Archive of November 2008
Finally created the instructable for the garage door whiteboard we made a few weeks ago. Visit it on instructables.
01:32 PM | Tags: robot house, projectsPutting a Fit-PC to Good Use.
In the earlier portion of this year, I bought a Fit-PC and did a little messing with it. It is pretty much your standard linux machine, except for the fact that it’s in this terribly small, low-power, package.
Originally I was trying to turn it into a backup appliance with one of those fancy web-interfaces that let you control pretty much everything - so that I could turn around and sell this little appliance. Eventually, a software only solution was found that would make it cheaper which would make it easier to sell a backup service to clients.
Since the software solution was found, the Fit-PC laid mostly dormant. Its initial use was no longer available and it would have to be repurposed. The idea of using it as a robot controller was tossed around, but without a robot to control - it still had no purpose. Then I started using it as a development server. I mean seriously, how awesome is it to always have a server available in your house that doesn’t create any significant heat or noise?
Even as a development server, I used it in a fairly light-weight capacity. It really was more of a testing server before final deployment. And since the projects that I’ve been needed to run through QA are nearing completion - even the task as a development server is slowly ending.
So end of the road right? Nothing really for this awesome machine to really do. Think again. I realized that between the various computers that I have, that there is easily a terabyte or so of disk space. I generally don’t keep those machines running since they create considerable heat and noise. So what I am doing now, is removing various drives, one by one, and putting them in USB enclosures. I already have Samba setup on the Fit-PC to share out /media (where USB drives get mounted), and since the system can handle USB drives suddenly becoming unavailable - I can just turn the drives off when I don’t need anything from them.
To make things even nicer, I have a network controlled power switch. I can connect from anywhere in the world, turn the drives on, download what I need from them via whatever means I want, and then turn them off again. This will prolong the life of these drives, since as we all know, the controllers in most USB drives are not smart enough to spin down the hard drive to prolong its life.
09:53 AM | Tags: projects, linuxImport Drupal into Chyrp
I used to not care about what I wrote when I moved between the software I used for my site. Now, I guess you can say, I do.
I have all the data sitting in a database for most of my old versions of my website and I am going to try to get that data into Chyrp. The database structure of Chyrp is fairly straight-forward, the structure of Drupal is a little more complex.
Once I have the code to do the importing, I’ll post it up here for others to use.
UPDATE: I’ve upgraded my Chyrp install, so now I get to learn the database structure all over again.
UPDATE 2: Is there really any good reason to import all my old stuff that I wrote for my old site? I’m looking through it and a vast majority is crap.
08:53 PM | Tags: drupal
Cylon Blinkenlights
Last night at the Robot House we had a costume party and while I don’t really celebrate Halloween, it was a party and my friends were there so I figured - why not?
Of course, I couldn’t just show up as my usual self, you know? I had to do something at least a little bit awesome. I got the idea about a week ago of embedding a Larson Scanner aka Cylon Lights aka Knight Rider lights, into a hat and wearing it. I spent about 2-2.5 hours soldering, programming, and glueing it and I am fairly satisfied with the results.
I may put up the schematics, but it is an absurdly simple design. Just solder a bunch of LEDs together!
I got a lot of people to stop and say “wow, that’s cool!” and more than one person informed me that someone was targeting me with some sort of laser scope. I think I got a pretty good reaction and not bad for my first real public display of some electronics project. People seem to like blinkenlights.
There are some pictures of the party, but not too many, between the strobe light and the fog machine, my iPhone camera wasn’t doing much good.
10:56 AM | Tags: projects, electronics, battlestar galactica