Name: Morgan, aka "Indrora"

Bio: Morgan is a developer, insane person and general lackey of the internet.

Posts by Indrora:

    Old tech: ADM-3A serial terminal, FreeBSD, and some fun.

    March 24th, 2013

    Stationfall on the ADM-3A display

    Quick quiz: Which is more important, health or fun? (hint: I chose the latter this time around… And you’ll see why!)

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    Giving new life to a Segate DockStar

    January 25th, 2013

    Or, how I learned to hack things.

    We at the Lab had a Segate DockStar kicking around, taking up space. I had been looking for a tiny NAS to run some home storage things, so a donation to the kitty later and away I go. However, I couldn’t put my 2.5″ PATA adapter onto it stock, so it needed a new home. That home happens to be sandwiched between some slabs of Inventables plexiglass. I’m kicking myself for not taking more pictures, but the overall design is pretty simple: Two sheets of plexiglass.

    First, a short primer on Poly(methyl methacrylate), AKA “Plexiglas”. Technically, there are many names for the (usually) transparent, shatter-proof material, including lexan, perspex, lucite, and oroglas. the material itself is a lightweight, usually thin layer of a synthetic polymer intended to be both heat resistant and shock resistant. One of its first uses was in World War II, on the front of bombers which needed to have impact-resistant noses (so you could see out of them. More useful if you’re the guy in the bubble below the plane.)

    Anyway, my design process essentially boiled down to:

    • Mock the whole thing up in cardboard (this is an important step)
    • Replicate the design overall onto a hunk of Plexiglas
    • Drill holes for the bolts
    • Drill holes for the zip-ties holding the ripped-out beating heart of the DockStar
    • Zip tie the Dockstar in place
    • Add hard drive/adapter
    • Cable it up
    • Admire work

    The last part is the hard part.

    On the slightly different side, I have ArchLinux ARM running on it. The device itself is supported quite well and has most, if not all, the Arch base packages available to it. Cool stuff. Installation wise, its a matter of following the instructions. I’ll summarize:

    1. Disconnect it from your PogoPlug account
    2. SSH into the device
    3. Pull down the alternative U-boot script installer
    4. Partition the disk. There needs to be at least one partition with at least 5..6GB of space available for ArchLinux. I personally gave Arch 10GB of space on a 250GB hdd. More data for meeee!
    5. Make sure the first partition is formatted ext2, has the ArchLinux arm5te root tarball extracted.
    6. Reboot!

    Nothing can beat the official documentation on the ArchLinux ARM website.

    One of the things I have is a real biggie for statistics. I like statistics. I happen to also like pretty graphs. Combine them and you get the results of tinkering around with the kernel diskstats file:

    I put the script on Gist. Go hack on it.

    1 Comment "

    Demoscene hack with the ChipKIT

    November 11th, 2012

    A while back, We got a ChipKIT box in the mail. Hmm, I thought: What could I do with such an interesting little device? I was mentally gone the entire month of november, due to working a major local event. So, after coming back to my senses I asked “What’s the catch?”

    The catch was “Do something awesome.” I was always fascinated by the old Amgia/C64 Demoscene and have always wanted to nudge something cool out of myself. Well, I did, and its kinda cool; I just finished it to a nice, polished place this morning and got a video up on youtube this morning. There’s some neat things in here: the “starfield” is really a moving graph that uses some fancy trigonometry to make pretty pictures.

    A touch of afterthought: The audio was overlayed by myself. I currently have some small plans to play audio on the board though.

    Video in action
    Source

    8 Comments "

    Help! My GCode is borked!

    September 8th, 2012

    Do you have prints that don’t print?A pronterface that looks wrongterface? Well, you might have a bad mesh.

    I ran into this when attempting to slice a whistle from Thingiverse: Slic3r would give me the ominous “Non-Manifold mesh” message and the printer would spaz out.

    In order to undertand what’s going on, there should be a little information on how tools like slic3r work. Slic3r and other G-code generators tend to work on the values of face “normals” — the direction the face, well, “faces.” Let’s take our whistle for example: As downloaded from Thingiverse, it looks like this:

    Bad STL file from Thingiverse

    The tool I use is ModuleWorks STLView (also for android!) which allows us to show the face normals (green lines) and faces which face the wrong way (gold surfaces). Slic3r will produce some very, very strange GCode for this model:

    Ugly GCode as a result of bad mesh

    The tool here is the RepRap GCode Simlulator from opencode.eu.The source is included, and depends on openGL. This lets us see what the actual path for each layer of the model looks like.

    So what do we do? First: don’t panic. Most of the horrible problems with ugly looking meshes can be fixed — all it takes is some time with the NetFabb cloud service. NetFabb produces a commercial 3D printer, but also runs a cloud service at http://cloud.netfabb.com/ which allows you to upload STL meshes and download the fixed version.

    Here’s what the model and resulting GCode look like afterwards:

    Fixed, good model with all its normals pointing out

    Good GCode as a result of a clean mesh


    1 Comment "

    Getting started with the STM32F4Discovery

    August 18th, 2012

    If you follow the Hack-A-Day stream, you’ve probably seen the STM32F0Discovery board come up on occasion. I have two of these boards and I like them — they have what I need for basic stuff, but I wanted some more horse-power (and USB Host.) Quickly, to the STM32F4Discovery!

    The target here is people who’ve outgrown the world of AVR and need something running faster; you should be capable and comfortable with diving into your PATH, mucking with environment variables and reading some pretty deep C.

    STM32F4 Discovery board (From ST)

    STM32F4 Discovery (From ST)

    I was given one of these for xmas a little while back (read: 8 months ago) and played with it, getting demo code to run on it. ST did something very painful and/or clever in that they produced this board, for hobbyists, but conveniently forgot to point to a clean, unadulterated compiler.

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    Nook Color modification for Fun And Profit

    March 8th, 2012

    We know the story. The Nook Color from B&N is pretty fun and awesome. But its not a real Android device ’till you have the full Android experience.

    I know how that feels. I got a Nook to replace a tablet that died. so far, the Nook has proven to be one of my favorite tablets yet. But following the CyanogenMod instructions left me wondering what I was doing wrong — Why wasn’t I getting a nice little “thank you!” message? Well because B&N changed some things. Here’s what I had to do to get a real version of Android running on my device:

    Standard Disclaimer Applies: I am not responsible for you bricking your device, the device blowing up in your face or the entire planet deciding you don’t deserve to breathe. The following is presented as-is. Neener^3. 

    What you will need

    • (1) 1GB+ MicroSD card (that you can loose the data from)
    • (1) microSD card reader
    • (Windows) Win32DiskImager (I can’t help you find that)
    • (Linux/Mac) dd

    Extra Data

    • CyanogenMod 7 for Nook Color (“Encore”) — Stable is fine
    • Google’s Applications for Android 2.3 (CM7) as an update zip
    • DizzyDen’s CWM Images (Choose the one for your SD card size)

    Procedure

    1. Clear/Deauthenticate/Erase all the data on your Nook. THIS STEP IS IMPORTANT. If you don’t, you’ll run into some STRANGE problems having to do with the main environment.
    2. un-gzip the CWM image you downloaded (if you haven’t already) as this will be pushed directly to your SD card.
    3. “Burn” the image to your SD card. Under Windows, select your SD card in Win32DiskImager and select the CWM image. Under linux, recite the following in a shell: dd if=(image name) of=(sd card device, e.g. /dev/sdb, /dev/sdq, etc.) bs=1M ( keep in mind here that the device may have been mounted before. If you get an I Can’t Let You Do That moment, find what is mounted on the SD card and unmount.
    4. Mount the SD card and create a folder called “update”
    5. place the CM7 file in that folder and the GApps zip.
    6. Unmount/Sync/Safely Remove the SD card. THIS STEP IS IMPORTANT. If you don’t make sure ALL of the two Zips are palced there you will get a message saying “HEY YOU DIDNT DO THAT RIGHT”
    7. Power off your Nook, 110% off.
    8. Insert the SD card and plug the Nook in. This should bring up a Skull And Crossbones “LOADING” screen.
    9. Select “install update from zip on SD card” (or something like that) using the Nook button
    10. Navigate to update/cm7-….encore….zip
    11. select Yes from the field of No’s
    12. Wait.
    13. Select “install from SD card”
    14. Select the gapps zip
    15. Tell it yes
    16. Remove the SD card and select “reboot device” (If you don’t, you’ll be sent back into CWM)
    17. Enjoy!
    18. Optional: Format the SD card (in Android or on Windows) and use it.
    19. Probably a good idea: install CWM (ClockWork Mod) Recovery to the device via apps drawer -> ClockworkMod -> Install ClockworkMod -> Nook Color.

    If you experience problems with the interface (it happens sometimes) try clearing the data off the device. There are some cases where there is lingering content from B&N that causes it to freak out.

    Now you’ve broke it!

    If you want to return to the original, stock Nook image, you can go back to 1.2 thanks to our good friends at XDA-Developers. The two versions there will either flatten over CWM or leave it alone.


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