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.

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

Sharing a hotel WiFi connection over WiFi

For my daytime job I am spending a lot of time in hotels, which btw starts to suck big time. To be able to keep in touch with the rest of the family and do a bit of gaming I usually pay for 50 hours worth of WiFi access which last me through the whole month, well at least most of the time it does. Since I am also an avid iPhone user I turn on the roaming feature from time to time, which to no surprise results in a steep bill from T-Mobile.

So I started to think about this. So I am paying to have 50 hours of WiFi access and I pay T-Mobile for the roaming charges. I started to poke around in the System Preferences panel of my MacBook Pro. Like I suspected by default there is a possibility to share connections from one network card to another. Great.

Now I only needed to find me a nice little wifi router to become part of my standard traveling kit, which is starting to show more and more Apple logos. Quickly I laid my eyes on the AirPort Express. This little gadget was just what I was looking for, great form factor and the right price.

This sunday I was visiting the Media Markt in Rotterdam and I saw some of these beauties lying around. There were even some demo models at a discounted price (€80), so I just had to pick one up. And since my last to bills from T-Mobile both had around €80 of roaming charges, this was a no brainer. Since I had to go abroad the same day I could test the device almost immediately. Which is good since waiting to start playing with any gadget is not one of my strong points.

It turns out to extremely simple to create a private (or public) WiFi access point using the AirPort Express. It only took me two steps (excluding the normal setup of the AirPort Express, which to be honest I don’t for sure now is there is such a process, since mine had already been used to demo the unit). Anyways, here is what I had to do

1) Enable network sharing for your active network card. In my case I had to enable sharing from my built-in AirPort to the built-in ethernet card

    Enable ‘Internet Sharing’ and select the correct ‘From’ and ‘To’ network cards

2) Open up the AirPort Utility application and perform a manual setup for the AirPort Express to create a wireless network

    Press the ‘Manual Setup’ button

    Within the section ‘Wireless’ choose ‘Create a wireless network’, set a network name and provide security information

After these two simple steps I could whip out my iPhone and have it join the newly created wireless network.

Apple, thanks for making my life so easy!!

Tip: When you buy a demo model for any wireless device be sure to ask whether or not the store employees have specified a password for the device. In my case they did, luckily the password as written down in the instruction booklet of the AirPort Express.

Replacing HDD in an iRiver iH120

Years ago I was an avid user of an iRiver iH120, but since I started using iPod’s (yes, I have multiple) it was becoming a dust bunny. When my girlfriend started to follow some weekend courses, I gave the iH120 to her so she could record the lectures so if she had missed something during the course or just wanted to review a particular lesson she could just play the lesson to review it.

It as always worked until the iH120 was accidentally drop from about 1 meter onto a hard floor. The HDD did not survive that drop. So I bought her a Creative ZEN 4GB. It is a very nice MP3 player and has the ability to be used as a recorder. However it turned out to be not such a great recorder after all. It records the sound very well, but it has the tendency to pick all the sound in the vacinity making the recordings very hard to understand.

So I decided to see if I could restore the good old iH120 to working order, assuming it was just the harddrive that was broken and not any other parts of the player. So I did a bit of searching to see what kind of harddrive was needed for this type of player. It truned out that a Thosiba MK3006GAL harddrive of 30GB could be used as a replacement drive. So after this small repair it would have 10GB more space than before the drop.

I ended up buying on from gebruiktelaptop.nl where I could get one for € 19.95, which was quite surprisingly cheaper than what people were asking for the drive on eBay (lowest € 24, highest € 52).

This week the drive finally has arrived and time to get out the tools, well just one tool. You only need one Torx screwdriver (TX5) to take apart the iH120 and replace the HDD.

The replacement process
First a total of eight screws need to be removed, four from the bottom and four from the top of the iH120, after which you can remove the plastic top and bottom covers.

Next you carefully open the unit making sure that you do not damage or brake the power cable that connects the two halfs of the iH120 together.

Now the old drive can be replaced with the brand new HDD and the iH120 can be assembled again.

The whole process takes about 5 to 10 minutes to complete, and no technical knowledge is required.

Booting the iH120
Now that all the ‘hard’ work was completed it was time to boot the iH120. At first all seem to be fine the iRiver logo appears and after a while the main screen appears. However when using the browse function some strange info appeared on the screen.

So I shutdown the iH120, opened it again, made sure all the cables were properly connected. All appeared to be fine so I closed the unit again. Then I decided to hook the iH120 up to my Mac and access the internal HDD of the iH120 using a USB cable. The iH120 showed up without any problems and I could copy files back and forth between the iH120 and the Mac. Conclusion HDD is working fine. As last resort I started Disk Utility to do some further testing of the HDD and as soon as I had a look at the HDD info within Disk Utility the problem was clear. It turned out the HDD was formatted using NTFS instead of FAT32. So I reformatted it as FAT32, disconnected the iH120 from the Mac.

This time when I booted the iH120 all was in working order and I am again a happy man :)

Apple invasion

Few days ago a was just sitting behind my desk and looking at all the electronic equipement/gadgets I had sitting or lying around. After a bit of counting I was amazed to find out that I had over 9 products from one manufacturer. Even more amazing for me was the fact that it took only a little over two years for this invasion to unfold.

My life has been invaded by Apple Inc and unlike other invasions this does not give me a bad feeling on the contrary I feel quite good about it. Sure it cost me an arm and a leg to aquire all of these products, but every time I use these products it feels just right.

So what have I been collecting from Apple over the last

January 2, 2006: iPod Video 5th Gen 60GB
July 31, 2006: iMac 20″ (Model Early 2006)
November 20, 2006: Apple Mighty Mouse Wireless
March 3, 2007: Apple Wireless Keyboard
March-June 2007: iPod Shuffle 2nd Gen 1GB
February 7, 2008: iPod Touch 32Gb
July 15, 2008: iPhone 3G 16GB Black
June 28, 2008: MacBook Pro 17″ (Model Early 2008)
July 2008: Apple Remote

When I would include Apple’s software packages as well, the following items could be added

August x, 2007: iWork ‘08
August x, 2007: iLife ‘08
September 6, 2008: Mac OS X Leopard

It seems that I have been transformed into an Apple-addict… Ah well, it could have been worse ;)