Technology at a glance!

If you, like me have an iPhone and can’t use the VOICEMAIL button for anything, then read on.

You can change the button to call a predefined number by issusing the following call:

*5005*86*xxxxxxxx#

and then press CALL.

Change the xxxxxxxx to your voicemail number or .. your mother

Benjamin Sølberg ipod / iPhone

If you wanna find out which firmware version you have on your brand new iPhone before trying to unlock it, try the following:

Benjamin Sølberg ipod / iPhone

While searching for informtion on statemachines to be used in my “Safe 12vdc to 220vac inverter control box” i sumbled upon an extremely lightweight stackless threads library called ProtoThreads. Although I don’t think I can’t use it because of the stack limitation on the PIC12F508/9 or PIC16F84 that i plan to use, it is worth mentioning.

Here is an abstract of descripton found on the webpage:

Protothreads are extremely lightweight stackless threads designed for severely memory constrained systems, such as small embedded systems or wireless sensor network nodes. Protothreads provide linear code execution for event-driven systems implemented in C. Protothreads can be used with or without an underlying operating system to provide blocking event-handlers. Protothreads provide sequential flow of control without complex state machines or full multi-threading.

A simple task is defined like this:

#include "pt.h"

struct pt pt;
struct timer timer;

PT_THREAD(example(struct pt *pt))
{
  PT_BEGIN(pt);
  while(1) {
    if(initiate_io()) {
      timer_start(&timer);
      PT_WAIT_UNTIL(pt, io_completed() || timer_expired(&timer));
      read_data();
    }
  }
  PT_END(pt);
}

Benjamin Sølberg Electronics, Links

Here is a good link on how to do it, including background information..

http://web2.murraystate.edu/andy.batts/ps/POWERSUPPLY.HTM

Benjamin Sølberg Electronics, Links

Hvis du skal beregne hvor tyk en leding skal være for at kunne trække en bestemt spænding og strøm, så er der her et link til hvordan man gør samt lidt flere informationer:

http://www.praestkjaer.dk/dk/emner/elektricitet/el-kabel.htm

http://home1.inet.tele.dk/ehh/elektronik/formel/spm/spm.htm

Ohm’s lov

http://home1.inet.tele.dk/ehh/elektronik/formel/ohm/ohmslov.htm

Mit specifikke behov var 12V, 50A = 600W over en afstand på 3 meter.

Så 16mm²  burde være nok, men jeg gik op på 21mm² (da det var hvad jeg kunne skaffe) for at være sikker.

Beregning 0,0175 (kobber modstand pr mm2 pr meter) * 6 (2×3m, frem og tilbage) / 21mm² = 0,005 ohm

50A * 50A * 0,005 ohm = 12,5W tab på ledningerne, altså effekt som bliver afsat i ledningerne alene.

12,5W / 50A = 0,25V spændings tab over ledningerne

Keywords: mm2 ohm modstand Ampere Watt Volt ledningstykkelse kvadrat DC

Benjamin Sølberg Electronics

• discovercircuits.com - discover circuits, has 25,000+ electronic circuits or schematics cross-referenced into 500+ categories. As a vital resource for engineers, hobbyists, inventors & consultants, the site’s collection of information will help you find quick solutions to electronic design problems.

• Electronics Lab - find useful circuits with full description, diagrams and PCB, electronics articles, links and downloads. Very cool site for electronics

Benjamin Sølberg Links

Fonera mp3 player & Fonera SC Card hack

http://phrozen.org/fonera.html

Another Fonera SC/MMC hack

http://www.larsen-b.com/Article/262.html

Benjamin Sølberg FON, Network

Ubuntu 6.06.1 server (choosen because of support until 2011):

http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/downloading?release=server-lts

Perfect installation of Ubuntu server:

http://www.howtoforge.com/perfect_setup_ubuntu_6.06

Virtual floppy driver, CDBurner and bios update:

APC & ACPI Power links:

http://packages.debian.org/stable/utils/i8kutils.html

http://comcap.free.fr/c640.html#power

http://www.centre-cired.fr/forum/article181.html

Benjamin Sølberg Network, Uncategorized, unix

I got a WebCam for free, but with no driver. And since no generic driver was buildin XP I thought “easy come easy go”.

I decided to take it a part and do a litle peaking inside.

What I did find was a chip named ZC0301Plus.

I then turned to Google and after an hour I got lucky.

I found a driver at a .ch site, and the funny thing was that it was the zip file itself that was indexed
and not the html page linking to the file. So it was pure luck.

While searching for the driver I found others like me, but only a few of them finally managed to find a driver.

I have made a local copy of the driver for my personal archive purpose, but feel free to take a copy yourself.

Download driver for zc0301plus based webcam here

Keywords:
MSN Messenger, WebCam, chip zc0301plus, Super AMT PRO Series Lense.

Benjamin Sølberg Microsoft, WebCam

I have had my Windows XP Media Center running for months now without any kind of problems.

Normally Windows XP does a good job even when never/almost never restarted.

My developer machine can run for serval weeks, even so that I am programming resource hogs.

But when it comes to my Media Center running as a settop box, it somtimes just dies or do other kind of nasty stuff such as not being able to fetch the Electronic Program Guide (EPG) and its like.

This is very annoying as it misses TV recordings

I usually restart the Media Center PC once a day to solve this.

And because I am lazy I had been looking for a way to do this automatically.

The buildin windows commandline SHUTDOWN.EXE program isn’t just enough so I found :

NirCmd v1.85 - Freeware command-line tool
Copyright (c) 2003 - 2006 Nir Sofer

You can find it here: http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/nircmd.html

The program can do anything well almost anything, from a command line.

Including “standby”, which was what I was looking for.

So the only thing to automate the restart & standby process is to use:

SHUTDOWN.EXE -r

at 4:00 am and

NIRCMD.EXE standby

at 4:05 am.

I have added the two commands to the Windows XP scheduler found in the Control Panel.

The Media Center now behaves alot better, but unfortunately it is still far from perfect.

Benjamin Sølberg Microsoft