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.

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

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

Google please do not redirect me just because I am traveling

I am traveling a lot for my current job taking me also outside of The Netherlands into Belgium and Germany from time to time. Lately I spent a lot of time around the Brussels in Belgium, which is the French speaking part of the country. As a result all the searches I perform using the Google search bar plugin within Firefox get redirected to a French version of the Google pages and the search result favor web pages written in French.

Since I can hardly speak or read French I find myself constantly typing in a URL for a (in my case) Dutch localized version of Google to do my searches. This totally defeats the purpose of Firefox’s search bar.

Look for a file named google.xml. On Windows systems this file is located at C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\searchplugins. On Mac OS systems the file is inside the Firefox.app. You can get to the file by right (or control) clicking on Firefox.app and selecting ‘Show Package Contents’ from the menu. Within the new Finder window navigate to /Contents/MacOS/searchpulgins.

By default (Firefox 3.0.6) the file contains the following information (except for the Image tag, data for the image itself has been removed)

<SearchPlugin xmlns="http://www.mozilla.org/2006/browser/search/">
<ShortName>Google</ShortName>
<Description>Google Search</Description>
<InputEncoding>UTF-8</InputEncoding>
<Image width="16" height="16">data:image/x-icon;base64,...</Image>
<Url type="application/x-suggestions+json" method="GET" 
     template="http://suggestqueries.google.com/complete/search?output=firefox&client=firefox&hl={moz:locale}&q={searchTerms}"/>
<Url type="text/html" method="GET" template="http://www.google.com/search">
  <Param name="q" value="{searchTerms}"/>
  <Param name="ie" value="utf-8"/>
  <Param name="oe" value="utf-8"/>
  <Param name="aq" value="t"/>
  <!-- Dynamic parameters -->
  <Param name="rls" value="{moz:distributionID}:{moz:locale}:{moz:official}"/>
  <MozParam name="client" condition="defaultEngine" trueValue="firefox-a" falseValue="firefox"/>
</Url>
<SearchForm>http://www.google.com/firefox</SearchForm>
</SearchPlugin>

Edit the content of the file like below (bold text indicates the changes made to the file)

<SearchPlugin xmlns="http://www.mozilla.org/2006/browser/search/">
<ShortName>Google</ShortName>
<Description>Google Search</Description>
<InputEncoding>UTF-8</InputEncoding>
<Image width="16" height="16">data:image/x-icon;base64,...</Image>
<Url type="application/x-suggestions+json" method="GET" 
     template="http://suggestqueries.google.com/complete/search?output=firefox&client=firefox&hl={moz:locale}&q={searchTerms}"/>
<Url type="text/html" method="GET" template="http://www.google.com/search">
  <Param name="q" value="{searchTerms}"/>
  <Param name="ie" value="utf-8"/>
  <Param name="oe" value="utf-8"/>
  <Param name="aq" value="t"/>
  <Param name="hl" value="en"/>
  <!-- Dynamic parameters -->
  <Param name="rls" value="{moz:distributionID}:{moz:locale}:{moz:official}"/>
  <MozParam name="client" condition="defaultEngine" trueValue="firefox-a" falseValue="firefox"/>
</Url>
<SearchForm>http://www.google.com/firefox</SearchForm>
</SearchPlugin>

This little change ensures that you are still being addressed in English although you are still redirected to a localized Google page. If you totally want to prevent the redirect to happen you could, instead of using “http://www.google.com/search”, use something like “http://www.google.nl/search” or any other of Googles localized search pages.

Using Foxmarks to synch to iPhone/iPod Touch

For some time now I have been using Foxmarks to keep my bookmarks synchronized between several machines I am using. At first Foxmarks, as the name implies, was for Firefox only. About 3 months ago Foxmarks put out betas for both Internet Explorer (Windows only) and Safari (Mac only). The beta period is now over (February 2, 2009) and you can now download Foxmarks for the mentioned browsers from the Foxmarks site.

By just using the Foxmarks software you will be using the following synchronization setup



Since Foxmarks allows for synchronization with Safari, it is now also possible to synchronize your bookmarks with your iPhone or iPod Touch. For this you will need a MobileMe subscription. The synchronization setup will then look like this



On the Mac side you need to setup for Foxmarks and make sure the Foxmarks synching is running

and for MobileMe you have to enable the Bookmarks synchronization

On the iPhone/iPod Touch side you have to setup MobileMe synchronization (visit this page for detailed information on setting up MobileMe)

I have only had two issues with Foxmarks so far;

1. Dividers in Firefox sometimes get replaced with “———-”. Normally Foxmarks does a good job keeping dividers being dividers in Firefox
2. At some point in time I ended up with two ‘Unsorted Bookmarks’-folders

Both issues are easily solved and never resulted in loosing any of my bookmarks and I am almost certain it was caused due to me playing around with some settings (MobileMe and Foxmarks for Safari) on two machines.

I am only using the bookmark synchronization of Foxmarks, since I am using 1Password to keep my passwords save and secure.

Keeping my digital life in-sync (3)

This is the third installment of my quest to keep my digital life in-sync. In the second part about my quest I blogged about the use of Dropbox. In this post I am going a little deeper into some of the advantages I have come across on the internet.

I am using the application 1Password by Agile Web Solutions to keep track of all my username/password combinations used for the many websites I make use of. Up until a few days ago I used the Mac OS X Keychain synchronization of Mobile Me to synchronize the data between my two Macs. On the Agile Web Solutions Wiki I came across a page describing how you can use your Dropbox folder to store and synch the Agile keychain between your machines.

I have been using it for a couple of days now and so far it works very well, and feels a lot faster when data needs to be synchronized.

As soon as I heard of the existence of Things by Cultured code I installed on my Mac and am using it as my main application to track all the things I need to do or have done by a certain time. This worked very well but it became cumbersome when I bought a second Mac (a Mac Book Pro) and started traveling around. There was a way of manually copying certain files to a USB stick and constantly copy these files between the two Macs. This goes well for a certain amount of time, but eventually I forgot to do the copy trick and was stuck with two difference lists of things.

Method #1: The article Sync Your Things Database via Dropbox desrcibes how you can move the Things library to a different location and then create a symbolic link on the original location for the datafiles that links back to the new location. Read this article carefully, if you don’t feel comfortable using the Terminal use the next method.

Method #2: I was very pleased when I came across the following wiki page describing how Dropbox can be used store it at a location that can be synchronized between several machines. This method is easier then method #1

The only things you really need to be aware of is that you only have one copy of Things running on any machine and make sure synchronizing has been performed between the machines before using Things on the other machine.

Method #1 as described for synching the Things database can be used for other Mac applications as well (for those applications that not let you choose where their information is being stored, like with 1Password), so I am making a list of applications for which I want to keep the data synched between machines.

I am liking Dropbox more and more everyday.

UberInventory 1.6

We are currently working on UberInventory 1.6. At the time of this writing we have not yet set any release date.

Following is a list of tasks we are working on;

• Fix issue that occurs on fresh installs (or joining a new guild) of UberInventory when visiting the guild bank

• Redesigning the settings module
• Adding more options to customize the behavior of UberInventory
• Improving overall performance (specifically determine usability of items)
• Removing obsolete code

Upcoming version of UberInventory

Over the time we have received requests from users that they would really like to be able to search across multiple characters, guildbanks or all the data that has been collected.

Within version 1.3/1.4 of UberInventory we started to make some of the necessary changes to the way we build up the user interface filters and how they are linked back to the data structures used for storing information on items. Over the last couple of days we have been working on making the modifications necessary to also make it happen from a coding point of view.

The new location filter will look as follows

All items – Combination of all characters and all guildbanks, including the current character

Maymayhem – My current logged in character, will display items from all locations
  Bag – Show items stored in the bags of the current logged in character
  Bank – Show banked items of the current logged in character
  Keyring – Show items stored in the keyring of the current logged in character
  Mailbox – Show items stored in the mailbox of the current logged in character
  Equipped – Show equipped items of the current logged in character

All Guildbanks – All guildbanks combined
  The Mystics – Items stored in The Mystics guild bank
  Wolf Pack – Items stored in the Wolf Pack guild bank

All Characters – All characters combined, including the current logged in character
  Drexore – Items from the Drexore character
  Galure – Items from the Galure character
  etc.

This preview demonstrates the new functionality within the UberInventory interface

At the moment there are still some issues that need to be tackled;
- Show correct cash totals when selecting combi items (All items, All Guildbanks and All Characters)
- Display proper info within tooltips
- Do some in-game testing
- Warn if there are 50 messages stored in the mailbox. WoW only show 50 mails even if you have more mails waiting.

We are making good progress and are hoping to be able to provide you all with a new version of UberInventory before Christmas.

The new version will also contain an updated version of the static data for prices and recipe data, and now contains information on book related items (like Gift of the Wild).

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 ;)

Keeping my digital life in-sync

In the wake of my new iPhone I am working on making the efforts needed to keep information synced between the several devices I am using easier. Currently I am using at least 4 devices, being;

• an iPod, soon to be replaced with an iPhone depending on the speed of both Apple and T-Mobile
• an iMac
• a MacBook Pro
• a regular laptop running the Windows OS for work

The information I am currently most concerned about keeping in sync are;

• Contact information
• Calendar information
• Bookmarks
• News feeds

Contact and Calendar information
This one I have solved by buying myself a MobileMe subscription from Apple. Despite all of the negative responses revolving around the Push not being a real push and numerous outages around the world, I find myself among the lucky ones. So far I have no real issues when using MobileMe. I had however some issues with the iPod Touch initially, it would sync over the complete calendar down to the iPod regardless of what settings I was using. After some fiddling with the settings I found what was working for me

• Set the iPod Touch up for manually syncing
• Turn ‘Fetch New Data’ to off
• Fetch mode to ‘Manually’
• Open the Calendar application and wait for it to (first clear and then) receive all of your data
• Set the iPod Touch up for Push
• Turn ‘Fetch New Data’ to On
• Fetch mode to ‘Every 15 minutes’

Bookmarks
Since I mainly use Firefox for my internet browsing, keeping my bookmarks in-sync could be easily achieved by using the brilliant addon named Foxmarks (see also one of my earlier posts). The only downside is that Firefox is not running on the iPod Touch or iPhone. This means that I don’t have direct access to my bookmarks when I am on the road. I could be using Foxmarks website to access my bookmarks, but I would much rather have a way of syncing my Firefox bookmarks into Safari.

This is something I still need to figure out.

News feeds
For getting the latest news from several web sites around the world I have been using NewsFire on my Mac OS X based machines. This has always worked fine for me, but since the introduction of the new software version for both the iPod Touch and iPhone combined with the introduction of the iTunes App Store a whole new world of abilities has been opened for these two devices (unless you had jail broken your device, then you had access to third-party apps for quite some time already).

On the iTunes App Store I found the application NetNewsWire (the link will take you to the iTunes App Store), which is a RSS news feed reader. I already knew this application as a regular Mac OS X application, but I had never really looked at it since I liked NewsFire and was not looking for a replacement for it.
With the possibility of running NetNewsWire on the iPod Touch this has totally changed. So yesterday NetNewsWire has replaced NewsFire on both my Macs and has been installed on my iPod Touch.
The synching of the RSS feeds is handled by using the services of NewsGator. Just sign up for a free account and your are pretty much set.

NewsGator also provides toolbar applications for both Internet Explorer and Firefox, but since these are provided as a downloadable executable, these are unusable on a Mac. I have found another way which allows you to add news feeds to your NewsGator account without the need of an addon or applications. I will describe this in a separate post.