Arduino Duemilanove

A couple of weeks ago I have received my Arduino Duemilanove, a open source hardware platform. You can find more information on the official Arduino web site at www.arduino.cc.

Searching the internet I have been able to find a couple of books related to Arduino

• Getting Started with Arduino by Banzi Massimo
• Making Things Talk by Tom Igoe
• Programming Interactivity by Joshua Noble
• Arduino – Physical Computing f¸r Bastler, Designer und Geeks by Finn, Julian, Odendahl, Manuel, Wenger, Alex
• Open Softwear – Fashionable prototyping and wearable computing using the Arduino (download for free)
• The Complete Beginners Guide to the Arduino by Earthshine Design (download for free)
• ARDX – Arduino Experimenterís Guide (download for free, scroll down to the ‘Resources’ section)
• Arduino Programming Notebook (download for free)

Some of these books are sold as part of so called starter kits which usually includes an Arduino, breadboard, components and starter project descriptions. These books give a wealth of information on the Arduino specifically and electronics on general. I really like the ARDX, this book also clarifies why a certain component (resistors) is included into the design or how a certain component operates. Even without any knowledge about electronics, this book is a nice one to start with.

Quickly browsing all these books and some web sites I am liking the Arduino and its possibilities more and more.

The time has come to define a project for myself. It didn’t take me long to come up with one. I am going to make my own ‘weather station’. It will start out very simple and over time it will be expanded. At the final state of my project I am hoping that it will include the following features and/or components;

• Temperature measurement
• Humidity measurement
• Light measurement
• Barometric pressure measurement
• Graphic LCD display for historic information
• Regular LCD display for displaying current information
• Real-Time clock (which will be initialised and recalibrate from time to time using a DCF77)
• SD card for storing data so it can be transferred to other systems
• Internet connectivity (web page, twitter, etc.)
• Solar power unit/recharger

Just looking at all the components that I want to add to it, I will need to spent some time on learning how to use shift registers (expanding outputs) and multiplexors (expanding inputs). Or I might have to move eventually to an Arduino Mega, but I would much rather do it using the
Duemilanove. This would allow me replace the Duemilanove with for instance a Arduino Nano and build it into a small enclosure case.

First major task for me is collecting all of the components (most I have already found, eBay is good source for some cheap LCDs) that I think I might need and most importantly brush up on my knowledge of electronics. It has been over 20 years since the last time I have done something with this stuff.

Next step will be to work on each of the features in a separate project to see how they work and what kind of coding is needed.
It will be a long way, but I am sure I will have a lot of fun along the way and learn tons of interesting things.

Arduino Starter Kit

De starter kit is binnen :)

- Posted using MobyPicture.com

Navigon MobileNavigator Europe (iPhone)

I was looking into updating the maps for my 3 year old Sony NV-U70 and found that it would cost me around EUR 70 to get the latest maps (dated 2007, and thus also already outdated). That and the fact that the internal battery of the NV-U70 is in very bad shape (30 minutes and the battery is dead), made it and easier to seriously consider Navigon’s MobileNavigator for the iPhone (priced at EUR 74.99 till June 30th). For me another added advantage is the maps included with the application, I now finally have map data for Croatia (only 56%) but way better than the 0% available for the NV-U70 or the TomTom’s solution.

This my most expensive iPhone app ever that I purchased, but for me it was worth the price.

Overview
The navigation screen display a road map besides your current position on the map a lot of additional information.

Not all of the information is displayed at the same time, but can be easily switched between by tapping on the top or bottom bar

By tapping on the top bar you can switch between the following information:
Distance to destination:
Estimated time of arrival:
Current driving speed:

Tapping on the bottom bar allows you to switch between the following information:
Current position:
Next way point:

Lane Assistant
When you arrive at a point where you need to change lanes/take an exit you will receive onscreen and spoken information. For the exit show in the image even the information displayed on the roadsigns matched (happily surprised).

    

Speed Assistant
While driving the maximum allowed speed is show in the top-right corner of the screen. We you go above the maximum speed an exclamation mark is displayed as well and you receive a spoken alert.

  

These alerts are as good as the data available to the application, because on my trip I used a stretch of highway that had its maximum speed reduced from 120 km/h to 100 km/h. So please be mindful of your speed.

GPS signal and route (re)calculation
During the test trip the iPhone lost the GPS signal from time to time or the location was not accurate enough. MobileNavigator will than display the text "GPS" in the top bar and in the left-bottom corner an image display a calculator and a trail of way points). As soon the new route is calculated or the GPS has a fix again the normal navigation information will be displayed again.

To test the route recalculation I ignored the instructions at a certain way point during my test trip. From the moment I had ignored the instructions it took only 7 seconds for MobileNavigator to detect that I was not taking the advised route and it started calculating an alternative route to my final destination.

Phone calls
Receiving phone call during navigation. When the phone call is finished you will be returned to MobileNavigator and it will pickup where it has left off. It looks however it is a complete restart of the application so you will wait another 30-60 seconds for the app to have fully started and navigation is working again. So hopefully you never receive phone calls when you are on a tricky part of your trip.

Issue using MobileNavigator
I had some minor issues with information stored within the address book on my iPhone.

1. Since the new release of the iPhone OS (or maybe this happened even earlier) you can no longer enter a country manually, but it needs to be selected from a list of values. For most of my contacts outside of The Netherlands I still had the country information that I had entered manually into the country field. This causes in some cases MobileNavigator to think that these addresses, although foreign, are within The Netherlands. So make sure you properly update the foreign addresses you will want to use with MobileNavigator.
2. MobileNavigator only allows you to select addresses within the current active group of contacts within the address book. So I have a group named ‘Hotels’ in my address book and when I had that group selected within the address book, I will only be able to selected from addresses from group when in MobileNavigator. Hopefully this bug will be fixed in an updated version. So make sure before leaving the address book you select the ‘All contacts’ group

Jippie !!

Mijn iPhone stencil is binnen

- Posted using MobyPicture.com

Nieuwe switch

Netjes achter bureau geschroefd

- Posted using MobyPicture.com

Cadeau

Cadeautje van de zaak

- Posted using MobyPicture.com

Using Drobo and Drobo Share with Time Machine

Recently I have bought a Drobo and a Drobo Share. One of the reasons for this purchase was to be able to easily expand disk storage capabilities and have a central location to store Time Machine backups for both my Macs.

When I had installed my Drobo and Drobo Share I soon noticed that by default Time Machine does not allow NAS systems to be used as Time Machine backup disks. After a bit of research on the net I found that it is possible but it needs a little bit of work.

This blog post details the step I performed to setup Time Machine for my Macs

1) Setup your Drobo and Drobo Share and make sure everything is in working order and you have enough free space available to store Time Machine Backup data onto your Drobo.

2) For every Mac to be backup-ed using time machine create a sparse bundle image. You can create this disk image by using Disk Utility

Normally a volume size of twice the actual size of the HDD installed in your Mac should be adequate to store multiple versions of your files into the Time Machine backup. If you have enough storage in your Drobo you can make the disk image larger. After the sparse bundle has been created make sure to eject the disk image.

2) Copy the disk image to the root folder of your Drobo

3) Open a Terminal session and execute the following command on every Mac to be backup-ed by Time Machine

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

4) Start Time Machine and select you Drobo as Time Machine Disk. For for Time Machine to start, moste likely it will fail or just stop the prepare action as soon as it starts. If you now look at the contect of the root folder of your Drobo you will notice that one additional file is created. This file is named something like this

Atum_001debec863e.temp.sparsebundle

Atum in my case is the name of my MacBook Pro, and 001debec863e is an identifier used by Time Machine to identify the machine.

Use the first part of the name (Atum_001debec863e) to rename the temp.sparsebundle into its proper name for Time Macine. In my case that would be

Atum_001debec863e.sparsebundle.

4) As soon as Time Machine is done working you can click on the ‘Change Disk…’-button in the Time Machine preference pane and select None from the list.

5) You can now delete the xxx.temp.sparsebundle from your Drobo.

6) Now again you select your Drobo as a Time Machine Disk. This time there should be no errors and Time Machine will start backing up your Mac.

I have used to following resources from macosxhints.com while figuring out how to setup Time Machine in combination with my Drobo and Drobo Share
[1] – Create a Time Machine size limit for networked disks
[2] – Set up Time Machine on a NAS in three easy steps

Tree is blossoming

Boom staat weer mooi in bloei

- Posted using MobyPicture.com

Delayed Christmas gift

Heeft even geduurd maar m’n kerstgeschenk is binnen

- Posted using MobyPicture.com

Plans for UberInventory 2.0

The next version of UberInventory will be version 2.0. To make it a bit special I want to add a functionality which I have been wanting to implement ever since I started working on UberInventory back in September/October 2007.

Here is a short list of some of the things I am planning to implement

• Highlight bags, bagslot when hovering over an item within the UberInventory frame to make it easier to locate items you are searching for. Here are some mockup pictures of how it might look like

  Normal
  

  Highlighted
  

• Improve look-n-feel of the settings frame (border around all of setting options within a group instead of just the indent)

Currently I am looking into all the things that need to be tracked additionally and what code is required to do some sort of highlighting.

It will be ready when it is ready, in other words I haven’t set a date when to release the new version. Hmm, I am starting to sound like Blizzard Entertainment themselfs.