I happens to have a LEGO Mindstorms NXT.
I just love it!
I have been doing/playing with LEGO all my life.
Today my youngest wanted to build robots with me.
He is 3½ years old, so we build parts of it together but I do the programming.
Soon he will learn or at least so I hope.
But when updating the firmware from version 1.03 to 1.05, things went bad.
Somehow the flashing process failed and I ended up with a bricked “brick”.
At the time I didn’t see how funny this actually was. But I was lucky to find a way to
fix this after a bit of googling. The process involves hitting a hidden reset switch.
The blog suggested that this switch is the one under one of the batteries.
That didn’t help anything, the NXT brick keeps saying “click click click”.
I actually assembled the NXT brick just to see if the switch was broken.
Which it wasn’t, and to be honest I really didn’t believe it my self.
But then i found another switch…
It turns out that the right switch to press with batteries inserted and no USB
attached is locate on the backside of the NXT brick in the upper left hole just
below the USB plug.
Holding it for 5 seconds did the trick.
The NXT brick now correctly boots into flashing mode.
Start up your Mindstorms NXT software and flash the (new) firmware
via the menu “Tools -> Update NXT firmware”.
If I just knew that from the very start…
Hope this helps you.
Benjamin Sølberg Lego Mindstorms NXT
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:
Power up your iPhone.
Enter *3001#12345#* then pressing “Call”.
This will start the hidden Field Test application.
Under Versions you will find the version of your firmware.
Simple and easy.  Â
03.12.06_GÂ = firmware 1.0.0
03.14.08_G = firmware 1.0.1 and 1.02 (as they both have the same Baseband firmware)
04.02.04_G = firmware 1.1.1
04.01.13_G =Â firmware 1.1.1 (Unverified)
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
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
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