a Newer Year

I had posted this which she couldn't use at all. As in she couldn't get it to work. Not long ago I dropped in and took a look, and discovered over 600 viruses on that machine. That's more than Master Yoda has. That is a lot. My time was limited but I told her she needed to wipe the hard drive and start over. I've seen infested and I was just hoping they didn't get into the boot sectors. I should just take her laptop back to my workshop you see, I'll fix it up there and bring it back here.... then give her a cup of water :). I had noticed that post... and thought I would post an update. I also want to update this. It got moved during a cleaning session... and no one knows where. If I find it again... I'll finish it I swear.

Test Leads for the Bus Pirate.

If you have a lot of patience, some skill with a soldering iron, and are meticulous, this might be a fun project. Otherwise skip this and buy them.

I'm not known to be organized. In fact just the opposite. SOO when I built these leads I simply wanted to make some leads that would connect the bus pirate to something so that I could use it. I'll be building my own leads later, AFTER the custom enclosure. But I wanted something for the in between times.


So I went to the garage where the bulk of my parts box has been banished to, and found an old IDE cable. After (almost) carefully removing the connectors, I cut a nice length of it and set about splitting twelve of the wires off. A note on splitting. This can be difficult I've done this before with an IDE cable for a computer I was having airflow problems with. I split the cable into strands, and bundled them together into a round IDE cable. There is a trick to this. Find the segment you want to split... it's going to be between two 'bumps' Take a moderately sharp knife (I use a lockblade because my leatherman is SUPPOSED to be sharp) and with moderate pressure run it between the bumps you want separated. A sharp knife will just cut, and potentially cut the lead inside one (or both) of the bumps. Separating them like this will weaken the plastic between, then you can carefully pull them apart.



So I stopped by my favorite electronics store and picked up a ten pin connector. It's pretty straight forward. If you can't figure it out, give up now. I hear thousands of people thinking... Why would you use twelve wires on a ten pin connector? Well, Firstly, if I HAD cut one of the wires, then it's no big deal. Since I didn't I'll modify this cable later on and use those pins for something else. It's possible that Dangerous Prototypes may upgrade to a twelve pin header on the board for V4. So I kept my options open. Better to err on the side of Caution. Notice my plug doesn't have the coolbeans no fail notch for the bus pirate. I pined it so the cable would move AWAY from the bus pirate... makes sense. NOW for the pins...

Disassembling is pretty easy
compress the test lead and there is a little copper hook, straighten it. The lead will open up and you will have a spring, a copper pin, the cap, and the nozzle.




THIS IS IMPORTANT

thread the cap onto your lead. Then just a dab of solder on the lead where it is connected to the wire...ya know to connect it. Then replace the spring, the nozzle, and bend the hook back into place.


If you are picky as to what color is associated with what you can use the pin to ohm out which is your wire on the other end. I didn't care though as long as they were all different. If your careful and diligent you now have a very nice ten pin test lead cable. I went ahead and put a dab of superglue in each hole so that they wouldn't accidentally pull out... waiting on it to dry now.

a quest for a home for TBP

A thing of beauty is a joy forever. For Christmas, my wife set our differences aside and got me a Bus Pirate. (and a dremmel, she is just asking for me to be arrested) You can Google bus pirate and learn all about what it does and how it works. This is about the quest to build a functional home for my bus pirate.

I want a home for it that is nice looking, as in I wouldn't mind having it on my desk... but still functional IE holds the test leads, holds the bus pirate, has displays for the LED's so on and so forth. I LIKE the steampunk stuff so I will problally move in that direction, but for right now, I have to get it up and running. Step 1 test leads.

E Lighter

My inlaws have become excited with this 'E-Cigarette' as I fully intend to take one apart, and re-engineer it for my own nefarious dealings, I associated it in my mind with my wife's new obsession.. LED candles. The Flicker LED candle if you take it apart seems to just be an LED, a switch and a battery. If that were the case then the light would come on and off and that's it. really though embedded in the led (supposedly) is an IC chip (or there was a troll in the forum I read this in. It seems plausible and the LED isn't going to flicker on its own, so I'm just going to push the 'I believe' button and go on. The first thing I did was to Steal acquire one of the Wife's flame-less candles and sacrifice it to the maker god Haxor.

The brand I'm using is normally acquired around Halloween and I got six for like a buck fifty so if one catches fire I'm not concerned. I opened it up and took out the components, but I was going to need a battery holder.
I solved this very simply, I cut out the existing battery holder, trimmed the excess got in trouble with the wife for having orange plastic shavings all over the dining room and VOLIA! a battery holder. Next I needed a Lighter... Preferably a Felix Lighter, but I Zippo will suffice.

So I sent a shout out to Facebook, asking if anyone had an old zippo they didn't want anymore. Making sure that they knew it wasn't going to work anymore as a zippo... FB came through and after a trip to the bank I had a free zippo lighter. Taking it apart was a breeze, but modifying it wasn't. I ran into a serious problem.

Fortune smiled on me and for Christmas I got a my first Dremmel tool.. (how did I live this long without it) You see the flint tube is a brass tube that goes from the bottom (where the screw thing is to put flints in) to the wheel passing through the metal inside where you keep the cotton for the fuel. Just accept that it is glued in there, and I made short work of cutting/breaking the tube out. Much to the dismay of the wife who seemed overly concerned with the amount of brass shavings in the dining room. The emblem is just glued on, I took it off and will probably throw it at that Pontiac that cuts me off every morning on my way to work.



Now I have the basic form of what I want. Now I need to somehow integrate a switch into this in a way that is intuitive. Normally one flicks the wheel with the thumb wheel being steel, and it strikes the flint bla bla bla. So I decided to use the wheel to move the switch, I have a hole there anyway so the switch should mount underneath and moving the wheel back and forth will turn the system on and off (which is what I want) I was hoping for a solution like this but wasn't going to hold my breath till I was at this point /sigh of relief.
Now to get into a groove


I decided to do this part while the wife wasn't home. Sparks are pretty, but I know she would be worried about the small fire that ensues. I'd like to take a moment to say that it's easier (IMHO) to REMOVE steel than to PUT IT BACK. I chose to err on the side of caution and only remove a little at a time. Then I would try the switch, see where I needed to cut more, then (oddly enough) cut more. Also I didn't cut for very long at a time. Heating the metal too much is bad for it, I didn't see a need to be mean to the metal, so I wasn't. So the Notch is cut, the hole for the switch is there there is a hole for an LED, and plenty of room inside for a battery. It seems like this may be successful. Riddle me this though... how am I going to keep from unwanted grounding on the inside? The answer.. spray on tape... I hope.


So if you just spray on spray on tape, then you have a big black mess. I opted to tape off what I didn't want black and insulated and sprayed on the inside resulting in a big black mess. Hind sight being what it is, Masking tape is probably better to mask things off with, and I probbally shouldn't hold the nozzle so close to the work area... but really I should have offered to pay a ten year old to do it, then gotten mad at him for the mess, refused to pay and sent him home. the result would have been the same, but I could have blamed it all on him. However, some spray on tape, twenty minutes of scrubbing my hands listening to the wife tell me how I should have done it, and it is currently drying on the dining room table.

So while that dries and cures, I have to find something else to occupy my attention...

self preserving robot.

I built a robot.. ish. it is for a microprocessing design class. The idea behind it was for it to self preserve itself. We centered the thing around a JM Micro Mini. Uses a Coldfire 32 module you can find the specs, and a 'midterm module' we used the light sensor on the midterm module, to read into the A/D converter (it has only one, otherwise we would have use the temperature sensor too) We read it in as a 16bit value (overkill admittedly but hey! we have the space!) and set cutoff values. one pin activates at one level of brightness, the other at the other level of brightness. The idea was to have a fan kick on with the dimness, and an umbrella on the brightness. The umbrella failed. I was using a 12v pull down solenoid I picked up from mouser and the plan was to control it with a relay. BUT the best laid plans of Mice and Men 'oft go awry. the relay was bad, so the 12v side was always open. ( I prob could have thrown more resistance in there I suppose) Hindsight being what it is, the project box needs to be back before I can square away another relay. The THEORY is sound though... So I do have a video, but only with the yellow light being the umbrella. I'd like to do this on a larger scale using venician blinds and a stepper motor. The code was too easy, we used freescale's CodeWarrior to program it, it's pretty plug and play... select this, configure that, generate code, a little logic and bam! it was done. Really we used time interrupts to read the value of the light sensor and check it against set values. we got those values by simply writing the code to check it and then watched the output of the sensor on codewarrior. Cover up the sensor a little bit, and write down that value, cover it up a little more and write down that value. Once it checks those values, it reacts accordingly. it's simple... The rest of it, weeellllll.... I had a brass weight that I super-glued to the cocktail umbrella. to pull it back down when the lever relaxed. Then using craft wood I built the solenoid lever combination. all was good except... the relay. With the presentation in less than 24 hours, and me turning in most of the hardware after that... I concede. FORTUNATELY the projects that went already weren't complete either. but in my mind, it's still a FAIL.

I've been quite the slacker with the blog posts...

And it's such a good idea too... so I promise to catch this up with my shenanigans.. there have been quite a few as of late. But first, I want to put out there that I want this who doesn't?! Every good hac.... erm... Electrical Engineer... or electrical RE-engineer should have one... I put it out on the wire I wanted one... we will see what happens. After all, if your going to cause trouble... CAUSE TROUBLE!

A new Year

Being the holidays, I haven't been working on the mod project. I survived no worse for wear. I did put together a nice clean little package for a friend. She said her computer has multiple nasty baddies. I think she said she said she had Mc Affee but I could be wrong. My sister has some baddies they sounded like similar baddies. Here's what I put together. I had an old 256mb jumpdrive on my keychain. dropped in the portable apps menu, clamwin av, and spydllremover. Facebooked the instructions. One thing to note clamwin does open a port to get updates, so some anti virus will see it as a Trojan horse. Ill post if there is a glich, but it seems pretty easy-to-use. which lets face it...is what you need for some tec assistance

-Hipcat