2 Bit Hacker

meta-markup: 0

Didn’t really do much this weekend. I had brought some equipment home from work on Friday to test out in the cold over the weekend. We’ve taken a D-Link wireless camera and stuck it in an enclosure with a heater and a fan. We wanted to know how well it would work, so I stuck it out on the porch over the weekend with a thermal sensor stuck to it, and recorded it’s temp all weekend long. It did pretty well, and it look like we’ll be installing it in VT later this week.

On Friday night, Andrea and I went out to go see a movie, but never quite made it, instead we got dinner, went to iParty and Newbury Comics, then she rented some stuff from Blockbuster and dropped me off at the apartment. It was odd doing anything with her since she dumped me, I didn’t really know how to act anymore. Weird.

Saturday I didn’t do much of anything, played some games, called some apartment places, and worked on my website a bit. I added two new sections, one for the HTPC project, and one for the MobilePC project. I decided to stop calling it a Car PC, since my dad would like to install one in his plane.

Sunday, I went over to my parent’s house for dinner, and ended up watching most of the Superbowl. Don’t really know who was playing or the score or anything, all I know is the commercials sucked this year. Perhaps Superbowl commercial quality is the best indicator of the state of our economy?

That’s about it. I’ve done some poking around for some more hardware for the MobilePC, but I’d rather post that in it’s own section now.

meta-markup: 0

Well, I’ve been poking around some more, and come across the Xenarc 700TS. It’s a 7” 16:9 LCD panel with VGA input. I think it will be ideal for the car computer project. I’ve been talking with Dave a bit about it, and he’s talking about putting one in his Explorer. I think in the Focus, we’ll be able to remote the original radio, mount a plate of some sort in it’s place, and attach the panel to that on a swivel mount, so it can be adjusted. This will require no modification to the dash, with is one of the things I really didn’t want to do.

Since the 700TS is a touch panel, it makes interfacing with the computer much easier. I think I’ll probably add one of these for use as a volume control. I think adjusting the volume is one of the most frequently performed operations with a car stereo, so it really doesn’t make sense to fumble with a touch panel to do it.

However, by removing the car stereo, it means the computer needs to be able to do more, and I need to buy an amp to drive the car speakers from the computer’s line out. Also, I need to figure out how to do FM tuning on the computer. Two options present themselves. I could go with a Hauppauge WinTV-radio, which includes a TV tuner, FM tuner, and video input. This would add a bit of flexibility too, since I would be able to connect a camera to the computer as well, perhaps a video review mirror? But, it takes up the only PCI slot on the EPIA board, which I had planned to use for the 802.11b card. I could use a USB 802.11b device at that point, but would probably suffer some performance penalites.

I also found that the D-Link DSB-R100 USB FM tuner is supported in Linux. It’s just got a line-out jack, so I could easily plug it into the line-in on the PC and be all set, but I wouldn’t have any video capability.

Or I could use a different PC to base this whole thing off of, with more PCI slots. But then I’d probably lose the nice 12V DC ATX supply. Choices choices choices. I’ll try to put up a section on chocobo.cx for all this stuff at some point, to keep track of both the car PC and HTPC projects.

meta-markup: 0

Not having a terribly inspired day at work, but I have been getting some ideas concerning a car computer project. I had originally been thinking of doing
something similar to the DashPC project, but that
requires hacking out part of the console for the touchscreen LCD panel.
Instead, I got to thinking that something like this
would work out well as a display. Then I just hook it up to something
along these lines,
which is powered from 12V, stuck under the passenger seat.

That takes care of display and the PC. I can hookup a serial GPS and stick in a PCI 802.11b card. It would be able to run GpsDrive
and Kismet, as well as be able to playback
CD, Ogg/Vorbis, and MP3 audio. The only thing I need at that point is some
sort of control interface. Maybe my old I-Opener keyboard would work initially.
Though what would I have the pizza button do?

meta-markup: 0

Well, it’s the weekend again, and again I’m just sitting around doing nothing. I went into work for a bit earlier, to get stuff ready to upgrade the servers. I’ll probably go in tomorrow to get everything upgraded. Other than that, I’ve just been sitting around watching TV and playing some CS and just generally being bored.

Andrea called my cell phone once earlier in the week, apparently (I found out later on AIM) to see if I wanted to do lunch. But I didn’t have my phone with me at the time, and for some reason she didn’t call me at work. I feel crappy that I missed the call, it would have been nice to see her. I’m actually a bit surprised that she called at all.

Oh, and I drove around for a while with the new antenna today. I’ve picked up a few new networks in the places I normally go, and the places I do see I seem to get a lot more packets from. It’s pretty spiffy. I’ve been trying to think of something cool to do with the data I’m collecting, but so far nothing has occured to me.

I’m also trying to think of a new design for my website. I’m thinking of making the whole site look like the main Chocobo.cx page. Not 100% sure how it’s going to turn out though. I think I’ll be dropping a few sections of the site, since I don’t really keep up with them anyway, like the games and movie lists, or maybe I’ll just make them easier to maintain.

I guess that’s about it for my ramblings. I should probably clean up my officespace at home a bit tomorrow, and maybe start packing some stuff up. I need to be out of here by 5pm on the last day of February, by the terms of the lease. I’d like to stay in the AT&T Broadband area, since their service has been good, but I’d also like to move to Milford to be close to work, but that’s Adelphia territory. Ah well.

meta-markup: 0

Well, I decided to spend some of my money from Christmas to buy a shiny 7dBi 2.4Ghz omni antenna with suction mount. I’ve got a 6’ cable to go along with it, to connect
to my modified SMC card. Big thanks again to Mark for helping me modify the card (by ‘help’ I mean he did practically all of it.)

So anyway, this should make it so my wardriving picks up more access points than ever before! Wheeee! Yeah, I know it’s not terribly interesting, but it keeps me busy, and I have fun doing it. Here is a map of Manchester with interpolated signal power.

Other than that, not much has been going on. Pretty slow week at work. I’ll probably come in over the weekend to upgrade the servers, since they really need it. No other plans for the weekend though, other than to drive around with my new gear. Wheee!

meta-markup: 0

I guess most importantly, Andrea and I are no longer together. I suppose that was to be expected, since she moved out of the apartment last month, and didn’t even want me around on New Year’s Eve. I’m not terribly happy about it, but she needs to do whatever she needs to do, so I’ll just deal with it.

At least work has been busy, which helps me keep my mind busy. This week we finally tracked down the problem at George Gordon in Merrimack, turns out one of my programs was acting up when run from daemontools without a log process. I figure it’s stdout buffer must have been getting full, causing the program to block. On Friday we went to the Milford DPW to test out a 900Mhz wireless serial link across the Souhegan. It worked great, and we plan to use it to communicate between one of our RS boxes and probably an IO module to monitor some water pumps. Should be interesting.

Yesterday I went with Dave to George Gordon to install a new firewall. It was somewhat interesting, since it was going behind their existing Netopia router. I’ve only dealt with Netopia once before, and that was to setup VPN at my dad’s work in Michigan. I managed to get by though, and it’s now happily firewalling. Still needs some config tweaking, but that won’t be till later this week.

I guess that’s about it. I’ve been wardriving more recently, keeps me from just sitting around the apartment. I upgraded the firmware on my SMC card to try and get it to show me WEP encrypted data packets, but I need to setup some test conditions to make sure it’s really working. Mark said he’d help me modify the card to have an SMA connector on it, and I’m going to be getting a 7dBi omni suction mount antenna from Signull in the next couple days.

Well, half of SimPro, anyway. Mark and I went up to Boltonville, VT today to scope out the location of a potential customer. For this place they want to use a wireless camera to see the top of the dam from a computer located at the bottom of the dam. Today we just setup one of our RS boxes with a PCI 802.11b card at the bottom, and put one of D-Link’s wireless “Internet” cameras at the top. With a larger omni antenna attached at the base, it worked great. The customers seemed please, so we’re probably going ahead with their proposal.

In other SimPro news, it looks like we’ll be going ahead with the Milford DPW install as well, where we’ll be remotely monitoring a water pumping station. Should be a good deal.

In other non-SimPro news, not much is going on. I’m nearing the end of If Chins Could Kill, the Bruce Campbell autobiography that Andrea gave me for Christmas. I figure I’ll be done with it in another night or two. It’s been really interesting so far, covering his experience with acting from childhood, trough the Evil Dead movies, and his work on Hercules. I’d recommend it to anyone who’s a fan of his.

I think I’ll head out and do some wardriving now. I don’t really have anything better to do except clean up the apartment, and I don’t really feel like doing that right now.