Just put a new page up in the projects section on getting internet in my new car. I was able to mount a 3G wifi router into the kleenex box holder of the center console in the car. Takes up zero space that would have been used for anything else and gives me and my passengers instant internet.
Apr
29
Just taking a moment to geek out. I finished my arduino code for my home HVAC project and decided to give it a burn in test tonight. I have 5 DS18S20 temperature sensors connected via parasitic 1-wire to pin 10 on a boarduino. My code just goes out and does a beacon looking for any 1-wire devices on the network and then queries them. It takes that data, turns it from hex to a Fahrenheit temperature and then prints a colon delimited string with that information out onto the serial port. I had been using just 1 probe, so tonight I decided for giggles to hot add 4 more. I smacked the ICs onto the breadboard while everything was running and what do you know, the code picked the new units up and never skipped a beat! Cool!
Apr
21
I don’t usually write about specific products, but I have to drop a line about this new Atom 330 based board that I picked up from newegg. First off, it’s a dual core Atom CPU (with HT) that clocks in at 1.6ghz in 8 watts. Two SATA 2 ports and a single IDE attach the storage, 1 PCI slot, 1 DDR2 DIMM slot, onboard RTL gigabit LAN and Intel analog video with s-video out. Pretty much a 3 generation old PC. But here is the kicker, this little board runs EVERYTHING! Right now, I’m triple booting OSX (Kalyway with 0 tweaks, it just works) Mint Linux XFCE and VMWare ESXi (!). The ESXi did require me to smack in an intel based NIC, but the ICH7 chipset allows you to use the onboard sata storage as VMFS. The only real drag about this board is that it tops out at 2 gig of RAM, otherwise I would be ordering these things in bulk!