After many moons of trying – I finally managed to ‘frankenstein’ my old Apple 30″ inch Cinema Display to work with modern equipment. I still say this is the best display I have ever owned – costing more than my MacBook Pro from the early 2000’s. Shown here powered by my shiny new iMac with 5k retina display (which looks great in this night-time photo but is so shiny I can’t use it when the sun comes out).

Insipred by this video from Harris of iDB, I decided to give her one more try before caving in and buying something like the BenQ thingy with a bunch of interfaces (multiple HDMI, DisplayPort, Mini DisplayPort and ThunderBolt 3 (similar, but different to USB-C) for daisy chaining two 4k monitors from a single modern computer.

My old Cinema Display had been in constant use from when I bought it soon after the turn of the century. That was, until my work ‘upgraded’ my old Microsoft SurfacePRO (with Mini DisplayPort that powered the old beast to its full 2560×1600 resolution) to a managed ‘Levnovo’ shitbox clone of same. I tried every adapter in the book (or at least in the photo below – purchased at my own expense) and made many more servicedesk requests that I care to remember – all to no avail.

Then, sadly, my favourite old MacBook Pro (unibody A1286 circa 2008) gave up the ghost, and could not be persuaded to power up (even after judicious tinkering and attempts to ‘hotwire’ with the assistance of Matt). Add to this the fact that my wife’s old MacBook Air with MiniDisplayPort that works with the display, has nearly run out of (120GB) space – and therefore “needs replacement”.

So, I began searching for the ‘Stone docking station by Henge’ (I see what they did there), mentioned in the YouTube by Harris at iDB – and sadly – they only seem to be available in the UK.

So, I put my isolation to good use and started to search more carefully for docks and adapters that support the DVI-Dual Link mentioned by Steve Jobs at the launch of the 30″ Cinema display. Bingo – I found some products that mentioned ‘Active adaptors and specifically addressing the 2560 x 1600 native resolution of my thirty inch beast. I found this little $AUD 290 adapter:

https://www.mwave.com.au/product/startech-usb-c-to-dvi-adapter-duallink-digital-only-2560×1600-ac33819

Mwave had none in stock, so ordered one from this little eBay store. It (eventually) arrived and worked perfectly with my work LENOVO surface at full res but on my 2019 iMac it showed as: “Cinema HD with max resolution of 1280 x 800” – DANG!

A quick search or three:  https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8439790 To see all available resolutions for your monitor press and hold down the option/ alt key whilst clicking on the Scaled button in displays preferences. Revealed 2560 x 1600 which works perfectly when selected.

Thanks StarTech.

Fang – Mike Seyfang

Here is a playlist of seventeen videos from our trip to tassie from youtube.com/mseyfang.

And an album of one hundred and seventeen photos from flickr.com/mikeblogs.

Enjoy

Fang – Mike Seyfang

I walked out of the store signed up for just under $200 per month worth of bundles *3 at the bargain basement price of only $174 per month.

How?

By being convinced that I could walk out of the store with a working Galaxy S8 Plus that I could swap for the new iPhone Plus as soon as Telstra offer it on a plan with enough data (17GB) to actually use each month without holding my breath between WiFi connections. And – a 100Megabit / 1TB NBN connection that would not interfere with my cherished InterNode ADSL2+ service (Never under 16Mbit wired, often over 20Mbit) that I could cancel without penalty if I could demonstrate less than 75Mbit as measured by fast.com.

What could possibly go wrong?

The next morning I woke with a strong feeling of consumer regret and a nagging feeling that I would be spending way too much time on hold to offshore call centres being CRM-ed to the point of tears. But hey, it would be a learning experience that might even help me do my job better as I document the sad tale and collect evidence for a possible encounter with the ‘TIO’. So here goes…

• Reading the contract details for the Go Mobile Swap Plan I discovered, to my horror that I had to wait 12 months before swapping the S8 and that the two year contract would start again from that date! Let’s call this issue #1 – the iPhone swap deal-breaker.
• I foolishly thought that the mobile number of the salesperson who served me (written on the cover of the lovely folder containing reams of bundle contents and contract terms – and txt to my new mobile by the Siebel CRM system) might actually connect me with that salesperson. Several calls (and days) later, I finally made contact with said salesperson and asked how long the cooling off period was. After a longish phone conversation I was convinced that my only option was to ‘fail-forward’ and to find a way to make the two year commitment I had made work. Many phone calls and at least three visits to the retail store later I had evidence that issue #1 had been dealt with and I could indeed swap the S8 for the new iPhone in a few weeks time. The reality, issue #2 – I resent being CRM fodder.
• The solution to issue #1 was the inclusion of an additional product called ‘Mobile Swap Assure’ at a cost of $10/mth, offset by an additional rebate of $10/mth. A long (entire tram trip home) session on Telstra live chat and a special receipt printout from one of the retail store visits provided me with documented evidence that I could swap phones without waiting for a year. That little exercise triggered an obsessive download of product brochures and the compilation of the following list of bundled items that I do not want. Issue #3 – bundle madness. What I DO want is described earlier in this post. The Optional Companion Plan looks interesting for iPads etc but requires a minimum spend of $140/mth. What I DONT want:
• A home phone line – will never connect a handset and dont want to PAY a monthly fee to suppress publication of details
• MessageBank – life is too short to wrangle voicemails. Telstra’s default=ON required a couple of hours googling and setting of ‘welcome’ messages to ensure I never have to retrieve a voice message (even if Telstra turn it back ON).
• Special call rates – from the line that will never be used, and which are too complex to understand anyway
• Telstra Air (again) – already got that with the mobile plan (and I have yet to figure out how to stop connection attempts breaking my mobile data connection while travelling past hotspots).
• Pay extra for Speed Boosts – A Very Fast Speed Boost is available for an additional $20 per month on the nbn network or a Super Fast Speed Boost for an additional $20 per month for Cable of $30 per month on the nbn network (except on nbn Fixed Wireless). Whatever the feck that means. I want the 100Mbit promised and expect to never see speeds below 75Mbit.
• Telstra Broadband Connect – a full discount off the standard monthly charge sounds attractive but I have absolutely no idea how or if this applies to me. Happy to be pleasantly surprised.
• Mobile Bundle Bonus – on up to four eligible mobiles on the same single bill as your bundle. Nah – I would have to be convinced that something better than my current Amaysim scheme exists for the other mobiles in our family. Very unlikely (and I would want at least one device on the Optus network for resilience on a bad day).
• Telstra TV – already out of HDMI ports on our dirty great Samsung TV (that requires a HDMI connected ChromeCast box to do anything useful with the Samsung Galaxy S8 phone).
• Apple Music teaser – a six month account that is complex to link to an existing AppleID and that will trigger automatic charge to my telstra post-paid account should I forget to terminate it at the end of month 6. (If it were via PayPal I could at least cancel the billing agreement and enjoy the trial worry free).
• Billing and payment charges – $2.20 if I receive a paper bill. Hope I dont!
• Post-Paid call charges – I have never exceeded the included calls or messages with Amaysim prepaid. I will be extremely disappointed if my $95 per month Telstra plan fails to cover my usage.
• Post-paid data charges – on the few occasions when I exceeded Amaysim’s monthly data quota I was able to buy extra pre-paid data at reasonable rates. I have never faced data ‘bill shock’ I hope I never do!
• Early Termination Charges – up to $637 + $1,140 (+ Device Lease Contract termination Charge up to $499 or worse if handset lost) if things go pear-shaped. $50 just to change bundles within Telstra. And I am not forward to dealing with the whole melarkey of surrendering an obsolete lease device at the end of my sentence (sorry, contract).

The #Telstra category on this blog should pull the fragments of my quest for bandwidth and tale of Trust and frustration together.

*1 Note to self: login to Internode and see how far back my billing history goes (guessing significantly pre 2004)

*2 (under $25/mth for several years, never run out of calls or txt, data good enough between WiFi connections)

*3 Best Bundle Ever $99 + Go Mobile Swap Plan $95

*4 UPDATE: on the Internode date. Note: while I seem to remember moving to InterNode while still at Microsoft, the oldest evidence I can find is an 11 year old welcome message from Internode circa 2006. (was that for my NodeMobile sim? – when did ADSL first arrive at Internode??

Fang – Mike Seyfang

This time I am trying hard to make it work. And I intend to document the affair in bid to get reasonable value and best available bandwith, help others do likewise and to teach myself how to earn, measure and retain trust in my work-life.

The #Telstra category on this blog should pull the fragments together.

Fang – Mike Seyfang

#1 Trying to get assistance with online checkin and seat allocation:

Thank you Close

Info at 17:21, Jul 21:
Thank you for choosing to chat with us. An agent will be with you shortly.
Info at 17:21, Jul 21:
You are now chatting with Iya. To keep a copy of this chat please click on the + at the bottom left and send to your email address.
Iya at 17:21, Jul 21:
Hello, you are chatting with Iya, a Qantas chat agent. How may I assist you today?
mike at 17:21, Jul 21:
when does online checkin open for my next flight
mike at 17:22, Jul 21:
on Sunday 23 July 2017 at 05:10 PM.
mike at 17:22, Jul 21:
I have logged in, manage Reference #LJOQN3Help
mike at 17:23, Jul 21:
CHECKIN button says ‘check in at airport’
Iya at 17:23, Jul 21:
Hi, Mike. I hope you’re doing great today. Let me double check into this for you.
Iya at 17:23, Jul 21:
For your privacy and security, may I have your full name/s and flight details (including departure date and destination) please?
mike at 17:25, Jul 21:
Mike Seyfang
Iya at 17:25, Jul 21:
I hope you’re still there. I haven’t heard from you for a while. Do you still require assistance?
mike at 17:26, Jul 21:
SYD
mike at 17:26, Jul 21:
QF766 Adelaide to Sydney Departs17:10 (Sun) Arrives19:30 (Sun) Duration:1h 50min
Iya at 17:26, Jul 21:
Thank you. While I’m checking on this, you may want to purchase a QBE insurance as it is recommended when travelling. If you need assistance with arranging travel insurance we have a range of policies from QBE available on our website or you can call them at 1300 783 146.
Iya at 17:26, Jul 21:
May I know if the email address and phone number on this booking are current?
Iya at 17:29, Jul 21:
I hope you’re still there. I haven’t heard from you for a while. Do you still require assistance?
mike at 17:30, Jul 21:
when does online check in open?
mike at 17:31, Jul 21:
hello?
Iya at 17:31, Jul 21:
I’m still here. Before I proceed, may I know if the email address and phone number on this booking are current?
mike at 17:31, Jul 21:
yes
Iya at 17:32, Jul 21:
Thanks for verifying. I’m currently checking here.
mike at 17:33, Jul 21:
am I dealing with a chat-bot?
Iya at 17:33, Jul 21:
Thanks for your patience. You may check in at the airport instead at least 30 minutes prior to your departure.
mike at 17:34, Jul 21:
wrong answer
Iya at 17:35, Jul 21:
Currently your flight is on airport control. This happens close to your departure when airport staff make all final safety checks. During this time, online check in is not available. I would suggest try this later on today when the airport control should be lifted. If not, you can check in once you are at the airport.
mike at 17:36, Jul 21:
the flight is sunday
Iya at 17:37, Jul 21:
Yes, that is correct. That is why it would be best to try to check in online later on today when the airport control should be lifted.
Iya at 17:39, Jul 21:
I hope you’re still there. I haven’t heard from you for a while. Do you still require assistance?

FFS

Fang – Mike Seyfang

Never did create an amazon account or get it registered.

I inherited it, that was fun (not).

Looks like a Kindle 5th Generation running v4.1.0 software. Connects to WiFi but cannot *reach any websites or servers (including amazon to register). Download and install v4.1.1 then 4.1.2 then 4.1.3 (latest).

Connect to home WiFi, register, all good!

Factory Reset? Nope, no need.

Error Messages:

Web Browser is unable to establish a secure connection with this web site (wikipedia or setup kindle, create an account from your kindle).

Your kindle is unable to connect at this time. Please make sure ou are within wireless range and try again. If the problem persists, restart your Kindle from the menu in Settings and try again (register using existing account)

Fang – Mike Seyfang

Similar patterns have been emerging on the internet since it got easy and convenient to ‘publish’ stuff. I would argue the ‘Read/Write Web’ or Web2.0 that emerged in the form of blogs, podcasts and now accelerated by people ‘swiping right’ and ‘scrolling down’ on their smart-phones has been a catalyst.

I would like to think that with a bit of thought and effort we might be able to amplify some of the great work being done by researchers everywhere and maybe even improve the formal academic publishing process. What follows is a random collection of examples I have seen and would like to start conversations about.

• Find it.

Google is now a verb, use it to find interesting stuff online. Social networks are great filters for information we care about – ‘like’, ‘favorite’, ‘star’, ‘tag’ (you get the picture…) stuff. RSS Aggregators still exist and are a great way to craft a flow of interesting information about any subject, niche or mainstream – subscribe widely, read, comment, trackback and re-blog. Podcasts are an awesome way to scan vast amounts of information for gems of wisdom from people you find interesting. And YouTube has changed the nature of television. Forever.

If you are a research institute – do this a lot. Talk about this with your researchers, brag about great achievements and promote a culture of inquiry beyond formal literature reviews.

• Use it.

We can now ‘publish’ to the internet by touching ‘like’ on a smart-phone. (This is somewhat simpler than the act of crafting a home-page in the early 1990’s). So, whenever you notice something interesting on social media or in a literature review, keep track of it in a way that you and others can follow along.

See some cool research on FaceBook – like it, maybe even share it. Got something to say about it – comment or write your own related post. Same thing on twitter, instagram, whatever – heart, fav, like, re-tweet to build on the ideas of others. This gets even better with YouTube and other videos or audio recordings. Share interesting content, if it is long tell others at what time to good bits occur. Better still snip out interesting pieces of audio and video and mash em up into your own and share. If you are really inspired by something you find online, write your own blog post, embed your own shared video mashup, link to other interesting stuff and share the post on facebook and twitter.

If you are a research institute – encourage this behavior, pay someone in the admin office to collect online stories from your researchers. Spend some time noticing interesting ‘uses’ of online media from your group and write up a narrative of hi-lights for your annual report.

• Cite it.

Could be as simple as a hyperlink. May be as complex as a formal citation in the bibliography of a paper. Make it easy to know when your own work has been ‘cited’ informally in online social media. Consider making your work available under a Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ license (like this blog post) and encourage forms of attribution that you can track and measure.

In the old days of blogs and podcasts it was common practice to conduct daily ‘literature reviews’ using an ‘RSS Aggregator’. Blog posts (or ‘publications’) that are interesting would be marked or tagged on social bookmarking sites like pinboard.in. One could quickly and easily engage with the author and other readers via comments. The practice of writing a new, related blog post with one’s own thoughts and ‘citing’ the original via a special hyperlink called a ‘trackback’ made it easy for authors to track re-use of their work.

Today the same principles can be applied to facebook posts, YouTube videos, tweets photos shared on instagram or flickr. Let me share a personal example:

If you imagine flickr as a ‘peer reviewed journal with a good reputation’ then I might be imagined as an ‘established author’ with a good h-factor. One of my photos has been viewed more than eighty eight thousand times. More interestingly, that photo has been re-used and ‘cited’ in many places that are very interesting to me. Sometimes people even go to the trouble of leaving a comment on the photo to thank me and link to their work in which it appears. Feels a bit like ‘citizen science’ to me!

/           

If you are a research institute start collecting evidence as ‘Qualitative KPI’s’ for your group. Look for interesting examples, start defining and promoting best practice. Be on the look out for emerging standards and tools to make collecting (and counting) evidence of informal ‘citations’.

Video remix or mashups are great examples of more sophisticated re-use of digital text, images, audio and video. The ‘Trump v Clinton’ debates are inspiring many video mashups with some remixers going to great lengths to tell their own stories. At the time of writing this search yielded 36,900 results. Inspiring potential future scientists to create video stories using content from research institutes ought to be a Key Performance Indicator (KPI).

Until sophisticated re-use of digital media becomes mainstream it will be difficult to count or quantify this activity. So, begin with some ‘qualitative’ analysis. Start collecting and sharing stories (narrative) about the interesting uses of online media.

Follow up:

Imagine a ‘qualitative’ version of events that could improve on existing formal academic research practices (such as h-factor).

Make a mashup of the catalyst episode that was a catalyst for my thinking and the invention of the ‘green-beam’ digital signature…

Fang – Mike Seyfang

The Short Story:

• Start a new Query and Get Data from FaceBook. Use ‘Me’ or the ‘ObjectID’ of a page as source. Leave the ‘Connection’ blank, we can drill into timeline or posts on the fly. (hint: ObjectID of a page is simply the last bit of the URL for the page)
• Drill into the connections Record (the string ‘Record’ is a hyperlink that will expand to show available connections). Drill into either the posts or feed Table (if in doubt, start with posts).
• If you get an error it is most likely an API limit that can be worked around by munging the source string in the M-language (Advanced Editor). Try something like:
  • Source = Facebook.Graph(“https://graph.facebook.com/v2.2/Me/posts?since=2006-08-12&limit=10“),
• Find the post you want (hint: filter ‘message’ column to get a nice alphabetical list of posts which is by far the best way to read mainstream media pages!). Expand the comments Table to reveal the comments you are after.
• Expand the from column to get name of the commentor, and the object_link column to get other interesting information. (count of likes is always interesting).
• Close and Load your query, create a simple report table to expose the fields you want in the order you want and either publish them to PowerBI.com or export to a spreadsheet (this whole process can be done from within Excel using the PowerQuery COM add-in, which requires the right kind of Excel license from Microsoft).

PowerBI Desktop makes a great FaceBook browser (and it’s a free download for windows)

The Long Story:

Coming soon…

Fang – Mike Seyfang

How is this done? -> to share a powerBI report/visualisation to the web

1. Fire up powerBI.com in web browser and login, find your report.
2. In the report window, file Publish to WEB to generate iFrame embed code
3. For wordpress.com blog (like this) iFrame is stripped out so grab a screenshot of your report and link an.img to the URL for your powerBI report

Fang – Mike Seyfang

.

//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js

More at: earth.nullschool.net/about.html

Even more: https://youtu.be/Lke-5yZw_A8

Fang – Mike Seyfang

An attempt to characterise that light at the end of the tunnel so I can jump out of it’s way. Just in time.

Education

Is the Academic Publishing Industry on the Verge of Disruption?

• my blog post on uofa work
• melissa terris youtube
• iTunesU predictions (2008
• pop sign
• publications lists & inst repository
• early OACA study
• my UofA research institute experiments SSA
• discover Open Notebook
• notice OA publishing
• eTeachers
• minilegends
• eduauweb2
• oldaily
• Web2.0 infection at edu.au

Music (reverse the order)

• my first record (daddy cool)
• my first cool listen (electric funeral, ball bearing bird, hotrod lincoln)
• am radio
• reel to reel
• cassettes
• CD
• 4 track recording
• online .mp3
• atoms/bits guitar picks
• iTunes songs (not albums)
• nTrack recording
• my son’s career aspirations
• spotify

ICT

Prior to 1995

• unix
• office automation
• e/mail
• modems & bulletin boards
• tcp/ip and the internet nntp://
• www
• FOSS
• linux (ashman sagems cubicle poster)
• web2.0 (RWW)
• linux compete
• podcasts
• blogs
• my first blog post
• my first podcast

Fang – Mike Seyfang

//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js

Fang – Mike Seyfang

As the walled gardens of facebook and twitter grew ever more insular, the value of my online networks dwindled. RSS was no longer the glue that kept many small pieces loosely joined. My interest and activity online began to wane in 2014.

Two funny things happened in 2015:

1. I started working as a public servant and made a conscious decision to stop blogging and tweeting out of fear of some policy breach or other by leaking sensitive public sector information.
2. I discovered a group of public servants at gov.au who share my passion for improving the interactions between government and citizens through well designed digital services.

So having lost my voice online out of fear of doing the wrong thing, I decided to find it again in order to do the right thing. And I thought it would be interesting to review my online activity since I started blogging (for the purpose of podcasting) back in 2005.

Here is a table of the number of blog posts, facebook status updates and tweets per year:

And in pictures:

//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js

In a little more detail:

//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js

Let’s see what 2016 brings…

Fang – Mike Seyfang

Fang – Mike Seyfang

• Image Size: largest .jpg, closest to 16:9. On my old Nikon D80 this is 3872 x 2592 (closer to 6:4) Not RAW due to our post-processing limitations and workflow.
• White Balance: Fluorescent (3) – look for off color (esp green) when shooting in fluoro lit labs.
• ISO: keep the ISO aka ASA close to 100 to avoid grainy images on half frame camera.
• TRIPOD: mandatory due to low light & ISO constraint above
• LENS: in the smaller labs yer gunna need a wide angle lens. *paste some AA recommendations for the D80 and Canon D500 here.
• LIGHTING: our next step is to buy and learn how to use a modest lighting rig.
• SETUP TIME: take (and book / pre arrange) time to setup each shot
• ZOOM IN, FOCUS: then half hold button, zoom out to frame shot. Esp. on eyes!
• BREAK Rule of THIRDS: NO DEAD SPACE in middle of shots for the ultra wide and thin banners. Remember both Left and Right edges will get lost and shot needs to degrade gracefully.
• ADMIN: pre prepared, have a list with all locations, peoples names, numbers etc. Double check you have each and every name, do the right thing with release forms, exposing shy people online and ethical concerns. If in doubt – DONT take the shot!

POST PROCESSING

• Top3 from each attendee.
• Select best image that meet legal, ethical and doing the right thing constraints.
• Crop to 16×9 (without throwing away any more pixels than necessary) – pick most interesting crop that will lend to further cropping for ultra wide banners on the site (ie no DEAD SPACE in the middle of a wide thin slice)
• Adjust, tweak each one till it looks great for the site
• METADATA: keep the name of the file from camera (at end of description). Make punchy title, name the lab and all people in shot. Include keywords to do with the science. (esp related to Research Themes / Challenges).

Fang – Mike Seyfang

Before you dismiss their claim, check this out..

Careful checking of one such complaint revealed that the user was TABbing through a gravity form entering data then pressing RETURN. Looking closely I saw that the cursor was not tabbing from the last entered field to the next or the SUBMIT button but to another field elsewhere on the page. That field happened to be a SEARCH field, and pressing ENTER executed a search for nothing but did not send the POST data!!!

After much hair tearing, fecking with TABINDEX settings and some excellent support from the team at RocketGenius (Make sure you invest in the developer version of GravityForms – best hundred bucks I’ve spent in a while) I cornered the issue to Safari browsers on OSX [safari 5.1.10 on OSX 10.6.8 or later].  I went thru all the usual steps to isolate WordPress THEME / Addin conflicts, set the TABINDEX=”1000″ to crazy high values in the shortcode on the page that displays the form and tried this little gem

The form at xyz does have the tabindex attributes, the issue now is a tabindex conflict. Try increasing the tabindex on the form either on the shortcode or using the following: http://gravitywiz.com/fix-gravity-form-tabindex-conflicts/

Now with all other plugins disabled, my theme at twentytwelve I could see the tab indices in my simple test form (single text field, three choice textboxes) but could not TAB into the checkbox field items in Safari on OSX. Then I found THIS little gem:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1271082?tstart=0

SystemPreferences->Keyboard

Change “FUll Keyboard Access:In windows and dialogs, press Tab to move keyboard focus between:”

from Text boxes and lists only to All controls

BINGO

it works!!

Ah.

Fang – Mike Seyfang

flic.kr/s/aHsk1mskA4

(Thought I had lost my blue ‘Grover Allman’ folder with all the old security blanket setlists, chords and tabs).
Fortunately I hadnt!

Fang – Mike Seyfang

Why change?

Because my shiny new SPORT GPS telemetry sensor reports rubbish data (and no latitude / longitude) to the telemetry screens of my Taranis using an X8R reciever. Did a test with different x6R receivers – same issue. Used a mate’s more recent Taranis (the one that ships with bigger battery, nicer sliders and v2.x firmware) and it worked fine. OK – time to bite the bullet and upgrade to the totally new V2.0 platform which replaces Companion9x with OpenTX companion v2.x

What a bloody nightmare of issues. Lets start with what worked then list the plethora of things that didnt.

WORKED (eventually) with some help from this manual (wish I had found opentx university and THIS differences to OpenTX2.0 reference:

• Backup models. Make sure you have an .eepe file with all of your models (EEPROM memory to file) before proceeding.
• Backup firmware. Use OpenTX Companion v2.0.8 on a windows 8.1 PC to Read Firmware from Radio and save it to FirmwareBackupFromRadio.bin on OneDrive. The trick(s):
  • Turn Taranis TX OFF before USB Connect to PC.
  • Check for STM32 BOOTLOADER in windows cpanel device manager (thanks to this and this video) then
  • download the right zadig.exe and run the bizzare driver swap (thanks to this post) to work around DFUUTIL errors when trying to read firmware from radio.
• Set preferences & download new firmware. OpenTX Companion v2.0.8 has moved preference s to Settings-Settings. It is crucial to ensure Radio Type is OpenTX for FrSky Taranis before proceeding. Then select the Build Options (I chose no heli, have be warned not to add haptic). The build and download firmware buttons have also been helpfully removed. Go to help – check for updates and you will get exactly one chance to download the appropriate opentx-taranis-noheli-en.bin firmware file. Hint: if you change one of the build options you will get ‘no firmware appears to have been downloaded’ and you can download.
• Update the firmware. Read/Write -> write firmware to radio. That was the easy bit!
• Panic. Unplug Taranis from USB. Switch on. Greeted with ‘EEPROM WARNING EEprom Data v215’. Hit any key. Converting EEPROM.
• Phew: conversion finished. All my models are there. The ‘WizardGlider’ model works, test GPS telemetry – now get coordinates! Mission Accomplished.
• Sort of… Remembering the new ‘3finger salute (two trims inward while power on) to put taranis in USB mode before connect to computer – now my SD card structure with log files etc doesnt show up.
• Restore custom splash startup image. My fancy FANG skull n cross bones startup image has gone (but the sailors hornpipe custom sound remains). Found FangSPLASH-212×64.bmp on an old drive and away we go.
• Taranis Bootloader – 2.0.8. I knew about the 3 finger salute (two trims in and power on) to get to USB mode but had no idea what it meant or where to get information on it. Info on understanding bootloaders at OpenTX University.
  • Backup EEPROM to SD card. Long Menu->Radio Setup->4xPage->VErsion -> ENTER long to backup EEPROM to SD. Creates /EEPROMS directory on the SD card in the same drive as /LOGS etc. NOw you can restore a whole .eepe file with all the models etc in the field without a PC.
  • Backup FIRMWARE to sd card. Create /FIRMWARES directory on the same drive as the /EEPROMS and /LOGS directories. Copy in one or more .bin files to enable restore from bootloader (WITHOUT PC / MAC / ZADIG OR ANy o that shite).

BOLLOCKS:

• Trying to get Companion9x v1.5.2 (the last before the big v2.x jump) running on mac osx 10.7. Tried many combinations of installers / downloads none would give me a working v1.5.2. The app would always crash on launch.
• Trying to read firmware from radio to create a backup of my firmware using companion 9x v1.5.1 on either of my Macs. The ‘Read Flash Memory’ icon would prompt for a file (.bin) to save then exit blindingly fast with no indication of reading from TX and no file written.
• Trying to  read firmware from radio on the windows 8.1 PC running OpenTX Companion V2.0.8 with the Taranis TX turned ON while connecting to USB. Many circles and loops of dfu-util [Opening DFU capable USB device .. Cannot open device ] errors and zadig.exe insanity here.
• Having to use a Windows 8.1 shitebox to get from the world of Companion9x 1.5.x to OpenTX Companion v2.x. I guess that’s because my macs are getting long in the tooth. (OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard and OSX 10.7 Lion).
• Support for old Apple Mac OSX versions (down to OSX 10.5 Leopard). Had to wade through gallons of tripe to find an OSX universal build of OpenTX Companion V2.0.7 from a DropBox of some brave compiling soul who commented on this thread in a github database of OpenTX issues. I like building rockets but I’m not about to start compiling my own builds of OpenSource software just to manage my TX.
• OSX Universal (OSX 10.5 upwards) download – having found a universal build for 2.0.7 in the dropbox from the comment above, I went looking for a decent source of OSX universal downloads. And there it was, right under my nose [the 2.0.8 OSX .dmg is universal and works on my OSX 10.7.5 Mac.

Fang – Mike Seyfang

and the network name at the top left of screen has changed from Amaysim to YES OPTUS. Dug around the FAQ and google to no avail – too many possible options and old information that is very confusing. Called 567 Amaysm support (2-4-5) and got thru in less than 10min. Turns out my personal hotspot had been disabled their end and was easily re-enabled. Within about 1 minute I got a txt message “Hi Mike, good news – tethering is now enabled on your amaysim mobile service. Happy surfing!”.

All good: personal hotspot (tethering) now works as expected in settings->Mobile Data->Personal Hotspot

Then the penny dropped – Tether ing is what they call personal hotspot. Things I could (should) have tried before calling:

• I see from this old post that I should have tried:

• • Personal Hotspot: txt ‘Tether’ to 568 and wait for confirmation message that setup is complete. This fixes “To enable Personal Hotspot on this account, contact OPTUS” error while trying to setup Personal Hotspot in Settings->General->Personal Hotspot as per AMAYSIM documentation.

• If that didnt work I could have logged on to amaysim.com.au and resolved via text chat.
• The support person said that to fix the ‘YES OPTUS’ network name back to ‘Amaysim’ I would have to do a full sync with iTunes. Maybe later.

Fang – Mike Seyfang

What I ended up doing* was enabling RemoteSQL access to my Windows ‘server’ from MySQLworkbench by:

• Open Port 3306 (TCP) in Windows Firewall
• Granting some privileges from a SQL console.
• For browser access to the wordpress blog: Windows (8.1) Firewall Configuration: add rule “Open port 80” (TCP) to computers from my IP address range. [one of my WiFi networks is ‘private’ the other ‘public’ so I had to add rules for both public and private network profiles. [tested thanks to this excellent article on windows firewall logging].

*Notes taken out of my gDoc “MySQL Learnings”:

Fang – Mike Seyfang

– Save desired text as a .PNG with dimensions of movie (say 1920×1080) and transparency.

– Open .PNG with quicktime player, select all, copy

– Choose a section of the target movie (in/out points) and

– Edit add to selection and scale

– Open Properties windows and play with the visual settings of the pasted .PNG video track

– Adjust Transparency (bottom left dropdown) to Straight Alpha

– repeat for as many tracks as needed.

Fishy.

Fang – Mike Seyfang

Something fishy going on in twitterland methinks. When I first visited @rikmayall on twitter there was a single post dated 13/04/2010. When I went back to show a friend things had changed…

Fishy.

Fang – Mike Seyfang

Patching to the 10.6.8 combined update for OSX did the trick!

My guess is that it is IPv6 related. See below for a list of symptoms / things I tried that did *not* work:

• DNS / Name resolution in general: access to sites like http://www.google.com (ie search) or code.google.com worked but sat on ‘contacting google.com’ for ages. Paste an IP address (obtained from ping) and access was immediate.
• NSLookup from terminal was always fast – even for sites with multiple IP addresses like http://www.google.com and code.google.com
• Changing TCP/IP advanced settings on OSX system preferences (manual IP addresses, hard coded DNS servers, excluding my router’s IP address from DNS server) made no difference. Neither did messing with proxy settings.
• Changing from ‘ISP default’ to known good DNS servers on fritzbox admin console made no difference.
• NameBench ran, took a long time and did not report anything useful
• Changing back to Billion router made problems go away immediately, Switch back to fritzbox and they return.
• Symptoms first appeared when booting of old external HDD image of OSX Snow Leopard that had not been patched for years. Rebooting to usual patched version was fine. First I suspected DHCP / IP Addressing issues.
• After finding and applying the combined 10.6.8 OSX Snow Leopard patch the problem immediately went away.
• I suspect that I could have worked around the issue by fiddling with IPv6 settings for Fritzbox / OSX but did not have time to do that.

Fang – Mike Seyfang

 The operation can’t be completed because an unexpected error occurred (error code -8003).

No matter which keys I hit while empty trash (shift, ctl, option, cmd).

This MacWorld article contained the clue that helped me.

DIY Terminal tricks

However, all those utilities merely send OS X commands that you can issue yourself in Terminal. To do so, first open Terminal (in /Applications/Utilities). Typecd ~/.Trash and press Return. Then, type sudo rm -R followed by a space (don’t leave out the space character—it’s essential). Don’t press Return yet.

Next, click the Trash icon in your Dock to open a window displaying the contents of the Trash. Select everything in that window and drag it into the Terminal window; this action adds the paths of all those files and folders to the rm(remove) command. Now, press Return and enter your administrator password when prompted. In a moment or two (depending on how much was in your Trash), the Trash icon should return to its empty state.

Fang – Mike Seyfang

Seems FaceBook has stolen my attention and that of those I care about.

This time last year we were in Paris as part of our fantastic voyage to celebrate Mandy’s 50th. Thought I look through my old posts and facebook timeline to see what I was doing on this day one year ago. I found a few blog posts but scrolling back thru my own facebook timeline was a better experience. I wonder when they will start charging for that?

Fang – Mike Seyfang

About 13mm seems to be the sweet-spot (indoors on a mild day).

While I was able to measure a voltage drop at distances up to about 20mm (which could be detected as an Analog input to my Arduino project), it seems that things degrade pretty quickly after about 13mm. Using the resistor setup I describe here, 13mm gives an input reading of <100 as an analog input with gap open, and jumps to 1023 when closed – ideal for digital LOW/HIGH state change with good margin for error in differing conditions.

Here is the data:

Fang – Mike Seyfang

In the end I had to set up two separate IP networks and get the Billion BiPAC 7404VGP to forward packets by setting up an ‘IP Alias‘. Set as DHCP relay agent.

Not as elegant as a single IP network but simple enough once you figure out the design and the funky terminology in the web based user interfaces for each device. However, the path to get there was anything but simple thanks to Telstra device locking, sloppy user interface design and firmware by Billion and an annoyance of half-arsed forum posts. With a bit of luck this blog post will save somebody (probably me) some pain when they try to re-use some old gear to get people on the internet.

• Telstra have locked the thomson speedtouch 536 configuration to suit their BigPond network. My plan was to change the LAN IP address range from 10.0.0.x to 192.168.1.x to match the factory defaults of the Billion. Could have proceeded down the ‘update and unlock’ path but life is too short. The IP address for this router is 10.0.0.138 – whodathunk!
• Couldn’t set  Billion LAN IP address range to 10.0.0.x The bipac7404vgp gave error “webserver:Invalid value 10” every time I tried to set it’s LAN IP address to an unused address in this range.
• Didn’t notice anything in the Billion configuraion User Interface that looked like it would forward packets from a 10.0.0.x network to a 192.168.1.x network until after I upgraded it to the latest firmware. (Doesn’t mean it wasn’t there, I just didn’t find it – and I cant be arsed going back old versions and looking).
• Updating the bipac7404vgp firmware from a Mac running OSX snowleopard 10.6.8 was a pain in the arse.
  • The .zip files on the billion support downloads site contain another compressed ‘.afw’ configuration file which is what the firmware update interface is looking for
  • Many OSX methods for unzipping the .zip file give varying results.
  • Firmware Upload Failed
    Failed to write to file system.
    Failed to update FLASH chips.
    This may be due to a corrupt FLASH filing system.
    You can attempt to repair this by saving configuration.
    error
  • Use terminal in OSX to unzip the .zip file is the most reliable
  • Restart router using Factory defaults *BEFORE* attempting firmware upgrade
  • Still no joy
  • Out of desperation I grabbed the 7404VGPM firmware (even though every physical marking or configuration page said mine was a 7404VGP), unzipped the .zip using OSX terminal, restarted from factory defaults – this time it worked.
• After the firmware update, I still couldn’t set the Billion’s IP Address to 10.0.0.x range but I did notice ‘IP Alias’ in the configuration pages for the first time.
• Set up an IP Alias of 10.0.0.254 for the Billion with subnet mask of 255.0.0.0. Remember the SpeedTouch router address is locked at 10.0.0.138 and it’s DHCP server dishes out client addresses starting at 10.0.0.1.
• Turn off DHCP server of Billion (set as DHCP relay agent).
• Took the Billion around to the in-laws, used a spare Cat5 10baseT ethernet cable to connect from LAN port 1 on the Billion to the unused Ethernet Port on the Thomson Speedtouch (checked for the green link status light on each port – you guessed it, the first cable I tried failed!).

After a bit of fiddling around I managed to get an iPhone, iPad and my Android phone to connect to the WiFi from the billion, get an IP Address in the 10.0.0.1-20 range (shows up in the speedtouch status page at 10.0.0.138) and surf the world wide inter-tubes courtesy of a locked BigPond rooter. Yay!

Fang – Mike Seyfang

As part of my research for the Institute of BackYard Studies , I am prototyping various components for a Lightly Oscillating Linguistic Organ (LoLa) – a musical instrument that harnesses the sinusoidal beauty of the pendulum wave.

After much fecking around with magnetic reed switches, analog light sensors, mercury switches, mp3 players and android phones I have finally iterated toward a reliable setup.

• A $2 Opto (or Photo) Interrupter sensor. For two bucks you get a little plastic gizmo that has an IR LED and detector separated by a 3mm gap. A couple of resistors and some fancy PCB wiring and you can make a digital input for the Arduino.
• Arduino Sketch that detects a change of state on said digital input and sends a MIDI note command via the serial output.
• A very simple 3 wire connection to a DIN 5 Connector for MIDI Output (Not quite MIDI standards compliant – need an opto isolator circuit for that).
• MIDI to USB input to an old mac mini that was lying around (PowerPC – OSX 10.5).
• SimpleSynth midi synth running on OSX 10.5.
• MIDI Monitor for OSX to debug things.
• Headphone output from mac mini to an old ghetto blaster in my shed to make noise louder.
• A work of art! (in the making).

Here is what I learnt:

• MIDI can be deceptively simple and frustrating
• On arduino DUE when using the +5V MIDI DIN 5 circuit as per all the instructions out there just got jibberish. By pure chance I tried +3.3V and it works like a charm.
• I probably spent as much time getting the sketch to reliably start with the MIDI sound I wanted (church bell) as I did on the rest of the MIDI work, including cabling.
• I probably should have started with a photo interruptor already wired up as an Arduino sensor rather than go down the rabbit hole of circuit diagrams, datasheets and the futility of resistance!

Fang – Mike Seyfang

I’m using an Arduino DUE so I used an external +5v power supply (from my model aeroplanes) always remembering to connect earth to common ground – arduino GND and the GND of my circuit.

*Note: this simplified circuit diagram does not quite match the physical layout of the pins. If you look closely at the ‘Top View’ schematic in the datasheet you will notice that the Collector (3) and Emitter (4) are physically located the other way around – which makes the wiring a little more messy.

The 220 ohm resistor between the +5V and Anode drives the IR LED input’s Forward Voltage in the range 1.2 – 1.5V at around 20mA. The 4.7K ohm resistor between the +5V and (3) Collector gives us a nice wide voltage change when an object is placed in the gap between the IR LED (1) (2) and the Detector (3) (4). I measured 96.5mV open and 5.31V closed. This gives a very sharp and reliable OFF/ON, LOW/HIGH, 0/1 digital input. Hooking up to an ANALOG input (A0) on my Arduino DUE showed values from the low 20’s open to 1023 closed – perfect!

So, how did I get that circuit diagram and those resistor values? I have to admit, I phoned a friend. My mate Ashley who actually understands this stuff explained the calculations like this:

• Look at the ‘Forward Voltage’ Vf on data sheet which shows 1.2V typical to 1.5V max at 20mA. (5V-1.2V)/.02A = 190Ohm. 220Ohm is close enough.
• Look at the ‘Light Current’ Il on datasheet 1.0 – 10 Ma. To get a nice strong voltage change across (3) Collector and (4) emmitter calculate the resistance required to leave about .5V with gap open. At 1mA the calculation is (5V-.5V)/.001A = 4500 Ohm.

Fang – Mike Seyfang

• I used this zd1901 photo interrupter from JayCar (datasheet).
• I copied the schematic from this post which had a 10k resistor between the + anode (long wires) and a 230 ohm resistor between the two short (- cathode) wires. That design was based on this RPI-574  datasheet .
• Since I didn’t have a 230 ohm resistor I used a 100 (which measured at 180 on my multimeter) in series with a 103 10k potentiometer that I tried to dial in 230 ohm total.
• All was going well until I figured a lower than 230 ohm resistor would be interesting to try, only I managed to provide a path of 0 ohm resistance for long enough to fry my IR led.

Schematic

Which resulted in:

• A kinda / sorta working output voltage in the range 4.7 – 5 volts. Ranged from the high 900’s to 1023 on arduino analog input A0 by moving a piece of paper between the gap.
• A failed attempt to use a variable resistor to drive the analog values from close to 0 up to 1023 so I could use it as a digital input to my arduino.
• A short across what should have been a 230 ohm resistor resulting in a loud pop, smoke and a nasty smell!!!

Note to self:

The z1670 photo interrupter I got from altronics and it’s datasheet.

Fang – Mike Seyfang

Here is what I did:

• Hung an old broomstick from a ladder
• Added a few bearings to make it swing better
• Added a six inch piece of orange PVC conduit to the top of the broomstick (via some home sprinkler system pieces I had lying around)
• Wired my sensors to servo leads (from my model planes) and stuck em to wooden pop-sticks (actually tongue depressors)
• Whacked a cardboard box on the top with arduino, battery and breadboard with holes to shove my sensors into
• Strapped an android phone running ‘AndroSensor’ to the bottom of the broomstick
• Carted my laptop out to the shed and collected a bunch of data via arduino serial monitor & pasted into a spreadsheet & from a .csv file that an android phone’s sensors was writing to
• Bunged the collected data into a few google spreadsheets for analysis by chart

Here is what I learnt:

• My $10 freetronics light sensor for android (that gives an analog output proportional to light intensity) mounted at the top is very reliable and copes with really sloppy swings.
• A $1 glass reed switch under a strong magnet on the bottom of the broomstick works well (once you make it stronger by sticking to a wooden tongue depressor and cover in clear epoxy and when you figure out how to ‘de-bounce’ the signal). 
• My $10 hall effect sensor for android mounted at the top is easy to use & check but hard to position well for consistent results. You need to have a very smooth swinging pendulum and find the exact centre.
• The guys building the physical pendulum wave have expressed concern over perceived slowing due to the magnetic force on each pass. This should be measured & tested before giving up on the simple reed switch..
• The ‘false positive’ readings I was getting from the magnetic reed switch is actually a well known phenomonen called ‘bounce‘ which can be de-bounced in software or via some rather ingenious circuitry! [I’m a little bit chuffed because before I discovered those links, I simply looked at my data on a graph and hacked my code to ignore state changes for a few hundred milliseconds after the first].

Photos:

Fang – Mike Seyfang

After much googling around and substantial fiddling, here is what I did:

• Searched around for quick and dirty ways to create an android app using PROCESSING to play sounds based on sensor input. Found out pretty quickly there are many can-o-worms and significant issues around latency.
• Decided to simply mash up a few sensor / music apps for a V1.0 prototype. 
• The AndroSenso app simply outputs raw data from each sensor and can make graph / log file recording for a period of time. After looking intently at accelerometer data I decided the Proximity Sensor would be a better option for my first prototype sound trigger.
• The Proximity Actions app allows actions to be configured when various numbers of ‘waves’ past the proximity sensor are detected. It is pretty well thought out, behaves well in the background and can easily trigger music play / pause.

Here is what I learnt:

• Latency, latency, latency – such a long wait before any sound starts. Varies depending on the state the phone is in, gets worse over time…
• APPS: accelerometer sensor, physics Toolbox, androSensor (the most useful), proximity sensor finder, proximity sensor clib, sensor music player, music proximity, proximity actions (the most useful).
• Good as it is, Proximity Actions has it’s limitations & points to a whole lot of pain in developing my own specific trigger app. A minimum of two ‘waves’ must be detected before and action can be triggered. The proximity sensor on the HUAWEI ascend g510 running android v4.1.1 is soooo frustrating. I could only get it to detect two waves with Max ave time at .4 sec & max wave timeout at .7 sec. And then it is frustrating as hell to reliably produce the two waves required to trigger the music.
• And then there is the LATENCY. Not only is it horrible but it varies. I’m guessing the variation is due to the phone o/s swapping out or shutting down things like the music player after a while. Nearly a second delay at best, several seconds when things go pear shaped.
• If it is crap as a prototype, things will probably get worse trying to hard code this and scale up to more than 8 devices swinging at once! My guess is that proximity sensors (and indeed others) would vary from phone to phone – making consistency difficult. From everything I read, latency is always going to be a problem. Finally, the phone is designed to provide a good phone experience – there are a lot of environment considerations to take into account when building an app to quickly trigger sounds, day in, day out..

Fang – Mike Seyfang

First impressions – huawei ascend g510 running android v4.1.1

• This is an ‘Optus’ badged beast with no sim card.
• What a freakin mess… apps &  home screens scattered everywhere
• Found the on/off button top left (eventually)
• there are three icons on the bottom panel of the display – the middle one brings up some kind of menu, the left one looks like a back button, I have no idea what the three lines on the right hand side mean. [update: There are the usual capacitive touch button below the display for back, home and menu]
• SD card. Turns out there is an empty micro SD slot behind the rear cover which is removed by prising the bottom left corner. The first SD card I inserted did not work. The second showed up blank and could be formatted under system settings -> storage (when not connected via USB)
• After searching for and finding various file transfer utilities for mac OSX I accidentally discovered that plugging USB from Mac into phone when running brings up a prompt to go into USB mode. After that the file system appears in my OSX finder window and works as expected. [maybe the google supplied transfer app is for older versions of android ??]
• Found a cool app called ‘Physics Toolbox’ that exposes accelerometer data and can record same to a text file and share via email or bluetooth
• Found another app called ‘accelerometer’ that shows x,y values on a scope like screen, has a low pass filter and can show maximum values. Not so useful for me and my pendulum whimsy.
• The phone runs on Android 4.1.1 (Jelly Bean) with Huawei’s own Emotion UI 1.0 on top
• Found another app called ‘androsensor’ that shows lots of sensor raw data and promises to record / save to file (but I keep getting unable to write to SD card error – oh, that’s cos I was plugged into USB mode)
• SCREENSHOT – hold power and volume buttons at same time. Thanks.
• x
• My first app: PROCESSING with android mode. Fire up processing. Add ‘android’ mode. Restart processing. Grab a sample app, change mode from java to android “is SDK installed NO”. Install android SDK.
• System settings -> developer options -> USB debugging (not sure if that was a good idea!)
• Get error: /Applications/adt-bundle-mac-x86_64-20130917/sdk/tools/ant/build.xml:542: Unable to resolve project target ‘android-10’
• Looks like I need to install the (OLD) android-10 files. android-18 is currently installed under \sdk\platforms\
• after much googling around, fire up eclipse -> window -> android SDK manager -> add v10 (accept license, download, … yep sdk\platforms\android-10 now installed)
• PROCESSING: grab a sketch & chose -> Run on device.
• Build: v22.2.1-833290
• Make a little ‘Hello Android’ app & run on device. Here ’tis:

Then things got messy:

• Getting processing to run sketch on emulator I ran into this can of worms. [fixed by SDK manager by uninstalling the intel x86 image]

Fang – Mike Seyfang

A quick munge of my earlier ARDUINO <-> PROCESSING serial ‘ASCII call / response’ code for running a dot on the screen by model aeroplane TX / RX remote controls did the trick:

• MultiSensorsSerialCallResponse_Crickets.ino – reads SPL from freetronics MIC sound input into Analog pin 8 of my Arduino & writes the value (0-1023) as the first of four (channel) Comma Separated Values to the serial port (every time an “A” is read from the serial port).
• SerialCallResponseASCII_Crickets02.pde – reads the 4 value parameter CSV from Serial port and does all the logic to figure out how much noise is coming in (on the first parameter) and what to do about it. The basic idea is to react to noise by setting a ‘fear’ string to the values: calm, alert or panic depending on the SPL level coming in. It then decays gradually from panic through alert to calm when all is quiet. Various cricket noises play depending on the state of fear: all three crickets.wav files play simultaneously when all is calm, only one when alert and immediately stop playing all sounds when in panic. I also threw in 4 keyboard controllable ‘seasons’ morn, noon, eve, night to toggle the mix of creatures making noise by typing 1, 2, 3 or 4. This is in preparation for time / light control.

• code.compartmental.net/tools/minim/ – looks a bit neater and possibly simpler. Let’s start here.
• crickets1 crickets.wav  http://www.freesound.org/people/Christoff45/sounds/106019/
• crickets2 crickets_creek.wav http://www.freesound.org/people/rhapsodize/sounds/171823/
• crickets3 http://www.freesound.org/people/Tito%20Lahaye/sounds/83270/ [cc:by, NC and too loud, find another cc:by replacement]

Fang – Mike Seyfang

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUqpf8gJl2k

There ya go Rick – that’s one way for your piece to react to the environment. If the ambient noise is low enough, we can tell when (noisy) people are nearby. That could shut the crickets up!

Speaking of crickets, how are we gunna control playback of noises? For a quick start I thought I would use Processing to process sound files from my computer & communicate via serial. Here are my learnings on PROCESSING and sound playback.

• www.tree-axis.com/Ess – turns up first in searches but looks ALPHA, buggy and messy
• code.compartmental.net/tools/minim/ – looks a bit neater and possibly simpler. Let’s start here.

Fang – Mike Seyfang

It seems that the first challenge will be identifying which serial port on my mac I need to address. This time I started with the PROCESSING 2 MANUAL and tinkered with the sample code under ‘serialEvent()’. After getting rid of the redundant font feckery, my little piece of code crashed and said I needed to create a directory and do a chmod 777 on it. Turns out this is business as usual to work around a port in use exception.

sudo mkdir /var/lock
sudo chmod 777 /var/lock

Tried by TERMINAL stuck on login: Reboot to fix that.

So I did. And it works. [well, after I plug my arduino into the USB port that is]. Before long I had a little text box displaying the serial data that was being written by my arduino running on the USB port.

Now, to make the output more interesting, lets find some code that does something a little more interesting with x,y (mouse) coordinates and hack that to use elevator & rudder input from my R/C TX.

• PROCESSING File->Examples/Basics/Input/StoringInput [looks nice]
• Modify Arduino sketch [MikeRX03_2ch_x_y] to output a pair of comma separated coordinates x,y with values between 1,1 and 1920,1080
• Didn’t really work, need to thing about serial protocol (ie HANDSHAKE)
• notice the range of pulse widths measured changes by about 100 from time to time. [subtract between 1240 – 1190 to make lowest values close to 1]
• arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/SerialCallResponseASCII looks the goods
•   Run: MikeRX03_4ch_CallResponseSerial.ino [no serial monitor!]
•   Run: SerialCallResponseASCII.pde
•            Let’s you control a dot in a window by Left TX Joystick.

• Probably should have a go at making an Etch-a-Sketch!

Fang – Mike Seyfang

I was at the sacred place. That park in my suburb where there is no surveillance. The one where you have to dock your phone into one of those drums. You know, the ones that start swinging and making those weird harmonic tones and tunes that drive away the hi-res drones.

It was like any other Sunday afternoon  conversing and hatching plans away from prying eyes and ears, except for one strange thing. Barry Morgan was playing tunes into the array of swinging drums. It was amazing. Beautiful. Disturbing.

You see, some school-kids had hacked the ‘SwingTone’ app that runs on our phones when they are charging in the drum dock. They added the new PhoneLab tweet stack to the usual move and sound stacks so that the entire array of swinging drums could be programmed on the fly. The cheeky buggers had had then compiled and published their apps to the store and managed to convince punters like me into a paid 5 cent upgrade. With the money they had collected over a month of Sundays they built an acoustic coupler that took the majestic tones of the IBYS Musycle and converted them into commands – from Barry’s Wurlitzer Organ to the SwingTone tower via the @BarrysPWorgan twitter account.

As usual, I awoke from my dystopian nightmare with a rather splendid technical architecture in mind. Like the old days when I could not stop my over-active mind from obsessing over technical architectures (usually required for clients who were paying my employer vast sums of money per hour for my services) I emptied my mind into a couple of pages of my notebook. Today I decided to share a photo of those pages with you via flickr and this blog post. Now – I can start my day without obsessing about refinements to my design for a rather impressive machine that makes beautiful sounds and shapes in the sky. Or can I?

Perhaps it is time to get a real job. Again.

Or maybe not.

Jamie and I hacked this little prototype together (accelerometer triggered tone on a string):

A bunch of them swinging together might sound a bit like this mockup.

Fang – Mike Seyfang

But how do I control something more interesting on my computer?

It seems that the Processing environment is an ideal companion to the Arduino IDE. Let’s download it and find out. Single app install, nice and easy v2.0.3. The hello world app draws a circle around the mouse location and comes with nice easy to understand diagrams. Cool.

Fang – Mike Seyfang

The tutorial wires up three channels from an RX which gets power from the 5v of a (non DUE) arduino. We need to modify things for just one channel and for external power (a 6v 3xAA NiMh battery pack from a glider). First we need to make up a servo lead that provides the pulse and our common earth. Then (the hardest part for me) we have to pick an input of the Arduino DUE. A quick look at the specs suggests any of the 53 DIGITAL inputs would do. Because some of them (1-21) have special labels like PWM, Communication TX, RX, I picked 30 which does not.

Setup:

• RX signal (orange) to Pin30 set for pinMode(30, INPUT)
• Common earth (brown) to GND next to pin 53

Code: MikeRX01.ino

Modifying Nick Pool’s code was easy. Just delete the lines for unused channels 2 & 3 & change pin to 30.

The key lines are:

• pinMode(30, INPUT); // Set our input pins as such
• ch1 = pulseIn(30, HIGH, 25000); // Read the pulse width
• Serial.println(ch1);  // Display read values on serial monitor

What happened was the values changed as follows:

• 0 everything off
• 1583 power up TX & RX
• 2013 pull full up on my TX Elevator (T3 Stick)
• 1146 push full down

Cool eh?

p.s.

• PWM: Pins 2 to 13
  Provide 8-bit PWM output with the analogWrite() function. the resolution of the PWM can be changed with theanalogWriteResolution() function.
• FrSKY TFR6 Bind: power on TX, Hold ‘F/S’ button on RX while power up.
• Values: 1583 CH1 neutral, 0 servomon, 2013 full UP +100 servomon, 1146 full DOWN -100 servomon
• Change to CH2: Values: 1578 CH2 neutral, 0 servomon, 2015 full RIGHT +100 servomon, 1142 full LEFT -100 servomon

Fang – Mike Seyfang

The first tutorial I found on YouTube that looked easy was this one by 000Plasm000 that uses the servo.writemicroseconds() method to make the servo move.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfMfysmfoNM

Trouble is it didn’t work. Nothing, not a skerric of movement. Bring on *Wild Goose Chase #2 – chasing updated servo.h libraries for the DUE board I had, and wishing that I started with an older, bigger, simpler Arduino! After wasting a couple of hours chasing updates & swapping servos I stumbled upon a much clearer and better servo tutorial that is part of the excellent ‘Adafruit’ learning system. Turns out I had fallen into trap for young players #1 ‘Ye Olde Common ground’. YUP. That simple. Since I have to use external 5v to power my servo (since DUE only handles 3v) there has to be a common earth or ground connection. Bingo! All good. And a much more elegant servo.write.angle() way to position the servo angle from 0 – 180 degrees.

Here is how I built on the basic tutorial:

• SWEEP – got the basic sweep back and forth code working
• Hard Code angle – update the angle value in my ‘sketch’ code & run. Works fine.
• Add serial monitor – accept input, adjust angle, output some info
• Improve serial ASCII input – MikeServoSerial03_Ascii.ino uses serial.parseInt() as per File->Examples->Communication->ReadASCIIstring

* Wild goose chase #1 – trying to run new software on old hardware. [thought that the Arduino IDE would run fine on my old pre-intel macbook pro. Probably would have except that the Arduino board that Jamie had lying around in his room was a fancy new ‘DUE’ which required a recent (v1.5.4 Beta) IDE that required a recent JAVA that required certain updates to OSX Tiger etc etc. After wasting half a day trying to update, re-jig partitions, wait for huge downloads etc I decided that life is too short and ran the IDE on my current Snow Leopard ‘production’ machine.

*Wild Goose Chase #2 – new fancy hardware. The arduino DUE board that Jamie had lying around from his music tech days promises great things for fancy audio output but comes with two catches: it doesnt do the usual +5v stuff that R/C gear uses and it needs an update to the ‘servo.h’ library in the Arduino IDE. ‘THat old chestnut’ methinks, so I wasted way too much time looking for versions, updates etc only to find that they are already in the beta 1.5.4 IDE I am using…

Fang – Mike Seyfang

A radio controlled glider that can see thermals and ‘sing’ (using telemetry data to conduct a symphony of sonic bliss).

I have scrounged around for a few old R/C components, including some FRSky telemetry, taught myself the basics of 3D modelling in Blender and even printed v1.0 version myself on a 3D printer. I have bent many ears of anyone who will listen about my crazy ‘singing glider’ and set myself a deadline of 1 year (from today) to have a basic version working. I may even document some of my learning journey and turn it into some form of ‘phd’. But last week a couple of chance meetings and an invite to a local ‘hackerspace’ event caused me to grab hold of an Arduino and start hacking. I get the feeling that a whole new obsession is about to begin.

Fang – Mike Seyfang

Mandy Seyfang

The idea was inspired by finding an old post entitled ‘emergent vs detergent’ on ye olde PROCESSOFINNOVATION blog that Andy Denlin and I used to write. To my amazement this highly relevant and insightful piece was just about five years old – ‘that would be right’, I thought, always about five years too soon with my bright ideas. Then my wife decided to start a blog last night so I thought to myself, self I thought, why not.

Use lots of pictures.

Fang – Mike Seyfang

• Right kerfuffle dropping hire car (SKODA) to Geneva Airport!
• Lots of trains, super easy walk to hotel
• Nice welcome, checkin and WiFi per device by GUID (Guideio of tripadvisor fame) and dinner nearby on our own (sorbet)
• Most of the famous beachside walks closed.
• Train to Monteroso aimless wander towards Venezza ended up walking the rather difficult, treacherous, busy path (found later it was the only one open, lady rescued by helicopter the following day!)
• Enjoyed hard earned beer then seaside lunch.
• Train back to Rigiamortise met up with Gilly n Paul, dinner at expensive fish place nobody left to pay!
• Brekkie with Woody and Vicky while I did the laundry (mexican stand off with woman who turned out to be from Adelaide!)
• Several beers at sunny clifftop thingy
• Zigzag train rides to Venezza and dinner with 8 aussies (Woodies, Vertues, etc)
• Nightcap drinkies a Zora
• That toilet brush incident
• A day of boats (first day calm enough) after catch up with Dave and Lisa for another nice aussie style breakfast with great 1E coffee at Zora
• Fish and chips picnic up top o hill
• Leave for Nice by train 666 (Paul and Gilly stressing out about their ‘connecting train’ turns out all 8 of us on same train!!!

See this flickr collection for a somewhat organised collection of photos from various stages of our European adventure.

Fang – Mike Seyfang

http://pinboard.in/u:fang/t:blender/

ToDo:

• Trace Sir Les (InkScape -> SVG -> Blender Curve [extrude & mesh])
• UV Sir Les (Front, Back, Sides)
• Improve photoshop edge selection [curve tool trace smooth bezier, mask, grow, sharpen / blur edges..
• Trace Sir Les (Blender Bezier – elegant, extrude, simple mesh) then seam / unwrap / UV precisely
• Model guitar pic (Blender Bezier – half + mirror Tx, simple / elegant editable mesh)
• Make outline (carve hole?) in Model guitar pic
• Chrome tribeardsirles badge
• better guitar neck – bend headstock, round edges.

• Space – start typing for function search
• Shift S – snap cursor to
• Shift C – cursor to centre
• Alt Home – set point to rotate view around
• Z – toggle wireframe [good for selecting those hidden vertices]
• n – extra info side panel [e.g. Mesh display, numerics for visible dimension measurements when mesh object selected in edit mode]
• Clt-alt-Q – toggle quad view
• Shift Ctl Alt C set origin
• Ctl T – track first selected object to second selected
• Alt T – clear Track
• Shift H – hide everything else (Alt H to reverse)
• b
• Scene, scene – set Units [metric millimeters etc, imperial feet inches etc]
• Glass: Material – intensity 1, hardness 473, ambient .55. Transparency (Y) Raytrace: Fresnet 5, Blend 1.25, IOR 1.55 <works a treat!>
• Chrome: hat tip. Material: just off white, specular as is, hardness up to 511. Shading emit 0.21, tangent shading. Remove transparency, add MIRROR 0.914 Reflectivity, Gloss <1 say .845, Samples up to 250.
• Alt C (object) convert to (Mesh from bezier curve) ? how reduce number of vertices? [Reduce Resolution while still a curve, curve shape->resolution – down from 24 to 6 worked well on first sir les trace]
• MeshEdit basics: ctl-tab (mesh select mode), global vs normal orientation, x-ray mode (only select vertices you can see), OPT-RM loop/ring select, grow / shrink selection (ctl numpad + -). W – specials menu. K – knife, drag/click cuts and press ENTER to accept. Ctl R – loop cut (purple ring), LMB, slide, LMB to accept.
• PIPE: Create a circle (or other shape object). Add Bezier curve 3d & Edit to basic shape -> Properties -> Geometry -> Bevel Object (set to circle / shape and bingo a pipe!)

Tracing OUTLINE cheat sheet

https://pinboard.in/u:fang/t:blender/

• Method1: hat tip to Joe’s Makerbot for this deadly simple script:

• Put the part on a piece of centimeter graph paper and take a picture.
• Import the picture into inkscape, line up the scale, and trace the 2D outline of the object. Save the outline as an SVG.
• Import the SVG outline into blender and extrude. Convert the curve to a mesh (Alt C), Go to edit mode and extrude the outline into a 3D shape.
• …
• Method2: from blender 3D noob to pro [using bezier curve to trace background image]
• see “Details of the background image panel” and “Introducing the Bezier Curve” sections.
• …
• Method 3 from excellent Batman logo trace YouTube:  [setup includes un-check normals 2D constrain, increase resolution in curve properties (from 12 to 24) for smooth curve [*reduce before convert curve to mesh], V – vector handles on first curve to make the two handles independent for better tracing control.
• Make sure traced path is Closed at end Alt-C (edit mode) ‘Cyclic’
• Drill: Pan (shift MM), Zoom (MM wheel), Add first curve segment (Shift A->Curve->bezier), Edit (tab), V (handle type to Vector)
• Sel first handle end (RM), G, make a tangent to outline (longer = more bend),
• Sel second handle end, G, make tangent, adjust length
• Sel endpoint, E (extrude), position new endpoint near place on outline, LM click
• <<rinse and repeat>>

UV Mapping cheat sheet

• Hat tip bpwebmedia for this handy youtube.
• <<<copy from my hand written notes here?>>>
• Two Panes [3D view, UV editor]
• 3D view – viewport shading to “Texture” [ball next to object/edit mode selector]
• Edit mode, select a face in a nice ortho view
• UV editor – image -> open -> image file
• 3D view – mesh -> unwrap -> project from view
• UV editor – Select All [a] Size, Grab, Rotate to taste
• Materials -> Add -> ASSIGN
• Texture -> new, type “image or movie”, IMAGE -> picture icon -> choose image
• Under IMAGE (Source) click on PACK IMAGE icon to bundle file into .blend project
• MAPPING coordinates -> UV (from default generated)
• Render!

Camera motion via Path:

• Shift A path, edit to taste (E xtrude, S ubdivide etc)
• Select Camera, Shift Sel path, Ctl P (follow Path)
• Curve properties – Frames (faster / slower movement through available total anim frames) Shape->Twisting – Z up.

HANDY SCREEN SIZES:

• 1280×720
• 1920×1080
• 3840×2160
• 5760×3240 [max on my old macbook pro]
• 9600×5400 – too slow to render
• 96000×54000 – well it did render but I gave up trying to save as .png file

Fang – Mike Seyfang

• Train from Paris to Geneva (up to 500km/h backwards)
• Hobble to EuropCar (arrived after close) to pickup rental
• Efficient but scary drive city->motorway->mountains
• Could have spent the rest of my life here (nearly did!)
• Love at first sight (beer, parapente baptisme sign on tennis court)
• Parapente baptisme
• Friends arrive
• Champagne, more (Pol Roger) Champagne, much celebration
• Weather turns crap, return to scene of launch in fog
• Cluses is the centre of the universe
• Daytrip to some lake town and Charmonix (elusive poco loco hamburger)
• Tad tricky returning the Scoda rental car
• Swiss francs versus Euro

Fang – Mike Seyfang

• Good STORIES told well can influence culture.
• People connect when STORIES overlap. (David Wallace)
• Interacting with digital STORIES (bits) is getting easier and can increase engagement. ReMix is the most potent.
• To MAKE stuff out of (atoms) from shared digital stories or plans (bits) currently requires a degree of small group collaboration and promises to be very engaging indeed. I think we should explore the possibilities as the tools for production become cheaper and easier to get.

An illustrated brain-fart of ideas.

It is becoming clear that there is indeed value in effective use of social media by scientists and I think this aligns well with the idea of science equity through engagement. I suspect that as the ‘internet of things’ plays out and the tools of turning ‘bits into atoms’ (Lasercutters, 3D printers, scanners and the like) find their way to the desktops of outsiders like me there will be even more opportunities for me to engage with science. There are some obstacles. Like the way we currently try to protect Intellectual Property (if you think the ‘piracy’ of music and movies is evil wait till you see what happens when we can print/make copies of cool things). More on that later.

But for now, who wants to join me in exploring ways to provide easy access to science for anyone who wants it?

Fang – Mike Seyfang

• Quirky bars
• Too much flash food
• A different vibe in each district or quarter
• A very helpful dude at an internet cafe near Moulin Rouge (Lebara.fr prepaid SIM – works a treat)
• Fun times with friends
• Clean, quiet (albeit tiny) room with free ‘Medievil’ WiFi
• Awesome metro system
• Laid back, safe vibe even on metro late at night
• Church at Notre-Dame
• Finding a local market (on our way out)
• Segway tour
• Playgrounds that forbid activity
• Lots of fancy clothes
• No smoking indoors (much better than last trip)
• Special times for my beloved bride

A Flickr collection of photos from our trip to Europe in 2013 for your viewing pleasure.

Fang – Mike Seyfang

Being too tired to think straight and not yet having any means of communication we dropped our bags in the room and walked around the block. By now it was about 7am and uncomfortably hot. We seemed to be in a ‘computer district’ and there were a whole bunch of people carrying shopping bags that looked like they would contain electronic gadgetry. The people on their way to work seemed to be mostly from India. Our Telestial SIM card burst into life and we were able to get in touch with our friend Andrew who gave us a few suggestions on things to see and an invite to his church the following day (Friday).

We took Andrew’s advice and used taxis instead of booking on one of the circular bus tour things. This worked out well and it was quite cheap to get to the places we wanted to see – like the famous Dubai Mall with it’s rather fancy fountain. It was almost deserted by the time we got there and we treated ourselves to an american hamburger at an empty Johhny Rocket franchise followed by a look at the aquarium.

By the time we got back to the Hotel, a non-smoking room was available and we changed rooms with a minimum of fuss – phew. We then took a short walk down to the Dubai Creek and caught a Abra over to the spice souk (market) on the other side.

We walked a bit too far then lost the will to live searching for a supermarket for some brekkie cereal and instant noodles. Finally found one & staggered back to find that we had no kettle with which to prepare the noodles. Had one beer at the very smelly Irish pub and went to bed.

Next morning we grabbed a cab to the ‘Madinat Jumeirah’ and enjoyed a fantastic breakfast looking at the Burj Al Arab then wandering the resort shops. A very short cab ride took us to the convention centre at another very flash hotel where our friend’s church meets. That was quite an interesting experience with heaps of ex-pats working in Dubai. We even met the Emirates pilot who flew our plane from Adelaide!

Next we enjoyed a wonderful lunch at an even flasher resort followed by a wonderful cruise out of the Palm marina in his boat. The feel from out on the water on a Friday was awesome. We jumped overboard and sat in the clean, safe water surrounded by locals and ex-pats having fun boating & skydiving around us for about two hours catching up on our respective life journeys. Something I will always remember fondly.

Feeling adventurous, we grabbed a metro to the Dubai Mall so we could check out the fountain again (they say it is better at night). In stark contrast to our Thursday morning visit, the place was packed – we saw the blasted fountain the joined an uncomfortably long queue for a cab back to the hotel. Slept well, off at the crack of dawn for our flight to Paris.

Search flickr for ‘fangoparis‘ to find a whole bunch more of our photos from this trip.
A Flickr collection of photos from our trip to Europe in 2013 for your viewing pleasure.

Fang – Mike Seyfang

YAK:

It looks like this and has served me extremely well – indoor flying at ETSA park with SSL one Thursday per month and most mornings out on Glenelg Oval.

Runs 2s batteries to power trusty TURNIGY 2204-14T 19g Outrunner with 8×4.3 props. Other bits:

• TURNIGY 2204-14T 19g Outrunner
  
• TURNIGY Plush 6A /.8bec/6g Speed Controller
• OrangeRx R410 Spektrum DSM2 Compatible 4Ch 2.4Ghz Receiver
• HXT500 5g / .8kg / .10sec Micro Servo
• ZIPPY Flightmax 350mAh 2S 20C (AUS Warehouse)

Fang – Mike Seyfang