l i k a . b e

Category: Electronics

  • Easy Time Capsule repair

    Ok, so the power supply of my Apple Time Capsule got fried due to a not-so-efficient cooling strategy of the designer. Basically the built-in power supply stops working and all of a sudden the Time Capsule does not power on any more. Several fixes were already proposed, but they all focussed on replacing the built-in…

  • Firmware update for utility monitor

    New firmware v4.3 is available for the xPL node ‘hollie-utilmon’ with the following features…

  • Plugwise gateway on NSLU2

    I’m using some Plugwise circles to control various devices around the house. A few lights and the amplifiers of my SqueezeBoxes are automatically switched on and of as required. To couple this with MisterHouse, I built an NSLU2-based gateway to the Plugwise ZigBee network.

  • PSOC Designer 5.0 code porting

    Cypress switched back to the ImageCraft compiler, and now we’re left with the task of fixing our existing codebase that was developed with the HiTech compiler. Not too problematic. The only thing that bothers me a bit is the lack of good/up-to-date documentation. I spent an hour to figure our how to get the printf’s…

  • Garmin simple text convertor script

    I needed to test some XBee long-range radios. Hmm, how can we make this test useful and fun at the same time? Well, let’s put one end of the radio in the lab connected to a computer, and wander around with the other radio while transmitting the current position obtained from a GPS. Using the…

  • xPL enabled utility meter monitor

    When built our house, we took measures to ensure that we would consume little energy to keep our place to live warm and cosy. For this, we added extra insulation, we kept the number of air leaks as small as possible, and added a ventilation system that recycles the energy from the extracted air into…

  • UPS power consumption

    Recently I migrated my home server (a Linksys NSLU2 a.k.a. ‘Slug’) to a more powerful device (Mac Mini). The Mini has more capabilities and hence will run more services. Time to invest in a UPS that will keep the computer running when the electricity grid goes down. Since the power consumption of my home server…

  • Setting the execute bit in SVN

    When committing files to an SVN repository, it happens that I forget to set the proper ‘execute’ permission. This results in problems when checking out a fresh working copy, as it seems that SVN does not take up a ‘chmod u+x’ on a file as a change when a commit is performed. This is easily…

  • Self-powered wireless ambient light sensor

    Since some time, the window blinds in our home are automatically controlled. When the sun rises they go up, at sunset they are closed. To determine the correct time for the blind commands, I’ve written a mix of Perl scripts. There exists a handy Perl module to calculate sunrise/sunset based on the date and your…

  • Site migrated to WordPress

    The site has finally been updated to WordPress. The Joomla CMS became too cumbersome for me to maintain. Joomla certainly is a flexible and powerful CMS, however, I found out that WordPress better suits my needs. All content has been migrated. and most important direct Joomla links are being redirected. In the mean time, the…