Connecting

After I wrote that last post about my being unable to connect my brother found the new modem outside. The technician that sent it the day before said

[...] How long have you had this problem? Lets look at you router's status-* Holy-Shit! How are you even able to connect? [...] Your modem is dying, there have been more than 200000 ATM Cell Header Errors in the last two hours! [...]

and decided to send a replacement overnight express. The courier instead of putting it in the locker box or ringing the bell decided to leave it balanced on my doorstep with the "Signature Required" label face up. The courier’s website says it arrived at 1:10 PM. :|

When I installed it in the exact same place the old one was I found that while it worked considerably better than the old one, it still did not connect for more than a few minutes and about the time it racked up 10k errors I decided to try connecting it in another room. There it worked brilliantly, only one error in the first ten minutes. Thinking back to the technician's questions about what might be connected to that socket, and the knowledge that I'd in the month prior had to dig a shorting electrical recepticle out of the wall that had been plastered inplace decided to replace that socket in the first room. Now it works and picking up a phone (wired or wireless) doesn't fast-resync the DSL line.

Thinking about it now, I also recall that the cable box was secured to the electrical meter by means of framing screws, I wonder if this is the source of the phantom rings that have been annoying us during the day. I will need to make a meter long insulated screwdriver and remove them. It can't have been legal to drive metal spikes into the meter the first place.

unable to connect.

Another DSL modem has failed and I am now waiting for a replacement.

My connections have been deteriorating since the meter guy had a tantrum and tore the phone and cable boxes off of the wall two years ago. I strongly suspect that the 'contractor' they sent out to fix it wired something into my loop that should not be there since

1. the boxes are now supported by their wires
2. there are wire splices outside of the box
3. my digital cable is fed through the phone box
4. there are loose fasteners inside the sealed boxes
and
5. without exaggeration, I can throw a rock and hit the CO across the intersection from my house and yet my signal quality swings from nil to excellent every few mintues

As a subscriber to both Bell and Rodgers I am understandably disappointed;
when I travel south into Toronto for work I am not excited to be meeting in person with my peers but able to get their e-mail.

If only my mother wasn't javascript:void(0)determined to keep her Bell e-mail address, then we could switch to a better DSL vendor (who would actually be selling us Bell internet, but at a better price and) with technicians who would understand that a loop that has toased three modems probabaly has something wrong in it.

Yeah!

The project I mentioned eariler on this blog in Aww Fuck, has finished its initial design phase and is about due to begin prototyping.

It is a developer board w/ perpherials (serial, GPIF, ADC, bellswhistles, etc.) based on the Digikey.com:Cypress EZ-USB FX2LP™, successor to the Cypress EZ-USB FX™ which my team built the Turner oscilloscope with.^[1]

In contrast to the $500 Digikey.com:Cypress EZ-USB Development Kit this has been designed down to a minimum system with only the peripherials needed to use the Microprocessor. I won't promise an exact price, but i expect that it will sell for less than $100 and more than $20.

I plan to develop a number of projects with this board over the next year, including the keyboard.

Rubik's Cube continued

About two weeks ago I came up with a workable design, and key layout for this thing.

I had to make it a 3x3 (2-1-2) so that the electrical interconnects with the corner pieces not be interrupted by turning the faces without building a tree of phonojacks, or having to make extremely precise overlaping cone shaped cuts into a solid base material, then inlaying wires and springs to establish the same connections.

This is also good since I can also getaway with lower build quality.

I had hoped to use this as an exercise to learn sourceforge.net:KyCAD, however the design I have come up with makes use of concentric rings to match the connectors I have designed which has made this too difficult for me to implement on my first day using KyCAD.

So I went back to Eagle to draw the inner faces of the cubes, and after learning that it would cost me $40 for enough DigiKey:tactile switches I will be building my own switches.

If this works I promise to make a this into a kit.

XD , I can implmplement the W3Schools.com:ISO 8859-1 Symbols on the extra 30 (odd) empty cells! No more will I need to remember

Alt

+{

1

,

8

,

1

}=µ or

Alt

+{

9

,

3

,

7

}=Ω

Re: Computer Keyboard Rubik’s Cube

hackedgadgets.com:Computer Keyboard Rubik’s Cube

Next step is to make it into a working keyboard, now that would be impressive!

- Alan Parekh on February 28, 2010

Well, I'm drafting a USB peripherial controller board, this looks like something it can do, and I have the source code for that one button keyboard I made last year, how difficult can it be to create a electro-mechanical input device with 100x the input data with electrical connections that need to move freely in three dimensions, along three axis, interchanagably whilst not losing electrical integrity.

The only difficult part will be scrounging 150 tactile switches for a 5x5x5 cube

Bonus points if I can finish building it before somebody else does.

New Toy

I have received my Sworche:Mover MP5 Player in the mail today from DealExtreme:(SKU 28877).

I was asked by a number of companies to source an affordible 'mini' PDA. I figured that repurposing a handheld game&mpeg player would be the only way we could stay within the $50 price envelope set by cellphones with PDA capabilities while remaining fabless.

I've intentionally broken and repaired it already and I have to say that the build and design quality are to par with what my clients are seeking, and significantly higher than I was expecting (which was not great). This appears to have been repackaged as packing the materials and methods of each of the accessories are different from each other, and what is discribed by vendor. The distributor tells me that this is because of their quality control checks. This would also explain why thie unit has evidence of having been cycled (charded, discharged, configured and fully feature tested).

With little modification I should be able to add touch, USB and bluetooth host capabilities; however the software needs significant work, especially the spectrum analyser.

Fortunately my clients are companies of software developers who are responding to requests by three different distributors. Two of which have tried to deploy what are now being called 'mini PDAs' due to a trademark infringement suit.

Because of a confict of intrest I terminated relations with one client when another offered me a permanent position- shortly before that company tanked. So this player will be my USB drive/e-book reader for the time being.

Edit: LOL, I just noticed that there was no opening in the case for the "Opuonal" camera.

Aww ----

Exepcting my travelling companion to stir up shit I decided to remove all CAD programs from my laptop before travelling to the states to avoid accusations of illegally exporting technology in addition other technological activities which are legal where I am now, but not in the states.

Upon returning I recieved notice that one of my major projects was due and I being the dubious bastard I am, was waiting for the request before submiting. (Also the design was still a bit rough.) I was surprised that the Eagle link was still in my startmenu; However, this link was broken as Eagle's uninstaller had neglected to remove the links and associations from my system.

Undetered I downloaded the new version from their homepage and after installing it was surprised that it was requesting the My Documents/Eagle be created. Figuring that I deleted it I clicked no and started to browse for my not in a default location projects folder on my C: drive. It was not there. Neither was the copy of an old backup on my desktop that I had included in Eagle's directory config. And my backup drive is nowhere close to up to date as I had to use that cable for my network printer.

So now a major project is due and the best backup I have is eight months old.

"...."

Edit: Language