The ArduClock continues (albeit very slowly)..I have fitted a Dark background LCD display (from eBay) – I think it looks better: still haven’t put it into a box yet.

new LCD Display

I am working on another clock/counter with 7 segment LEDs (HDSP-7503) High Efficiency Red – 7.5mm (0.4 inch) Char Height.

(I bought a lot of them recently) plus some huge 16 segment LEDS – see pic below..

LED size comparison

some changes have been made; the Arduino NG has been replaced by a BBB Rev D (atMEGA168); the LM75A by a DS18B20 and the display is now a 4×20 LCD unit. The Code needs some more work before posting…I now need a bigger box to put it into! I have a nice wooden box that used to contain code wheels, but it’s not quite big enough for the LCD display..

ArduinoClock - version 2!

Just using some bits and pieces, to prototype a desk clock/calendar with thermometer. So far we have an Arduino NG with a DS1307 RTC and a LM75A thermo sensor chip. The Clock/Calendar is working…

the proto layout...

Note that the “Temp:” has no value yet. I may rearrange the display to fit a 16×2 display better. Nearly all the bits are from eBay…

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/03/26/2526701.htm?section=justin

Yes, folks: from the ABC news – gerbils are a new eco-horror in china!! Maybe they could catch them and turn them into sweet and sour gerbils, lemon gerbil, gerbils in black bean sauce…

[yes, yes, I know it's not technology...]

The T20’s are nice enough for browsing and word-processing – but lack grunt for development tools. I managed to get a working A31 planar (system) board from an american eBay vendor for a very reasonable price and it arrived very quickly (courtesy US Postal Service/Australia Post). The original mobo (see below) had finally failed to permanent fuzzy video.  I rebuilt the A31 with more RAM (1 Gb) and an 80Gb 7200 Hitachi 2.5 inch HDD, rebuilt the system with a set of IBM recovery disks, did the thousands of patches updates etc and it came up very well. It now comfortably runs Arduino IDE, Atmel AVR Studio, BDS 2006 (Delphi), and MPLAB for my PIC devices.    

A T20 with nice wallpaper!

Some weeks ago, I bid for a Thinkpad T20 described as good for parts or maybe a fixerupper. I duly won the auction and the T20 arrived. The Screen didn’t work (bad back-light, or so I thought) but it all worked OK when plugged into an external monitor. The Hard Disk was cleaned up, all the current IBM/Lenovo patches applied and the inevitable miles/km’s of MS Win2K updates also.

All up a good little machine, for little money. Then I thought I would just order a new LCD and everything would be fine. The first one; I ordered the wrong FRU (part number) and received a 13.3 inch screen which doesn’t fit the the 14.1 inch lid assy.   The next one was a 14.1 inch screen and I also got a complete lid assy marked T20 but it was for a T23; tried these out but interestingly no screen or backlight. As I was able to borrow my SO’s T20 to test things, it finally proved to be the motherboard. Another T20 mobo (with the right FRU!) from eBay and some LCD swapping and it all works quite well..not quite as cheap as I had hoped but a learning experience.

As ThinkPads go, the A31 is a big machine – but I really like it. It was only replaced because of the (well-known) video chip issues – BGA device comes unsoldered, joints unreliable and cause intermittent video problems. ThinkWiki covers this issue in some detail. I tried the aluminium foil mask and heat gun approach but it didn’t make a lot of difference. These days, I find that two or three power cycles, gently thumping the bottom of the A31 about where the CPU and graphics card are, and on occasions removing the battery, will get the machine to start up in correct video mode and stay there all day. Good motherboards for A31s are rare and pricey (even on eBay).

At long last, the more elegant programmer has been completed in a little box (pic to come..). It works well with the ICD2 clone PIC programmer. I have had to reburn the code in the 16F4550 on the programmer twice – XP got the hump and refused to recognise the ICD2 device as a legit. USB device! so the 16F4550 was plugged into a little JDM burner and hooked up serially to WinPic800 which put the right software back..

Now for some 16F877 PLCC hacking!

The Huawei E800 info available from Huawei is not helpful if you are using Ubuntu 7.10! A post from Ubuntu Forums for the Huawei E220/620 had some info re wvdial, using the wvdial.conf suggested and modprobing the device, I could get it to start, but the connection kept dropping out. Perhaps Hardy Heron will support this device (it’s a Vodafone unit, works well in XP SP2)
I suupose it is a bit unreasonable to expect Ubuntu to support every device ‘out of the box’, but the ISPs/Telco’s could help by offering drivers for other OS than just Windows…

Finally, got the Rescue & Recovery program to build me a recovery startup disk! I needed to download the exe that creates the ThinkVantage Boot Manager repair utility and run the disk. I also had to uninstall the most recent version of R&R and drop back to the one that comes with the machine (4.0?). I can’t do a full backup to my IEEE 1394 WD MyBook 1TB HDD as it crashes on “br_funcs”…wonder if it will work on USB? When will IBM/Lenovo improve the Intel Q965 graphics driver for XP?