DST change today, realised the new Cisco SPA525g2 phones don’t have a proper DST rule in place. After googling unsucessfully for a few minutes I remembered that these are relatively new phones. The manual might actually be useful. And it was.

So the proper DST code for Mountain Time is:

start=3/2/7/2;end=10/1/7/2;save=1

One of the things I’ve learned about cheap Chinese powersupplies during my research (read: watching youtube videos) is that they usually have a fair amount of overshoot when you turn them on. In the case of mine I can turn it off when set to +12V, and when I turn it back on it’ll hit +16V before settling down.

I set out today to fix that and about half-way though adding a new power switch to the back of the unit and repurposing the original switch as a load-switch I noticed a 3-wire cable that goes from the board that has the adjustment controls to the board that houses the output jacks. I had a hunch that the controller board may be using that 3-wire cable to read the actual output voltage of the unit. I then realised my clever plan would need ammending. I realised that I’m going to need to tie in the +V sense line before my new load-switch instead of after the switch where it is now. Well, I figured that’s what it meant. I decided to close up the patient according to the original plan, partially because I wanted to see if I was correct and mostly because I was really tired of using my ancient ratshack soldering station. I was especially tired of using it as I know my new rework station will be here either Monday or Tuesday.

After putting everything back together I verified the new power switch works properly. Lights on. Lights off. Lights on. Lights off.

Lights on. Now we test the load switch. Load off. Aaaaand the voltage display disappears and the powersupply drops into constant current mode. We’re going to need to move that voltage sense line. Good to know. It’ll be easy to do. I’m not going to bother until the radioshack soldering iron is in the garbage.

I didn’t accomplish what I set out to, but at least I learned something along the way.

I picked up a tube of 10 ATMega328 microcontrollers for an embedded project I’m working on. I’d wired everything up Wednesday on a breadboard according to this guide with the intent of then connecting my original Arduino Duemillanove and burning the Arduino bootloader to the blank ATMegas using the ArduinoISP sketch. Attempt after attempt, rewire after rewire resulted in the following error:

avrdude: Expected signature for ATMEGA328P is 1E 95 0F

I spent a few hours searching around trying to find a solution and the forum posts involving that error really didn’t seem to apply to my situation. I eventually noticed that the uC that shipped on my Duemillanove was the ATMega328P-PU and the chips I had ordered/received were the ATMega328-PU, signifying that is not in the pico-power series. Armed with that little tid-bit I found this post containing the piece of information I needed to move forward.

I now have signatures in /etc/avrdude.conf (excerpt below) for both the 328 and the 328p, and I now uncomment the appropriate signature for the chip I will be interfacing with. With that sorted I was able to finish burning bootloaders on all the ATMegas, breadboard my test bed, and get to learning bi-direcitonal half-duplex RS485 comms between microcontrollers using TI sn75176bp differential bus tranceivers.

part
id                  = "m328p";
desc                = "ATMEGA328P";
...
##      m328p signature
signature           = 0x1e 0x95 0x0F;
##      m328 signature
##   signature         = 0x1e 0x95 0x14;

My bed, the one I woke up in yesterday morning by all standard methods of telling time, feels so distant it’s as if I can’t say for sure I actually saw it this weekend.

I almost killed my netbook today. I’d just finished burning a CD with a USB attached external and when to close the burning app and *ZAP*. Hurt like all hell and the netbook immediately powered off. I unplugged the USB drive and fired up the netbook, all seemed OK. I’d zapped the thing in the past and it’d been just fine so I wasn’t too worried at first.

And then the back-light cut out just after I remarked that “I’m surprised I haven’t killed this thing yet”. 2 minutes later, the back-light comes on again. It cycles back and forth time and time again, each time the on period becoming shorter and the off period becoming longer.

Out of an amazing stroke of luck one of the other guys in the hackspace today not only had an Acer Aspire One 110 with him, but he also knew his way around an oscilloscope too. I pulled my netbook apart and we attached my LCD module to his Aspire One and let it ride for a while. It behaved perfectly. So we started thinking the issue wasn’t with the back-light but either the power provided by the motherboard or with the dimming signal sent to the display module. With Matt’s netbook still powering my display we spent some time noodling around with the oscilloscope and with the help of possibly the correct data-sheet for the LCD module we verified that the LED back-light was powered by +5V and the brightness is controlled by a +3.3V PWM signal. Once we determined what the cause of the problem was, either the +5V line cutting out or the +3.3V signal getting mangled we could route around the problem. If it was an LED power problem then I could borrow some +5V from the USB lines to the webcam. If the +3.3V PWM signal was borked I could just wire the +3.3V line that fed the LCD module to the brightness control line and deal with a permanently-100%-bright LCD. With all that determined we shut down Matt’s netbook and connected my LCD module to the internals of my netbook.

I fired it up and waited for it to fail. And waited…. and waited… and it hasn’t happened since. I put everything back together and it’s been behaving. All that planning and geekery and I don’t even get to claim to be responsible for the resurrection of this netbook. Apparently I have a self-healing netbook. It’s an ENTS miracle.

AO: Amisk Wuche Trail, Elk Island National Park, Alberta
Conditions: -16, slight wind, mostly cloudy
Trail Distance: 2.5km
Time Taken: 1 hour
Photo Album

I’d done this trail before with Steve in November but I decided to tackle it again now that a blanket of the white-stuff had fallen. I picked up a pair of MSR Denali Evo Ascent snowshoes last week on clearance at my favourite toy store and decided I needed to start the year off right with a quick hike through the park. I got to the park just before noon after having spent the morning fretting about what to pack in. As per usual with most of my endeavors the answer was: too much. I really wasn’t sure how quickly I was going to tackle the trail so I brought more than I needed with me, partially in the hopes of testing out my Vargo Ti alcohol stove in the cold, but I didn’t stay out long enough for that to come up.

I re-waterproofed my Montrail GTX boots in preparation for the outing, as well as picked up a pair of inexpensive GoreTEX gaiters from the aforementioned toy store. Feet stayed quite dry with the above combo, and warm enough with a pair of medium weight merino wool hiking socks. Wore my expedition weight long johns under a pairof cargo pants, the expedition weight thermal vest over a long sleeve merino wool shirt and my NorthFace Honcho jacket. MEC mitts (waterproof shells and polarfleece liners with chemical handwarmers), OR NinjaClava, Northface Hoser Hat and a cheap pair of Bolle goggles rounded out the clothing.

Unfortunately the ninjaclava and the goggles were not a good combination, the moisture I exhaled was directed into the lower vent of the goggles and they fogged up quickly. The balaclava and hoser hat work together though, I may look into some other form of face shield to keep the goggles fog-free. Luckily there wasn’t much wind and dropping the goggles didn’t make things significantly more uncomfortable. About halfway through the hike I did have to seriously start opening up my jacket to keep myself from overheating. The merino wool works well to pull moisture away from the body and I was able to regulate my body temperature pretty well. The dummy strings on my mitts were a great feature allowing me to pull off my mitts and grab the camera without having to find a pocket to stuff them in. Having the chemical warmers stuffed in the mitts meant that no matter how long my hands were outside of the mitts they were always ready and waiting to warm up my fingertips. I have rather poor circulation in my hands so this was a great help.

I need to rethink the snacks I bring on winter outings. Either I go with mostly cookable dehydrated stuff or I find foods that I don’t need to worry about trying to eat while semi-frozen. I would like to have tried out the alcohol stove this trip as I do wonder about its real cold-weather performance, I’ll make a point to do so next outing. Goals for the next snow-shoe trip will include finding some undisturbed powder and try my… foot? at breaking trail. I will most likely need the tail extensions for my Denalis for that and should look into a set of hiking poles with snow baskets so I can use them in the non-snowy months as well. At some point in the future I would like to go out snowshoeing at night as well, but that is going to require a better headlamp than I currently have.

All in all I’d say it was a successful first test of my gear and I look forward to upcoming trips. I think I’m going to seriously consider getting a parks pass by the end of the month.

For the record, this is on an Acer Aspire One ZG5 with a SuperTalent FEM32GF13M 32GB SSD running Debian/Squeeze and 2.6.30-2-686.

To be fair, I noticed it last night but I didn’t bother looking into it. When time allows today, I guess.