scottyau

I've been playing quite a bit with Arduino based stuff over the last while.  It's an awesome way to get started without a huge amount of low level knowledge of the micro required to get an LED to blink.  I wanted to try some bare bones bits though with some ATMega's as well.   I found a few different tutorials online that explain the gap that the Arduino bootloader fills.  One of the ones I liked the most is the Hack a Day series on AVR programming . I ordered a few ATMega168 's from Core Electronics .  I've been buying a bit from them lately.  They are here in Australia, with pretty good prices and very fast shipping. As for the AVR programming hardware I decided to use my BusPirate (fully supported by AVRDude). So I read through the tutorials and got to the section in Tutorial 02 where it's time to connect up and program the ATMega168.  Dangerous Prototypes have a full page on using the BusPirate as an AVR programmer . There were two bits tha...

Ok, so I've been a bit slack while on leave and let Scotty down by not posting up my speedometer. I swear I will, however, today is more about server administration than an electronic project. The reason I am writing about this is that it took me a while and a lot of reading to get everything I needed to grow, repair, destroy and create (in that order oddly enough) a RAID5 software array with and overlaying Logical Volume. A while back I purchased a HP micro server and with the assistance of a mate got it up and running with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. The OS runs of a USB key inside the server, while the RAID5 array sits in the bay drives. I needed the help originally as I had no real idea about LVM ‘s (or for that matter any real working knowledge of a RAID) – so to begin with I had four 2TB hard disks, which gave me about 5.4TB of usable space on the array. As with all things, I 'had' to tinker with my Micro Server. The plan (as suggested by said friend), install two ...

Pretty quick post about my morning repairing the baby monitor that we were given for our new born last week.  It's an Angelcare AC401 (sensor pads not pictured): It's only issue was the LCD display.  It started out just missing a segment or two when our friends were still using it, and slowly progressed until the display was almost useless: We were gifted the monitor, as our friends kids are past that age - which saved us a chunk of $$ on a new one.  So I set about opening it up to see what sort of connection the LCD display was using to see if I could reseat/reconnect it to get the LCD working 100% again: Once it was apart the cable to the LCD was clearly visible, and was just one of those glued ribbon cables.  The best link I could find about repairing one of these is from  Instructables .  I followed that, using a peg to hold the display where I needed it while working on it: I got out my heat gun and put it on the lowest setti...