), there’s most likely a Finnish voice in place of this (even though, dvd’s propably always have the original soundtrack) and therefore this is error in listing. And it looks ugly too! Nevertheless, I found this very annoying, so annoying that I’ll write about it. What makes it worse, is that this usually brings up translations I’ve never heard of before! I mean, they could’ve put the site to listen for user-agents preference on language instead of some geo-ip policy, it’s not so hard?
Then again, I clearly wasn’t only one loosing hair over this and there is a solution to this problem, you can use http://akas.imdb.com/ and get the titles as they used to be. Which is my primary movie-source now 🙂
Finnish rye bread [Ruisleipä ja miten se tehdään]
If you don’t know what this is, it’s a traditional dark bread here in Finland (or perhaps in all scandinavia…), made solely out of rye flour and water (and salt). No milk, no added yeast – leavening occurs through natural fermentation process. Don’t know for sure if it should be called rye bread or leaven bread, so let’s try both.
Because there was very little information present on this particular art of baking – I’ll share my experiment with this traditional bread, which I like to eat alot. I’ve never tried to do it before, as I’ve had illusion that it’s too much of a work and needs unseen university degree in magic to get it going on a modern kitchen (as I didn’t have the old traditional wooden basin, or hundreds of years old sourdough from my ancestors…) For some reason (perhaps others have been as sceptic as I was) there seems to be very little information on how the sourdough should be made from scratch. All the instructions I’ve seen rely on the fact that you’ll have saved some dough from your last patch of bread…
Sourdough:
So I couldn’t find out any exact information on how this should be done, there is lots of mixed opinions [FUD] around the internet on this. I read few posts from different internet forums, digged some information on traditional cooking book and counted 1+1 = 3. This is how the experiment turned out.
- I took a clean (washed it with boiling water) glass pint with ~2dl of boiled and cooled water.
- Crushed one finncrisp into the water (this is the magic ingredient, I don’t think it’s necessary at all, but idea of adding it was in the traditional cooking book. I’ll have try this out without the finncrisp in the future and update this if needed.)
- Added few tablespoons of rye flour and roughly one tablespoon of milk. (And for a sake of trying it out I did another identical pint without the milk to see if it would make any difference.)
Sourdough should be quite thin liquid, I added flour very cautiously. Whipped it also well as fermentation needs the air.
I left both pints in a warmish place and covered them with cloth. Whipped them over once a day, after first 24 hours, nothing had happened, but on a second day, I could see some bubbles on both pints and also they smelt a tad sour. Whipped them again, added a bit of flour and left them to ferment further. Third day made the difference. The one with milk had a lesser amount of bubbles and quite nice smell. Another was almost foamy and smelt sharper. I decided the one containing that tad of milk, would be ready and sourdough for my coming up bread. I forgot to took image of this, so no pictures of this.
The sourdough goes dough (or paste:)
And on we go after three days of eager waiting. I took roughly one litre of water (a tad above room temperature). Added the sourdough to it and about 0,5l of rye-flour, mixing and whipping it well, again coming fermentation process needs air, so this is mandatory. [And in case you had done this before already, now you just take the bit of paste you saved from last time, mix it with the water, and voila. You have sourdough. Add flour and continue.]
After this phase I had quite thin ”rye-porridge” which I left to a warmish place to ferment for a roughly 16 hours.
Sourdough worked as it should and I now had a half a bowl of bubbling porridge. Smell it, it should be nice, fresh and sour-ish. Depending on how well fermented (longer you keep it, the tougher the taste) bread you like, you can keep it in bowl for several days, just remember to add some flour once a day so the process lives on. And also remember to whip it a little while adding flour.
I decided that one day was enough for my taste (and for this test), so at this point (16hrs after mixing sourdough, water and flours) I added roughly 1kg of rye-flour and turned it into very thick brown dough. I read an recommendation that one should mix it with wooden stick or stow and add flour until the stow almost cracks in half. I think this was very correct statement and also on a sidenote: don’t put your hands in there if not necessary… It will be sticky and very messy.
Put a cloth on top of the dough it and let it be leavened for a few hours, it should roughly double in size. At least mine did 😉
Last phase is to turn the dough in to the bread. I made the ”traditional” thin disc-shaped bread out of it. Remember to save some dough for the next time so you don’t have to do the sourdough from the start again! Readily shaped discs are further leavened for couple of hours in warmish place and under a cloth. I baked the bread in middle section of oven and with 250 degrees (C) temperature – for about 30min. After you take them out of the oven, let them cool under a cloth and I strongly recommend that you cut them while they’re still a tad warm. Failure to follow this last instruction will propably mean that you’ll need a chainsaw to cut the bread :]
And then eat it! It’s just damn good, taste will beat anything you can buy from stores!
Lastly; I take no responsibility on whatever you’ll manage to create following my notes on this experiment. It is your own responsibility to know what you’re doing 🙂
I may add Finnish version of this later on.
Let there be rock (or more noise at least)!
Long time no press, I’ve been busy finding a job and again noticed that doing things is generally much more fun than documenting the doings, but here we go again.
I’ve been planning for a sort of home studio for a long time. This is what I’ve come up with during past few weeks and well, studio is a bit too hi-fi expression for the current state, but it’s a start and it works. Equipment now includes couple of nice dynamic microphones for vocals, Korg D4 multitracker, basic mixing abilities, power amplifier and close-range monitor speakers. This can now serve for singing, synth (or multitrack) backings, karaoke – whatever the need.
And it wouldn’t be mine if it wasn’t something home-made. I built the amplifier enclosure from what was once a cd-tower, so it’s recycled! Amplifier is a Tripath chip based ”Class-T” module with stated power of 2 x 100W @ 4ohms. I bought it for testing earlier this year and it surprised me with both being quite clean and quiet sound-wise but also by delivering almost the specified wattage to a load. So I made a power supply for it and put it to good use. It’s actually impressively efficient too. Amp delivers pretty much the promised wattage per channel to 4ohms with very nice THD figures and generates very little heat, shoebox has no air-holes at the moment and I can still keep the volume cranked up for several hours with no problems.
This is how it looks.
No extra bells and whistles. Switch to turn it on, power and audio in and speakers out. All you really need 🙂
Audio processing is now only done with a small Behringer mixer I purchased second hand. It still needs some nicer preamp for mics and perhaps a dsp for mix-out, more on those later when I’ll find suitable device(s) to fill the needs.
Mixer has seen it’s better days for sure, but nothing a little cleaning up wouldn’t take care of. All the channels and features work and the best part is – no noticeable humm or hiss at the output – it’s quiet!
And the microphones. Bought them based on some reviews to try them out. T-Bone MB-85Beta (Shure imitation) and Beyerdynamic Opus 29-S. I like them both for what they are, affordable dynamic microphones with solid build quality and natural sound reproduction (in my case the singer will be the main problem anyway 🙂
Last (and least) the speakers. They’re small Behringer passive close-range monitors I removed from my surround setup couple of years ago. I’ll propably upgrade these soon-ish, but as the room is quite small and they handle the available power well, result is actually quite good. Overall when considering how little money I spent on these components, this is a superb solution.
Tested this also as a karaoke setup last night, works very well indeed!
First snow – 2010
A tad late posting because I was replacing HDD to my main computer and didn’t download photos from my camera until now.
Anyway we were visiting my parents in Karvia last weekend (23.10). There was no sign of snow when we arrived there Friday and when I woke up saturday morning, almost couldn’t believe my eyes, there was ~15cm of snow!
And my niece Elina got on to creating her very first snowman.
Let there be light
One of the things too long on my to-do list was some nicer night-lightning to my home and leds would be the perfect solution for that. They’re cheap and practically last forever. Like usually, I couldn’t find anything that would fit my purpose from stores, so I decided to make the led-strips myself. It’s made from triangle shaped wooden strip. Drilled the holes (by hand at this point, which is very visible :P), milled a groove for wiring in the back side and soldered the leds in place. Leds are 5mm, white, driven with constant current of up to 50mA. Lightning output was around 15000 mcd @ 20mA. Not very much in lumens, but it is enough for this sort of purpose.
And first installation of strips fitted in place, this is how it looks now in stairs. Photo is actually quite dark compared to what it is in reality. There’s well enough light now to see where you put your foot on.
EPROM data lost forever?
I got myself an interesting bit of museum-grade hardware last week from a friend of mine. Little (not in size, though) Z80-based industrial computer, four A4 sized cards on a back plane, 8KByte of battery-backed up SRAM. Device seemingly worked – one could read data (programs) from memory, but saving didn’t work correctly or at all. My first suspicion was of course software Eprom(s) as the computer originates from somewhere 1980’s. As I hadn’t instant access to a prommer, I first decided to check possible hardware-faults in address decoding logic of memory card as the fault was hinting to that sort of problem as well. I didn’t find any faults in there, couple of potentially hazardous design-flaws, but as the device had already worked 20+ years, those had perhaps been proved to work after all.
So I loaned a simple prommer from a friend and started verifying the eprom contents. One out of the three eproms was outputting random-ish bytes here and there. I could read out 4-5 different commonly repeating binary images out of the one Eprom, but none of these worked at the actual hardware. With any of the tried images the computer stays dead silent, with original supposedly-corrupted rom, it atleast starts up. As the prommer-software lacked any control parameters over the reading, I decided to do what I had planned to do for some time now, my own prommer (well, memory-reader at this point atleast). I was hoping that with settable read-speed, I could perhaps still salvage the lost contents somehow. On to the matter… few hours and roughly 100 lines of C later, I had Atmel mcu interfaced to eprom and could read it’s contents over serial port to PC.
Good news, after slowing down the read operations and precise control over the vcc, I could now get more consistent data out of the eprom. Bad news, none of these images was even close to the ones read with the commercial prommer. At this point I verified that my prommer was actually reading the data correctly and not outputting any garbage – it worked, so the fault was really the ROM itself. I read the contents for about 30 times, out of the results there can be found three commonly appearing binary patterns. Looking at these three patterns more closely, reveals there is difference between them only in three address locations, so I can now atleast get quite consistent garbage out of the chip.
Too bad for more testing, the commercial prommer decided to stop working at this point (what seems like timing problems with the PC, it’s one of those using programmed I/O through parallel port), so I couldn’t test all of the read images on the actual hardware. So I’ll propably have to continue with adding the write operations and some kind of terminal functions to my own prommer.
What troubles me at this point, is that despite the more consistent data, I can’t be sure if the the idea of slowing the read was correct at all or if I did end up with more garbage than with the commercial prommer anyway. Disassembling the rom contents doesn’t immediately reveal anything as there are no illegal opcodes or non-sane parameters at the differing address locations and digging through thousands of lines of disassembled code to understand it, is too much trouble to do for just plain curiosity. Anyway, should this test succeed, it would propably be a nice bit of information as the much used eproms are getting older every day in all kinds of equipment.
Long story short – if you have a car, refridgerator, tv or anything useful (and old) equipment you have containing eproms, back the data up before it’s too late. They’ll fail eventually to point of no repair.