2 Bit Hacker

Now that I’m moved in to the new place, I’ve been giving some more thought to my temp and power monitoring projects. In the old place, my server was located in the same closet as the punch-block for the phone wiring. In the new place, they’re not even close. In order to have more than 2 thermal sensors, I’ll need to put the Basic Stamp II in with the punch block, so I’ll need a way of getting it’s reading back to my server for monitoring.

I was considering serial, using the phone line to the office as RS-485, but I remember all the headaches I had with 485 when working at SimPro, so I’m kindof leaning away from that. For the price of one 232/485 converter, I can get two XBee modules and carrier boards at Adafruit.

I’m also considering hacking apart my Kill-A-Watt to make a Wattcher, basically an XBee crammed into the Kill-A-Watt housing to allow for remote monitoring. I could then use that to track the usage of individual or small groups of devices, which would be nice even if I do decide to install T.E.D. in my breaker panel.

So, I finally went and took the test to get my amateur radio license. I’m now have a technician class license, callsign KB1QYW.

Now I just need a radio so I can do something with the license.

I’m still primarily interested in doing APRS and other packet applications, so I’ve been looking at radios with built in TNCs. At the moment I’m mainly drooling over the Kenwood TM-D710A, which can do everything I want, and more, but runs about $600 new. Looks like an ideal mobile unit for what I want to do.

I’ve also been pointed toward the upcoming Yaesu VX8-R, which also appears to have a built-in TNC, but is a handheld, rather than a mobile. From what I’ve heard, it should be considerably cheaper than the TM-D710A, but is overall less functional.

Either way I end up going, I’ve got some ideas for integrating a radio in my automobile with a PC. I’m thinking the car PC could pull in APRS data from the radio, OBD2 data from the car, GPS data, and perhaps video from a forward mounted camera. It should be pretty easy to rig up something to read the locations of other stations from the radio and insert them into a database for GPSDrive to read waypoints from, displaying them on a map along with my current position.

I’ve also been tossing around the idea of correlating position to fuel economy, creating a sort of fuel consumption heat map which could then be used to adjust my repetitive drives to more efficient routes. I don’t think this will be all that hard, just need to figure out how to get the current MPG number from the Prius, record it along with the current GPS coordinates, and then perhaps hack up Kismet’s gpsmap to plot that data instead of wireless access points (or in addition to.)

As far as hardware for the mobile PC, I’ve recently been looking at the IEI IBX-500A, which has enough serial ports for all the inputs I want, along with built-in 802.11 wireless. Not sure if the CPU would be fast enough for everything I want to do, but I think it’d work. I’ve also been looking at the VIA Artigo, which is a bit smaller, and a little faster, but has a fan and no built-in wireless.

Not that I can afford to do any of this just yet, but it’s fun to think about…

Okay, LG is going on my personal vendor blacklist, at least for LCD TVs. I bought this LG 37LB5D LCD television back in December to replace my Sony WEGA CRT, and initially I was very happy with it. Then it started having audio issues, which I worked around. Then it started having video issues, where the screen would blank out randomly. I called a repair place, and the guy came out and swapped in a new power supply and control board, and everything was happy once again.

And so it went till today. The audio issue just resurfaced. I’m sitting here watching History HD off my TiVo, with no audio. First it was quick cut outs, now it’s just totally silent.

I suspect it’s something with the HDMI audio decoder. My suspicion is that it overheated and did some permanent damage to itself. I should probably contact the repair guy again and find out if the replacement parts were also under warranty, as it’s probably going to take another set of replacements to make this thing work again.

At this point though, I’m tempted to chuck this one off the balcony and go buy a Sharp AQUOS. We’ve got three of those at work and they’re running great. I suppose this is what I get for trying to save a buck and going with the cheap brand.

I often have a number of projects floating around in my head that I’d like to get done around the apartment. Largely for my own tracking, I’ve decided to list them here, roughly in the order I’d like to get them done.

1. Home Server: For a while now I’ve been wanting to build a NAS box for the apartment. A place to backup all my important files from other systems so I don’t have to worry about what I’m losing when I randomly decided to format and reinstall my OS. I was originally thinking of reusing an older Mini-ITX board I have kicking around, giving it a SATA controller and a few large hard drives. I’ve also wanted to do my own router for the apartment. I’m currently using a Linksys WRT54g running dd-wrt, which works fine, but I’d like more control. I think the most economical solution is to combine the two projects into a single Home Server, probably running FreeBSD. It’ll need at least 2 network interfaces, and preferably 4 or more SATA channels. I could easily reuse one of the 5 or so motherboard I have kicking around the apartment, as I don’t need a ton of CPU power or memory. Software wise, just the normal file sharing stuff, NFS, Samba, a web server, maybe look into WebDAV.
2. HTPC: I’d still like to get a Home Theater PC hooked up. I tried this a few years ago without much luck, but now that I have a TV with HDMI inputs, it should be nice and easy. I originally wanted to do this with MythTV, but I think I’ve cooled on that. I think it’ll actually run Windows, primarily for the ability to play streaming Netflix.
3. Replace Desktop: Now that a couple of guys at work have eee PCs I’ve been reconsidering my own systems. I rarely use my desktop at home anymore (perhaps repurpose it to HTPC?) so I’ve been tossing around the idea of replacing the desktop and my ThinkPad T43 with a heftier laptop, like a T61 or an ASUS G1S. Basically, a laptop decent enough to game on if I feel like it. Then pick up an eee to use for portability and quick things like checking e-mail or fixing stuff for work. The Nokia n800 works pretty well for the latter things currently, but the lack of keyboard hurts a bit. And the eee PC is a plain x86 CPU, so I could run XP on it and be able to use Slingbox, which would be nice.
4. Car PC: Yeah, still keeping this dream alive. Some day I’ll build it. It seems to be getting easier though. Bluetooth GPS, Bluetooth serial adapter on the OBD2. Maybe someone will figure out how to hack into the Prius MFD by then.

I have been unable to find a device by the following specification, but I think it would rather handy to have. I suspect it wouldn’t have a huge appeal however. The device:

A small box with a USB port on one side and VGA, USB, and PS/2 cables coming out the other side. You connect the VGA, USB, and/or PS/2 cables to one computer, and the other USB to another computer, and it gives you a window on your screen that acts as a monitor for the other computer.

I think this would be great for people who have to work on machines in datacenters and the like, where sometimes you just need a monitor and keyboard, but lugging those around are annoying. Just plug this device into the server and your laptop, and poof! your laptop acts like a monitor for the server.

I don’t think it would be terribly hard to implement. You’d need some sort of video capture chip for grabbing the VGA input. PS/2 is basically just a serial output. The USB would just emulate a keyboard and mouse (perhaps via a virtual hub) to the “remote” machine. The other USB would be somewhat trickier, I’m not sure if there’s a standard video transport over USB.

You’d probably be able to sell them to system administrators, PC technitions, and maybe people who want to run a small server at home, but don’t want to switch back and forth all the time with a traditional KVM switch. The closest competeing product I’ve seen is a one-port KVM-over-IP box, which runs $500+. I think an ideal price point for this would be in sub-$100, prolly in the $80-$100 range.

So, there’s the idea, someone go turn it into a product and sell me one…