I neglected to really document the last few projects I have done. Mostly out laziness but also I didn’t really feel they were all that interesting, basically just re packaging of existing tech/ideas into something useful for me. You can find them on my thingiverse and G+.
SMD Component Dispenser: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:394354
Ham Radio Go-Box: https://plus.google.com/+RyanSuttonRMS/posts/Us3UmvWJAME
New, better documented project coming soon!
Needed a bunch of H-Bridges for a project that I likely won’t move forward with, but I found this chip that has 4 H-Bridges in a really small package. It only comes in surface mount packages so I threw together a breakout board for the HTSSOP-48 version. Schematic and eagles files can be found here.
Summit of Cannon Mountain, NH
We finally had some good snow move in, in the last 3 days around 12″ fell making for some good skiing. I logged today with the Skiing GPS Logger in it brand new case and got a TON of data. In previous runs the datalogger would periodicity reset, I’m guessing due to a short in its old case or need to be manually reset for what ever reason. After moving to this new case, it did not need to be reset all day! Also all of the data was written in a single file indicating that it did not reset it self all day.
The days data.
I managed to cover a good part of the mountain today. The image above was generated by Merkaartor. There are a couple bugs in my software right now where it doesn’t close some tags, but the idea is that the files generated should be able to be opened directly by anything that can read GPX format, so I have some things to look at there. After running a quick sed script to close the tags the data imported nicely. I believe this is the first run I have done since upping the sampling rate to 5hz and it makes a huge difference. (more…)
While it looks like congress is back peddeling pretty quickly, they are still going forward with SOPA/PIPA which could fundamentally break the internet. Messing with the distributed nature of the internet will but the United States on par with some of the most aggressive censorship countries. In an open letter signed by the 83 high profile internet engineers including Vint Cerf a co-designer of TCP/IP explained their concerns that such legislation would damage the internet.
Below is a while a little outdated a very good explination of what SOPA/PIPA is:
PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.
So 38 days after I ordered it and 31 days after the original ship date I finally have a new Thinkpad Tablet. Shortly after ordered it I remembered that I have a old Thinkpad Tablet from 1993. When you look at some of the key features of both of them they are quite similar.
First off the size, they are both roughly the same size length and width, thickness is a different story. Though screen size is nearly identical. Unfortunately the 1993 version dosn’t power up any more as I do not have the OS cards for it, at some point in the past I had gotten linux running on it but have no idea where those flash cards went. Also the batteries are completely shot.
Both tablets also have available docking stations with keyboards. The 1993 version would be a bit tougher to carry around every day. But even the 2011 version is enormous by today’s standards when but into the dock. Just for comparison the new Thinkpad Tablet in it’s keyboard ‘Folio’ as Lenovo calls it is bigger then my Lenovo s205 netbook which is pretty insane. My biggest complaint about the new keyboard folio is that it connects to the only full sized USB port and does not have another on the folio. I was intending to use the tablet to write this post, but realised to upload the photos I would have to remove it from the folio, then put it back in to finish typing.
The next thing that IBM/Lenovo thought was important in both tablets was printing. The 1993 version comes with a thermal printer in the dock, in 2011 Lenovo opted for a program called ‘PrinterShare’ being loaded. I don’t own a printer, and even at work I pretty much only use them for printing boarding passes so I really don’t have a use for either of these.
The the new tablet already feels more useful then the Blackberry Playbook which I’m currently using. I will still continue to use the Playbook, mainly for the Blackberry Bridge feature which is great, but the Thinkpad may become my tablet for ‘everything else’ already got some critical applications working that do not on the playbook such as the admin interface to Cisco Communications Manager which is a big one. I’m hoping to get a physical ethernet connection working via the USB host interface but that will be tougher.
Finally started a generic blog for the random projects and other comments I have going on. No idea how often I’ll update but w/o being tied to a specific topic should help 🙂
