EC1204B V1.2 kit

This is a fun project. I picked up this clock module, a EC1204B V1.2 ,from wish, so it wasn't expensive. Few things you will need. Some warnings, there are small parts, so be careful opening this up. Also there are quite a few surface mount components so I don't recommend this for a total beginner, unless they are super patient. There seems to be quite a bit of support on the Internet and the device appears to be highly hackable, and cheap enough to screw one up. The transistors (or triodes according to the instructions) can be tricky to solder. I tin one pad and then mount the transistor on that pad, then solder down the other two pads. Actually, I do that to the caps and resistors. I did have a few LEDs that weren't working, but there were leftovers. SMDs were 603 I think. It took me several hours, but then I'm pretty unfocused and had a grandkid getting into stuff too :). Stock, it has several modes. Tells the time, date, and temperature. Best of all it looks nothing like a bomb. I set this up in my workspace to keep an eye on it for the week, (I needed a clock anyway) after several days I got an ERR1, or ERRI I suppose. Hard to tell on a 8seg display. It required a complete reset of the clock to clear. There is a lot of leakage too, so there is a lot of half/on led. But for the price, if you have done a few through hole component projects and are ready for a decent challenge this one may be for you. Oh and one other thing, the hourly chime sounds like my microwave, so don't go running to it for food. I had some sort of weird Pavlovian experience one night. I enjoyed it, and ordered another one to hack into something for my desk at work. I'll post that process when I'm done I promise. For now though, I've other things to do.

Update and some news

Lately I've been starting several projects. My intentions is to move this to a wordpress site that I would host myself. It is proving to be quite challenging ergo, I've been quiet. I do want to do more with this site. So I invested into some soldering projects a question I get asked a lot is "my (family member pronoun) likes electronics (probably video games on some console) what is a good project for a (random number)yr old? Also there is a certain zen to soldering. Put on some Floyd, climb into your head space and put iron to copper. It's a beautiful thing actually. SO, hang tight as I start sharing my soldering adventures with you dear readers, and perhaps you will get excited enough to be a soldersucker too. Remember too, cp horse /water but you can't sudo drink horse.

Fresh OS

That was adventure.

My laptop is my life. It's my Hal to my Dave, but also my Gerty to my Sam, and R2 to my Luke, my Data to my Picard. My experiments with Raspian convinced me to dual boot ubuntu with xfce desktop. The problem was that my dear R2 is an HP. and HP saw fit to give it for partitions, a common problem. The HDD can only have four actual partitions. HP has a tools, windows has a windows, a recovery image and some other image... I decided to delete the hp tools partition and shrink the windows partition and install kubuntu. Here is where I went wrong. I moved the partition for both the windows and the recovery. Boot couldn't find it. I had frelled my windows install. What does one do?



One wipes the drive and starts fresh.



Ubuntu, and Xfce, conky and now my machine is quite zippy. BusPirate is back on line and the Arduino environment is working better than before, I must say I am quite pleased with the results. Needs some screws in the case, but then perhaps not. Perhaps it's OK if it has, like me, a few screws loose.



Let's make some trouble.

It's been awhile let's catch up

Lately I have been working with command line Linux through Raspian. I've learned some things. I use the pipe more than Gandalf. if you ls -al on a 2.8in screen (from adafruit) you will want to pipe that to less. More importantly let's talk networking.

Plenty of tutorials out there on getting a Raspberry pi up on a network various ways. I rather enjoy the command line so I simply

sudo vi /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf

move to the bottom and i something like

network =

     {

     ssid="networkname"

     psk="passwordfornetworkname"

     }

esc :wq and if you spelled everything right your in like flynn. If you don't know the wifi name you can scan with

sudo iwlist wlan0 scan

(sudo stands for superuser do I think, what it means is "I made you and I have a hammer above your hard drive so do what the heck I tell you to" in linuxeese. The windows equivalent is only known to bill gates and hackers.)

but what if you don't have the password? Well that is a bit more involved. I don't have the whole process down yet but I'm starting with Aircrack-ng.

you'll need some libraries.

sudo apt-get -y install libssl-dev

sudo apt-get -y install build-essential

not a bad pair to have around anyway. now we need aircrack itself

wget http://download.aircrack-ng.org/aircrack-ng-

in ended up with aircrack-ng-1.2-rc1.tar.gz so that means I have to 

tar -zxvf aircrack-ng-1.2-rcl.tar.gz

makes a folder called aircrack-ng-1.2-rc1 so cd into that and type

make

then go get a sandwich, watch tv... come back later... when you have a prompt again (after a refreshing nap)

make install

you should successfully install aircrack. What to do with it? well we will figure that out in another post.