Inside the mind of an otter

Died in his sleep, at the age of 50. Will be missed. I personally loved the guy and thought he was great.

http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-billy-mays29-2009jun29,0,6116879.story

Edit: I hope his tombstone says "Billy Mays here!"

Because Scani wants a post too <3! Yay!

Hi Neo, I know you're watching! <3!

It's... alive!

Had an awesome time at the Engineering Open House yesterday. The first part of the day was just tours and stuff of the different departments, to give us insight into what major we want to go into. I'm already set in that regard, so it was kinda boring :P After that, though, there was an engineering competition at Sexton Campus. The engineering students from other universities, such as Acadia, SMU, etc, were there as well. We had to form groups of ten, where we were given junk (pop bottles, elastic bands, straws) and were told we had 3 hours to design a little car powered by the elastic bands. The challenge was to make a car that traveled the greatest distance, and also be able to travel an exact, set distance. Myself, Andrew and Katie put some hard work into the design; we wanted something simple and robust. We eventually got a fairly solid car built up, and ran our trials. Our first raw distance trial ran just under 5 meters, and our second ran about 6 and a half. Our average between the two set us fairly highly in first place. It was pretty mutually assumed we wouldn't stay in first place for long, however, after watching trial after trial of the other teams, half an hour later, we found ourselves still in first place. Our accuracy trials didn't go as well as our distance trials, as we came out with an average deviation of about 50mm, which was fairly large compared to other teams. With that in mind, our performance in the beginning was more then enough to keep us in the lead! After the competition was over, we went to the engineering lounge where they announced, much to our surprise, that our group were the winners. We never thought we would win over all those other people [engineers!], so it was very exciting. We won 2GB iPods :P It felt great to come together as a group and succeed in such magnitude.

In other news, classes are harddd x.x I'm used to maintaining a mid-80-low-90 average, now I'm just trying to keep it above 70 x.x Such little free time lately. No time to work on projects or tinker with stuffs, which really sucks. Math is the worst. Getting up at 6:30 in the morning sucks too! I feel that it's not so much the work that's difficult, but with all the classes, there's just so much of it you don't have time to let one thing sink in before moving on to another.

Fun! =D

I graduated! Woohoo! It's about time :P Feels nice to be done high school. Gives me more time to contemplate taking over the world!

Built a breakout board for one of my accelerometers, and had a bit of extra space, so I put a cute little furry pawprint on it. I thought it came out well enough to show people :) X Y and Z refer to the directions of measurement that the sensor can record. Since it's 3-axis, it can measure motion in the X Y and Z planes. Data is sent to a host microcontroller via I2C (Or SPI, if I can wrap my head around managing it with a uC). The module is roughly the size of a quarter. :P





And zomg, no pins on the chip?! Blasphemy?! No! It's a land grid array! Much to my delight, it was fairly easy to solder :) Here's a picture of what it looks like on the pin side, the only difference being mine is a 16-pin array, and the one shown is 14.

Random title, bored and tired, wotevar.

It's been busy the past weeks. Exams are next week, and I just wrote my Math12Adv Provincial this afternoon. I pretty much just accepted my fate, bent over and let it take me up the ass. It was brutal, but I think I did alright in the end.

After a bit longer then expected, I got my USB UART IC's (FT232RL for reference) today. I redid my board layout a bit and fixed up some spots. It's a bit more efficient and clean now, and I'm happy with it. All parts are now surface mount, with the exception of the pin headers that plug into the breadboard. Etched it tonight, and it came out really well. Tweaked all my timings and stuff, fixed my mistakes from last time. The only mistake this time was that I ran it through the developer too quickly, and it didn't remove all the resist. As a result of this, I've got some random patches of copper on the board. Nothing major, all cosmetic of course. Can be removed with an exacto. It's getting there!

omg big board layout image.



I'm quite pleased with how this one came out. No broken traces, no missing traces, the proper amount of jumper vias... we're all good! Now I just need to go drill the header holes before I start soldering it together.

Also, won some academical awards and stuffs last week. Received a Certificate of Excellence for my performances with the band, and a plaque for my work as an engineer on the Robotics team. Pretty exciting stuff. Gots a neat pin, too. Says, "DRAGONS: LHS Band '08" and it's got our dragon thingie on it.

After 4-ish months of hunting and waiting, I finally gots him! He's pretty big, just shy of 2 feet, and very cuddly :-)

Got some boxes from Freescale and SamTec today. Capacitative touch sensors and accelerometers from Freescale, and custom headers from SamTec. They give you full customization of what you want, and it comes out to a checksum, which they use you send you what you need. I got 5x 50 pin row standard spacing hole-through headers, and 5x 34 pin (I think) dual-row standard spacing surface mount headers. The checksums for both are TSW-150-14-G-S and TSM-136-02-L-DV respectively.









Should last me a long time. Thanks guys!

Sidewalk sale down at Princess Auto today. Went down to pick up a 10x loupe to help with all the surface mount stuff I've been doing lately, and came back with a bunch of neat stuff. Especially these, which were on sale for 2$ each:

So, Wednesday night, I realized I can order free samples from electronics component manufacturers. Not having much money, and always wanting to experiment and tinker with new things, I ordered up a ton of interesting parts from a variety of different places. Besides some of the high-end Microchip PIC18's and PIC24's, I searched around and found that you can sample some pretty expensive stuff. I got my first box full of parts this morning, from ST Microelectronics. They sent me $157.89 worth of parts for free, with free 2-day priority shipping.

Part Number Quantity Description

L298HN 3 Dual Full Bridge Driver
LIS244AL 3 MEMS motion sensor 2-axis - +-2g Ultracompact Analog Ou
LIS3LV02DL 3 Linear Accelerometer 3-Axis +-2g / +-6g with SPI/I2C
STE45NK80ZD 3 N-CHANNEL 800V - 0.11Ohm - 45A ISOTOP FAST DIODE SuperMESH
STGW30NC60W 3 Ultra fast series IGBT
STGW30NC60WD 3 Ultra fast series IGBT
STW29NK50ZD 5 N-CHANNEL 500V - 0.11 Ohm - 29A TO-247 Fast Diode SuperMESH
TDA0161DP 3 Proximity sensor

Note the accelerometers, which I've been wanting to tinker with for a very long time. Now, I realized they were small, but damn. They're seriously fucking tiny! Can't want to get a board designed to try them out. The eventual goal for this is to have the sensor read by a microcontroller (one of many that I've got on the way from Microchip), and then send the data through (hopefully USB, hopefully USB!) to a PC, which then (and this will be the hardest part...) will transform the 3-Dimensional motion of the sensor into 3-Dimensional motion inside a small 3D program of some sort. But that's pretty far off right now. Check it:





The second photo is of the H-Bridges I got; motor controllers. Plan for these? I dunno yet, TBA! Perhaps a small robot? They can handle 2 amps per channel, and they're dual channel parts, more then enough for some little-ish motors. Of course, if I need more, I can amplify that with the 600v 60amp IGBT's I got too. :-)

Had a physics test today on electricity and magnetism. I pretty much bent it over and raped it from behind. Feels good to actually do near-flawless on a test for once.

Managed to get the board etched today. Came out really well, save for a few newbie screwups. Due to inexperience with the time required for etching the PCB in the FeCl, I accidentally left it in a little too long, resulting in a few cut traces where the ferric chloride ate through parts of the resist. They're very minor and can easily be bridged with solder. Also, I actually forgot to re-add a trace I removed one night while tinkering with the design. No biggie, can jump it with wire-wrap wire. Other then that, the board actually came out extremely well! Not too shabby for my first time, I'd be willing to say. My old man was pretty impressed with it, and I have to say I am too.







The level of precision with the photoresist process is amazing. The pictures suck, but the traces are all crisp and sharp. All text and symbols are clear and highly legible. If I knew I'd be able to attain such levels of accuracy, I would have been a bit more daring in my layout. Dimensions of the board are 1.008" wide by 2.061" long.

I've started putting some components on, and so far the LED's, resistors, caps and bottom-side jumpers are all in place. Just need to solder on the USB connector, the headers, and finally, the chip itself when it gets here.

After spending a lot of time working on fairly isolated electronics projects, I've been beginning to want to interface some of them with a computer in order to transfer, record, and monitor data back and forth from microcontrollers. With that in mind, I searched around on the net and found a chip that could do exactly what I wanted and more, all through USB. Unfortunately, this chip is very small, meaning I can't use it unless I etch my own circuit board. To get an idea of how small it is, here's an example chip I have that is the same size and pin count:



The chip I'm going to use is called FT232RL, and it's got 28 pins packed around an area the size of your pinky fingernail. It's going to be a pain in the ass to solder. Because of it's size and unique connections, I've gotta make my own board for it. I've picked up some photoresist PCB and ferric chloride, and need to pick up the developer for the board tomorrow. So far, I've got a layout that I'm fairly happy with:



The dimensions of the layout are 1" wide by 2" long. It looks massive in the drawing, but I've printed out test copies, and holy hell is it small. It'll be printed off in all black onto a sheet of transparency film, and then pressed firmly against the PCB with a large piece of heavy glass on top. Then, it'll be exposed to fluorescent light. Once it's complete, it'll be rinsed with the developer chemical, then etched with the ferric chloride. This'll be the first PCB I've ever made. A little ambitious, no? There are a ton of things I'm worried will go wrong; traces will be too close together and short, I'll expose it too long and ruin the board, I'll etch too much copper away and have opens all over the place. Above that, soldering all the surface mount parts won't be easy. The Tx and Rx LED's I'm using are so tiny that they'll blow away if you so much as look at them. Dimensions on them are 1mm x 2mm.



That's all I've got for now. Couldn't find room for an otter symbol on the board =P My name will have to do.

Got back from UNB last night, completely exhausted. Slept. Long car rides completely take it right out of me. Lots of pictures and footage of the stuff that happened, but it's not mine, so I have to wait till other's host it somewhere so I can link to it. Was very interesting. In the end, we came in 8 / 21. Not bad, but not exactly great either. Got to see some neat fursuits

In other news, recently, I've become interested for various reasons about connecting external DIY peripherals to my computer, but the line levels directly from the serial port are enough to trash logic and microcontroller chips, so I needed a converter to adapt this to suitable voltages in order to use them. With this in mind, I decided to build a small, compact RS232 to logic level adapter.







You'll have to forgive the webcam quality pictures, because a webcam is pretty much all I'm stranded with at the moment. The converter is fully operational and can run reliably as low as 2.5v. The 4 pin header on the back provides an area for a supplied voltage, Rx and Tx signals and ground.

Also, the SD card reader came in the post while I was away. Looks neat, should be able to find an interesting use for it eventually. I believe it shows up as a COM port, but I haven't checked that out just yet. Fairly heavy and robust little thing, I didn't expect very good quality for six cents.







That's it for right now, more later when I remember it all x.x

Been a long few weeks. Got really really sick. Then I got better. Hauled ass on a tough math test yesterday.

Found this, it got a giggle out of me.



In other news, I won a USB memory card reader off ebay for 6 cents, free shipping. Reads SD/XD/MMC cards. I'm hoping to be able to interface it with a microcontroller and establish some sort of sketchy link. Actually, that's a lie. I bought it just because it was 6 cents.

Robotics EAST competition coming up this weekend, which means another weekend in New Brunswick. The hotel we're staying at has high speed, but no wireless, so I brought one of my wireless routers back from the dead, wound a high gain omni antenna (Yes, I actually did the math for this) and soldered it internally so that it fits along the side of the case. The router in question was scrapped a long time ago because it dropped connection every few seconds, and I actually took the antenna connector off it for my USB-Wifi mod. Ever since I wound and attached my own antenna, I've had no problems at all. It's been running for 48 hours now without a single dropout or loss of connection, which pleases me greatly. I modified the settings so that it'll plug and play directly into almost any basic network and provide a secure wireless link. Basically, the LAN from the upstream router connects to this router, which provides all the necessary IP and DNS handling, and passes off new IP addresses to clients over the wireless network via it's own DHCP. I've got it set up for WAP2, and I'll be SSH tunneling while I'm there to make sure nothing important is compromised. I've also got the SSID hidden so that the access point won't be visible to anyone under Windows, however, I believe apps like Kismet or Aircrack in a Unix enviroment can spot hidden SSID's. Regardless, perhaps it's overkill. =P

What do they all have in common? Well, me, I suppose.

First off, I got accepted into Dalhousie University yesterday! I'm really pumped about that. I'm taking a 4 year degree in electrical engineering, and hope to go a bit further after that. Now comes the anxiety about money, loans, finding a place to live (As much as it's looking like I'm probably going too, I really don't want to live at home.) etc.

Second, made some parabolic reflectors for my antennas the other day. They're made out of 1/16" steel sheet, so there's no worry about them easily losing their shape. They were created on a roller machine to ensure they were at least relatively precise. Here's something not quite good enough to be called a picture so that you can look at it.



In the representation above, you can see my professional test setup. Laptop and antenna on bed, being held up by a can of shaving cream, which is further held up by the other little reflector, in hopes it will at least be kinda vertically accurate. Which it really isn't. x.x Oh well. I was testing out the big reflector on my little antenna. As you can see from the laptop screen, the signal strength changes depending on where I aim the reflector. As I found out later, the access point I was probing was actually about another 20 degrees counterclockwise from the current target location, and the signal strength spiked significantly when I found it.

Yesterday evening, I went wardriving with my friend Matt. He drove me around a few roads while I probed for access points using my laptop and new antenna. We slowly drove around for approximately 10 minutes and I picked up 56 access points.


Click to view full.


Interestingly enough, 28 out of those 56 access points were unsecured, and I was able to successfully connect to some of them from my car before we drove out of range.






Also, some random crap I picked off my memory card. I took these before the camera died. I kinda like the depth of field effect in environments with lots of objects or detail, and electronics tend to be unique for this due to the heavily populated circuitry.

And it gets hacked. Big surprise, huh?



I've been wanting to tinker with something like this for a while now. I was given a USB wireless adapter for the Nintendo DS/Wii and wanted to see how much I could squeeze out of such a relatively cheap device.

I first had to overcome a significant obstacle: the adapter is designed for proprietary Nintendo devices ONLY. This means that you can only connect to Nintendo products. To overcome this, I first popped open the case and found what chipset was used. It turns out that this product is a rebranded Buffalo WLI-U2-KG54-AI. Armed with this knowledge, I downloaded the Nintendo drivers to see how the software interfaced with the hardware. After some extensive research and trial and error, I found out how to modify the drivers to release the adapter from it's Nintendo captors.

I saved and installed my driver, and tested out the adapter by sticking it in a USB port. It recognized as a Buffalo USB Wifi adapter, and proceeded to flicker into life. I disabled my integrated laptop wireless, and probed for access points using the new adapter. Much to my surprise, I received a slightly stronger signal then using my inbuilt wifi. It connected perfectly, and I was granted a solid, stable connection.

I didn't want to stop here, though. This wasn't enough; it needed something more, so I wanted to try adding an external antenna. This would allow me to attach high gain antennas to my laptop and scout for long range wireless access points.



I pulled a Reverse-polarity SMA connector off some old wifi gear. After carefully making sure I'd found the internal antenna points, I tinned the ground pads of the adapter with solder and carefully attached 2 ground points towards the rear of the board. Using a small, very thin piece of solid core copper wire, I cautiously soldered one tip to the solder pad on the board, and the other to the center conductor of the SMA connector.





After making sure the connector was firmly attached, as to avoid being torn off by torsion applied by adding/removing an antenna, I began reassembling. I lined the plastic case with grounded foil tape to prevent unnecessary noise from entering the circuit. Electrical tape was applied over this to prevent shorts.





I placed the lid halves together and covered the exterior in foil tape connected to USB ground. I realize this is most likely overkill, but it certainly won't damage anything; too much protection is better then too little in this regard. I wrapped the finished unit in electrical tape to make it look better, since foil tape isn't very pretty.







Now, the most important question: Does it work? Well, yes! In fact, it works far better then I anticipated, but not in the ways I hypothesized. I expected to see good gains from my large 10dBi external AirLink antenna, but in fact I got the highest gain from my 4" direct mount AirLink antenna! Further observation seems to point towards inefficiencies and wasted transmit power through the large antenna, resulting in access points I could see, but not transmit too. Also, due to the cheapiness of the antenna, I'm doubting it matches the proper 50 Ohm impedance which the circuit was expecting. This resulted in null access points which are out of my range. The little antenna, however, had no problem talking to routers over 300ft away through walls, a hill and a road (Aka, my neighbour :D ). I used this signal, as well as my own home network, as a test, since I live in the boonies and there arn't many wireless networks close to me.



As you can see, my integrated laptop wireless has a signal strength of approximately -75dBi at home, which isn't that bad, but it's not particularly wonderful either. My modded USB adapter with the 'high gain' Airlink antenna shows a signal of approximately -69dBi, which is a -6dBi improvement over my integrated. Adding a 4" Dlink antenna shows a signal of about 60dBi, a boost of around -9 or -10dBi. Once I add the 4" Airlink antenna, the signal jumps to >-45dBi, an improvement of over -15dBi! This is a -30dBi gain over my integrated wireless, and is very significant! Leaving the adapter with no antenna, the signal plummets back to about -71dBi.

Pros:
- Greatly improved wireless range and performance.
- Antenna upgradability: can add a reflector, etc.
- These Wifi adapters are ALL over the place, at least around here x.x
- Cheap! Cost me 0$.

Cons:
- Requires a steady hand and some good soldering experience.
- Probably not legal.
- Can easily damage your equipment if done incorrectly.

In conclusion, this project required some very precise soldering and planning, even though it doesn't quite look that way in the large, highly magnified photographs. Incorrectly performed, this modification could severely and permanently harm your wireless card, or even your computer. In my situation, I was able to yield quite satisfying results with the equipment available to me. This project gave me a fair bit of experience in driver writing and modification, as well as RF circuitry and engineering. I had quite a lot of fun, and it was well worth the work!

So, about two months ago, I set out to buy an otter plushie. I found a really cool one, 20" tall, but absolutely no place I found would order him, or had him in stock. After a few email exchanges with an employee at this place, they agreed to order it for me, and said they should get one in stock within the next week or two. Well, here I sit over a month and a half later, with this in my inbox:

Alex,

Thank you for your e-mail.

I apologize for the delay. But unfortunately, the manufacturer didn't include it in our last order as planned. We have requested again that they include one with our next order and hope that it will be arriving in 2-3 weeks if not sooner.



So, great x.x I'm really starting to lose interest in putting so much effort into getting one. Meh, what's another 2-3 weeks, plus however long it takes them to ship it here?



He looks really cuddly; I'm rather bummed it's such a hard time trying to get my paws on one. Oh well. Hopefully it'll be worth it in the end.

Well, it's been a few months since I posted last =P Big surprise there. It's a little past 3 in the morning, and I'm up working on Precal. Ugh, it's driving me insane. I really wish I didn't need this credit.

Robotics EAST 2008 is gearing up quicker then I imagined. I'm not really looking forward to it; it's a lot of work. At the teleconference a few weeks ago, I represented our team, which was fun. I do rather enjoy leading events such as this. We got to ask and discuss a few serious questions to the Robotics competition administrators, and we also asked some silly ones. As teams cycled through the roster and asked any questions they had about the competition, I had the pleasure of asking interesting, and yet somehow still relevant questions regarding weather or not we'd receive a penalty for invalidating the rules of gravity, weather or not we're permitted to attend the competition without pants, etc. Having an, err, interesting track record with this annual competition, we were quickly humorously reminded that Miller (our mascot, a big blue dragon) was NOT to get into any fights this year, and that we're still not allowed to equip armaments to our robot. It's a long story. A very long story. And since I'm half awake, chances are I'll wake up and realize I wrote jibberish in my LiveJournal.

My soldering iron is dead.

I need a new soldering iron! Quickly! Someone bring me one! This is like an artist without his paintbrush!

If you haven't already done so already, bookmark this.

Go otters.

Working my ass off on this PreCal course and feeling like I'm going nowhere. It's been 2 weeks and I'm only on Assignment 2, and I work on this every single day.

Feel like I completely tanked this History test I had today. It fucking sucked, and I barely remembered anything I was supposed to know for it.

Band performance tonight, was just about the only thing I actually had a good time doing today. Oh! And a friend sent me a Christmas card with an otter on it. I was pretty pumped about that.

Had to study for tomorrows Chem test. Shouldn't be hard; acids and bases. Regardless, studying = sux.

English class is BEYOND going down the tubes. It's already down the fucking tubes. Our teacher is so... she's just... it's just that... >< Ugh. She can't teach for SHIT. So far, we watched a movie, wrote a short paper, and read a book. She's supposed to be preparing us for a Provincial Exam. We haven't done ANYTHING of relevance. Students, myself incl, are getting pissed the hell off. Parents are too. The school board is getting involved, and all the complaints from students and parents are getting heard. Some nasty shit is going to go down soon over this. I'll keep you posted.

Computer now refuses to hibernate. Fucker. It doesn't need to sleep anyway.

And bits and pieces of random other stuff made today rather craptastic! Oh, the joy. Firefox says craptastic isn't a word. I think it should be. Don't you?