Chumby Transplant And Hardware Upgrade Used With DSLR And WFT

August 27, 2011 by Mike Szczys 3 Comments

The Chumby One comes in a nice little case and features an ARM powered board with a touchscreen interface. [Bobby] thought is was a good starting point, but wanted a more portable version to use as a wireless file transfer device for photography. WFT is a connectivity enhancement for digital cameras that allows pictures to be pushed to other devices over a wireless network.

In order to improve the portability of the hardware [Bobby] ditched the power-hungry WiFi adapter that comes with the device. The newer and more efficient USB dongle that he’s using as a replacement makes switching to a rechargeable camera battery a viable option. With the battery and dongle soldered to the board he ditched the rest of the hardware (save the touchscreen) and began work on his own enclosure. You can see the version above is just a little rough around the edges, he cut it by hand from the Google Sketchup design. But since he plans to make a few more copies of this hardware for friends he will probably use a service to laser cut those cases for him.

The new hardware needs drivers, and [Bobby] has lots of instructions on how to compile your own. This includes setting up the toolchain, compiling the kernel, as well as building the drivers themselves.

[Bunnie] Mods Chumby To Capture Epic Time-lapse Video

August 21, 2011 by Mike Szczys 13 Comments

When [Bunny] moved into his apartment in Singapore he was surprised to find that a huge building project was just getting started on the other side of the block. Being the curious sort, he was always interested in what was going on, but just looking in on the project occasionally wasn’t enough. Instead, he set up a camera and made a time-lapse video.

This isn’t hard, you can find a slew of intervalometer projects which we’ve covered over the years. But being that [Bunnie] is one of the designers of the Chumby One, and frequently performs hacks on the hardware, it’s no surprise that he chose to use that hardware for the project.

Luckily, he’s sharing the steps he used to get Chumby capturing images. He mentions the hardest part is finding a compatible USB camera. If you have one that works with a 2008 Linux kernel you should be fine. The rest is done with shell scripts. Mplayer captures the images when the script is called from a cron job. Once all the frames are captured, he used mencoder to stitch the JPEGs into a movie. See the result after the break.

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Installing Linux On Old PC’s Part 2

August 19, 2011 by Kevin Dady 44 Comments

In part one I showed you that you could install a linux distro on a new computer and transplant it into a 386 computer in a short amount of time and with little effort. Now it is time to move on to bigger and beefier machines like 486’s, Pentiums and better.

I am going to break this quick tutorial down into sections based on installed RAM. While this won’t be a “how to” for all old PCs in the world I hope to at least send you in the right direction. I will mention a few distributions mainly for the super low ram machines. Its not my intent to start a distrubution war, and I have not personally sat down with every single one to make a educated assessment. However, you’re more than welcome to chime in.

Join us after the break and see what options you have for that old “boat anchor” sitting in the closet!

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Installing Linux On A 386 Laptop

August 12, 2011 by Kevin Dady 121 Comments

The “cheap” and “easy” way in about an hour! A question that pop’s up from time to time is “I somehow ended up with an archaic old laptop / computer, can it run Linux?” Well of course it can, but that totally depends! On what? Well machine CPU, CPU speed, hard disk space, RAM and most importantly what you are expecting it to do.

Okay, why a Intel 386? Well number one I own a 386, but more importantly its the absolute bottom Intel CPU you can run Linux on. While it wont be able to do much, it will give you a basic system to kick around and “get to know” the insides of Linux without a million things installed and the worry of breaking it.

Unfortunately a 386 requires some special moves as the actual chip was dropped from almost all distributions long ago. All of the modern distributions I have looked at require at least a 486 CPU. This tutorial will be strictly for installing a basic bare bones Linux on a 386. Have a 486? Pentium? Faster? Never fear I will be covering that in a part II later this week.

Linux on a 386 in about an hour? Madness you might think, it probably takes Linux longer to boot on a 386 (and in some cases you are correct)! Want to know the trick? Simple, cheat!

Join me after the break for the parts and steps needed to get you started.

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Fonera-based Quadcopter Can Be Controlled From A Web Browser

August 1, 2011 by Mike Nathan 11 Comments

fonera_html_controlled_quadcopter

[Tiakson] just wrapped up the construction of a quadcopter which piqued our interest due to the unexpected mix of hardware he used.

A good portion of the copter is made up of the essential bits we have come to expect from a quad rotor system. Instead of using an Xbee or hobby wireless controller however, [Tiakson] opted to use an old Fonera router running OpenWRT to control the system. He wrote special software that allows him to direct the quadcopter using an HTML 5 interface, adding a few kernel tweaks along the way that enabled him to emulate I2C ports over GPIO pins.

The Fonera takes in data from Wii nunchuck and Motion+ sensors, relaying commands to the on-board PIC 16F976 microcontroller. The PIC is used to manage the electronic speed controller modules using PWM, which the Fonera could not handle on its own.

This is a great use for a old router, and the cost is obviously far cheaper than buying off the shelf wireless control modules. We would love to hear how much extra weight the Fonera adds, as well as if there is any controller lag introduced by the web-based interface.

Continue reading to see a quick demo video of the quadcopter in action.

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Using A Router As A Linux-based PID Controller

July 21, 2011 by Mike Nathan 23 Comments

espresso_machine_pid

[Nathan] had an small router kicking around and thought that he might as well put it to good use. He had always been interested in getting a better handle on his espresso machine, and figured that the router would be a perfect Linux-based PID controller.

He installed OpenWRT on the router, then disassembled it in order to get access to the router’s GPIO pins. He built a small PCB that allows him to get temperature info from the machine to the router using i2c. [Nathan] put together a PID package for OpenWRT, allowing him to control the machine over SSH, though he may build in a user-friendly web interface sometime in the future.

He says that most espresso machine PID controllers he has seen come in the form of big ugly boxes slapped on the side of the machine’s case, though we have to disagree with him on that point. Opinions aside, he is going for a minimalist design, and while he says that he is only about half way through the project, we think things are looking promising so far.

When everything is said and done, we hope to get a much closer look at all of his code, schematics, and more information on the router he used as well.

How Canonical Automates Linux Package Compilation

June 12, 2011 by Mike Nathan 25 Comments

pandaboard

What do you do when it’s time to port the most popular Linux distribution to a completely different architecture? Canonical employee [David Mandalla] works on their ARM development team and recently shared the answer to that question with his fellow Dallas Makerspace members.

Canonical needed a way to compile about 20,000+ packages for the ARM platform, however they did not want to cross-compile, which is quite time consuming. Instead, they opted to build a native solution that could handle the load while ensuring that all packages were compiled securely. To tackle this immense task, [David] and his team constructed a 4U server that runs 20 fully-independent ARM development platforms simultaneously.

The server is composed of 21 PandaBoards, small OMAP development boards featuring a dual-core ARM cortex processor with just about all the connectivity options you could possibly ask for. One board operates as the server head, keeping track of the other 20 modules. When someone requests server time to build a package, the main board checks for unused server, triggering a relay to reboot it before the server is automatically reimaged. Once the pristine, secure environment is ready to go, it’s handed off to the customer who requested it.

If you’re interested in learning more about the build process, [David] has put together a blog with additional details.

[Thanks Leland]