catch(...)

Fuzzy chair

2011-06-23T08:53:00.000-07:00

Computer rig I built for my wife. I can't sit in it, but it works well for her. Still looking for good telescoping half-rect covers...

Wood Jewelry

2011-01-11T21:52:00.000-08:00

Playing with the CNC ;)

Bloodwood Presbyterian Cross

Colorblind Apps...

2011-01-06T04:06:00.000-08:00

Ran across a great colorblindness website with reviews of all the colorblindness-related apps for iPhone on it.

Was thinking about an old tool I made called CodeBlind, back in 2003. It was a rather ugly tool - made when I was experimenting with building skinned apps, but had a fair number of features like simulating various types and severities of color blindness.

Here's a screenshot of using it while I type this, with both the filter/magnifier and options up.

Been debating about updating it, adding camera support, porting it to all the platforms I can, and generally making it release worthy - but I only want to do that if people might use it.

Here's the old tool if anyone is interested - please be gentle, it really is old and I never finished it :) Note that the domain (codevis.com) is long since dead and the email in the program is no longer valid.

If something similar would be useful for anyone, let me know. And tell me what it'd need that the current tools don't already provide!

Kinected

2010-12-30T00:51:00.000-08:00

Picked up an XBox w/Kinect to play with recently to get in on the 3D hacking.

Unfortunately, didn't read enough first and got the bundle (Slim + Kinect) rather than grabbing them separately, so I didn't end up with the Kinect USB adapter/power supply. Turns out Microsoft doesn't like selling the adapters by themselves.

The Kinect is just a USB device that also needs +12V, so Microsoft put together a proprietary jack for it. There's an excellent pinout breakdown here, and here's a couple of pics of the receiving end w/o shielding.

Anyone know of a manufacturer selling these jacks and plugs in lots of 100 or so?

So, to avoid playing splice-the-cable on the Kinect itself, I shredded a PDP Kinect extension chord. Bloody expensive things, although they have quite a few active electronics in them (I'm assuming for USB repeating to stay in spec for a really long cable, although haven't checked the chips yet).

Anywho, here's my hacked adapter for now. Connecting it via a short shielded usb cable to an internal USB A jack on a PCI->USB add-on card, and just using the 12V rail off a drive power plug to power it.

It ain't pretty, but it works.

Edit: Hah! Now they're in stock solo O.o Well, saved a few days of waiting.

Experimenting with molding metal clay

2010-12-22T22:24:00.001-08:00

Present I made for my mom ;)

The original photo used for the model of the fire ants is by Bart Drees, from here.
CNC machine is a Probotix Fireball V90, using a 60 degree .005 etching tip on a Dewalt trim router.
The wax is a block of machinable wax from Flexbar.
For that one, just used double-sided Scotch tape for hold down for the wax to leveled plywood surface. Still need to lay out a better clamping system, but that's worked really well for wax and circuit boards for me so far.
The silver clay is ArtClay Silver 650.
The oil used was a knife sharpening oil. Olive oil would probably work as well or better.
Gemstone is a synthetic corundum (don't torch-fire a natural like that!).
Pearls are cultured freshwater.
Garnets are probably natural, although I'm not 100% sure on that source.
All other silver is sterling.
No solder or bezel other than metal clay was used.
Tried out CamBam for the image->g-code. Plan to buy it soon - neat stuff, although still in the learning curve on what it can do and how.
Used Mach3 for the milling control software.

Meaux Mill improving

2010-11-21T19:03:00.000-08:00

Still fighting with bits, feedrates, etc. But making useful prototype boards with it now.

This was done with a 60 degree .007 engraving bit and a #66 drill bit, 10 ipm feedrate on X/Y and 5ipm on Z (was breaking smaller drill bits going faster - using 1/8" shank drills in a 1/4" chuck with an adapter and there's a bit of slop in it that doesn't show with the 1/4" shank engraving bits), a Dewalt Trim Router (30k rpm or so? haven't measured).

My engraving bits seem to chip/dull pretty fast so far - tried ordering an Amana InGroove from ToolsToday, but they sent the wrong bits and don't respond to emails. Another day, another distributor :)

Meaux Mill

2010-10-09T22:08:00.000-07:00

Been working on my CNC all day.... *almost* to the point where I can cut circuit boards.

Here's the second one I've tried to cut (first one, well.... it just looked painful).

Looks like I still have some shim work to do, and need to do a bit more math on the configuration.

But, is good enough I'm stoked... should be able to get there from here soon enough.

Posted a video of the machine using its steppers to play music. Had to switch it to half-stepping rather than the 1/8th steps I'm using for the PCBs to get it loud enough ;) Used a script from here to build the G-Code vectors.

More metal clay...

2010-05-16T14:09:00.000-07:00

More metal clay...

(with sterling wire, pearls, rainbow obsidian, bezel wire, and created corundum w/vanadium)

Still getting the hang of it. But fun.

Metal clay is cool.

2010-04-21T19:29:00.000-07:00

First try using it. Neat stuff. Hope to do more.

Experimenting with one-button interfaces...

2009-11-16T18:12:00.000-08:00

Tried adapting a Sansa Clip mp3 player to a one-button interface.
On one hand, it worked. Yay. On the other hand, it also sucked.

All the menus loop when scrolling - which is great, if it's easy for you to twiddle all the buttons. However, it's *really* tedious to use up/down/left/right via a switch scanning type interface. So, I'd go with macros, except that due to the looping menus I've yet to find a good way to get to a known "home" position from an arbitrary location within the device's UI. This has got to suck for blind people as well.

Anyway, some pics. Overall, I'd call the adaptation a failure. But learned a bunch. Maybe I'll make a one button mp3 player from this kit sometime.

Only in Louisiana...

2009-01-05T12:29:00.000-08:00

Way behind...

2008-12-08T02:46:00.001-08:00

Way behind on blogging and everything else outside of work. Hoping to catch up on at least some of my projects like GAS and a few others, but my time has been pretty limited. So many ideas, so little time to finish them :( Definitely haven't given up on them, just been crunched moving and changing jobs and getting product out.

On the bright side, the product I've been helping with shipped :)

Also started playing a bit with Phidgets a little bit - really neat so far, and much simpler to use than many boards I've used in the past for I/O, although haven't had time to really do too much with 'em yet. Have many alternative-input ideas to try out with them, as well as wanting to make a poor-man's MIDI wind controller and a few farm monitoring/automation tools. Just need 48 hours in a day....

2008-07-10T20:09:00.000-07:00

MacBook Pro Thermal Paste

2008-07-09T08:33:00.001-07:00

Pulled my MacBook Pro apart and redid the thermal paste. GPU and CPUs idle about 10-15C cooler now, and the GPU stays about 10C cooler under heavy load. The CPUs can still get hot when kept at 100% for too long though...

Here's the money shot (*before* cleaning and reapplication):

Obvious debugging trick...

2008-07-07T04:10:00.000-07:00

Many times in the past I've been debugging stuff with digital signage or video games and I've wanted to have a window on a secondary display showing diagnostic information. Since most full-screen applications change the video resolution on the primary display, this has always been a bit of a pain - you have to calculate where the window will land in your new resolution and put it there prior to running.

With my new computer setup I'm running my secondary monitor above my primary (at 0,-1200) instead of to the right of it (default). Now the apps don't move. Much easier, no more calculating out where to put the debugging application before running the debugee. Wish I had thought of that sooner. Made watching the temperatures of the hardware while running games much easier.

Gratuitous pick of current arrangement at new house:

Frying Eggs on your MacBook Pro...

2008-07-07T02:59:00.001-07:00

So, I'd been having problems with the MacBook Pro recently. It'd work fine, stable as a rock, when I'd run OS X. When I'd reboot to Windows XP SP3, *usually* it'd be ok, but when I did large network transfers or tried to play a game it'd lock up almost every time. When I say lock up, I mean total hang - no bluescreen, no mouse, audio card buffer stuck, no key response except the power button, etc. No blue screen, so no hints. Frustrating....

I assumed it was software at first - probably drivers - mainly because OS X was fine, but XP wasn't (although XP running in a virtual using VMWare Fusion did just fine). Backdated XP SP3 to SP2, disabled various pieces of hardware (especially network, since it seemed related to large transfers), changed drivers, the works. Some things seemed to reduce the problem, but nothing actually seemed to fix it.

While trying to find new 8600M GT drivers (wild goose chase btw - NVidia doesn't want to release reference drivers apparently), I grabbed nVidia's nTune software, figuring I might check out its diagnostics. Painful stuff to use, but you can get it to do a nice TaskManager-style display of CPU, Disk, Memory, and GPU Temperatures.

Noticed that the crashes tended to happen while it was running a bit warm (~85 - 91C) on the GPU... Ugh. I hate heat problems. I'm so not an overclocker....

Found a program called Input Remapper that allows manual control of the fans - turned 'em all full, underclocked the GPU with nTune - much better, but still occasional crashes during gaming.

Took off the aftermarket plastic cover I had put on the MacBook Pro to protect it's finish (my last Mac, a Titanium G4, scratched *extremely* easily and really looked like hell after a year or two, so I had put these on). Then propped up the back of the MacBook to give it some air under it, and tossed the fans to be on about 80% minimum.

The idle temperation on the GPU has gone from ~65C to about 57C, and the max under pressure has gone from about 91 down to about 85. And no crashes. I don't think it's the NVidia card objecting to the heat and crashing, but their diags definitely point to crappy cooling in the system, and the covers making it worse. Put the clocks on the GPU back up to normal - little bit warmer, still no crashes.

Somewhere during all of this I came across a few articles. 1 2.

Ugh. Apparently some Genius at Apple thinks thermal paste is a magic cooling compound that chips should bathe in, rather than just a thin heat conductive layer to help transmit heat from the chips to the heatsinks.

I really don't want to void my warranty, but I loathe handing my development machines to any local retail tech shop (and when I do have to, it's sans hard drives), whether they're called 'Geniuses', 'Geeks', 'Nerds', or whatever. Guess I'll order some thermal paste and fix it sometime when I'm bored. Raising it up, removing the covers, and blasting the fans has made it stable so far though, so hopefully I can make do for now.

And why was it stable under Mac OS X? Probably mostly behavioural on my part. Mac games are.... rare. I also think that the stock drivers for running the fan are tweaked differently between OS X and XP for the MacBook Pro, although I haven't verified this.

In other fun "I hate computer hardware" news, my wife's PC was also constantly crashing recently. Hers at least had more direct clues - sometimes the BIOS couldn't find the SATA drives, or it would get stuck detecting IDE drives (on an EVGA nForce 590 SLI AM2 motherboard, running two SATA drives in RAID-0 and the DVD-RW). After several attempts at diagnosing the problem with it going away temporarily each time only to come back later, I finally tracked it down to a $25 ASUS Lightscribe DVD-RW (DRW-1814BLT, Feb 07 manufacture date). Not sure how/why it hoses the system so badly, but it does. Replaced it with a Pioneer DVD-RW that cost $30, and no problems at all anymore. Bizarre.

Previously, the hard drive access on that machine had been periodically HORRIBLY slow, and I had tracked that problem down to the ASUS DVD-RW as well. That problem had gone away when I updated the firmware on the drive (and I presume that was when the nasty crashing problem was first introduced).

Another engineer on a farm...

2008-06-21T23:22:00.000-07:00

Found this today, might become interesting (or he might stop posting when things get really busy and crazy like I usually do...)
http://softwarefromthefarm.blogspot.com/

Better house pics...

2008-05-26T19:45:00.001-07:00

Just some pics...

2008-05-26T15:03:00.000-07:00

Been promising a few...

Oh, the fun of moving...

2008-05-20T10:17:00.000-07:00

Yay, truck is gone now!

New Mobile Rig...

2008-04-16T20:21:00.001-07:00

Two more days and I'll be leaving my career writing digital signage software for one that's a hell of a lot more fun - amp and effects modeling software. I finally have a good excuse to play my bass REALLY LOUDLY again :)

Been working on setting up my mobile rig for crossplatform development - here's what I've got so far:I've tried to get the best for the money - choosing fairly low end professional hardware over pricier consumer items. So far, the setup consists of:

And, of course, my bass, GuitarPort, and lots of good coffee :)

It's been a while since I've used a Mac - my last one was one of the G4 Titaniums. My favorite part about the new ones is that I can finally run any major operating system I'm likely to write code for on one box. Between the (somewhat clunky) built in boot management w/BootCamp and VMWare Fusion (slightly buggy but *beautiful*), this is pretty much all the machine I expect I'll need for a while - especially when on the road.

The M-Audio monitors sound very clean and are pleasant to listen to. They lack a bit of bass, but that's probably to be expected for the size (let me know if you've heard these and know of better in a small package!). I'll probably be getting a larger pair and/or a sub after we move so I can get a full low end, but for mobility - they sound amazing compared to any of the consumer crap you'd buy at the same price or size.

My only complaint on the Behringer mixer is that the blue power LED is bloody bright. I work in the dark generally and find it distracting. It's either going to get some leads clipped or a piece of tape over it very soon. I haven't been using it for much yet other than direct level mixing, but so far it's pretty much perfect for my needs and I haven't noticed any noise from it when playing with the knobs.

The VX Nano mouse is really thoughtfully designed and I love the features. It's a little too small for my hands, but I'll probably stick with it regardless. It gets extra points in my book for having a free spin mode on the scroll wheel and a place to tuck the wireless receiver that automatically turns the mouse off when inserted. You definitely want to install the extra software from Logitech for use with OS X.

And the GuitarPort - well, I love it, but I have to admit I'm partial ;)