I wanted to update people who have stopped by and visited this website. The projects we were trying to finish got pushed. Both myself and antics have a job and a bunch of side projects to keep us busy through the year. I will try and post some updates, but dont expect anything anytime soon. This site was going to be used for all of our EE projects, but mostly has been moved to Tears of Fire. I do a bit of EE work but not as much as antics. I will still keep this site up for portfolio reason and possibly convert to a store, once we do put out a product.

Posted by smitten

Permalink

one thing to be aware of when using uClinux on the blackfin is that the MMU does not handle virtual memory allocation. In short you can't use a true fork(). There are versions of these functions for MMU-less processors like the blackfin (it has an MMU but not that kind) so all is well right? Pretty much but not really. uClinux still is fully threaded, and many, many wonderful apps run under uClinux. So close your eyes, take a deep breath, and accept the truth; there is no fork.

Posted by antics

Permalink

backuppc is great. i originally was going to setup this complicated set of cron jobs and scp transfers to backup all of my crap. turns out backuppc does that for you. it's a versitile program and i won't go into all the details but features like file pooling, compression, and a nice web frontend make it the ideal backup utility for *nix, Mac and Windows computers alike.

Posted by antics

Permalink

for those of you that haven't played with the blackfin you are really missing out. it's an incredibly powerful yet very low power usage processor capable of running uClinux. ADI even has staff dedicated solely to maintaining the uclinux distro for the blackfin. go buy a STAMP or EZKIT from digikey and start hacking.

to avoid common gotchas see the uclinux forums or antics notes

Posted by smitten

Permalink

Well, I was in Europe for about 4 weeks. I had a blast and saw some krazy electronics stuff. The phones over there are so much better, almost as good as the stuff in japan. I just got my Tmobile MDA when I got back. I still need to pickup a minisd card to start playing and installing some programs.

Anyway, so the avronics project is on hold. We have got a couple of other ideas and have put this on hold due to other boards like the makeboard controller. I am trying to work on posting up code in the handbook. This week I will be working on my edibletags project. The backend is fully functional, so now its time for the design. I got some ideas kicking and hope to post up a sample by Friday. I will be posting more electronics and code on this site in the upcoming weeks. I am hoping to start doing at least 1 post a day!

Posted by smitten

Permalink

The past couple of weeks I have been losing weight and looking for a new belt. This past weekend I stopped by the Burton store in SOHO(NYC) and saw an awesome belt by Analog. I was thinking about buying it until I came across EgoKast Video Belt - $279 USD price tag is pretty high for a belt! The videos and pictures are stored on SD Cards in jpg,bmp,mp4,avi, and wmv9 formats. More can be found at their website by ordering it now! A must BUY for any GEEK!

Posted by smitten

Permalink

I have built various projects in the pass and have a couple of project that I want to work on in the next couple of weeks. I found Spark Fun a great source for products, including a bluetooth modula for the roomba.

Update on Kit: We have been working on making our kit more user friendly. We plan to have our kit for sale by the end of August, but we will keep you posted.

Posted by smitten

Permalink

The robotic vacuum clean a great idea, but a horrible implementation. iRobot has built and sells these vacuum cleaners to clean your home, but the people over at Roomba Dev Tools offers development parts for hacking your roomba! You can order their various development kits to interface with your roomba. Although the roomba sucks or rather lack there of, if you want a real vacuum cleaner ... get a dyson, if you want a robot, get a roomba! Anyway, enough with this rant, go and hack your roomba!

Posted by smitten

Permalink

just welcoming myself to the avronics blog.

don't forget - robots are cool! go build one!

Posted by antics

Permalink

Last week I was working as a consultant at a clients office. He had a mandriva box running that I was using. I have no problem coding in vi, I prefer it! Anyway, while working on the project I realized I was missing all my web tools on my powerbook. So I started to think and update firefox on the machine with all of my MUST HAVE web tools.

1. Web Developer - This extension for Firefox gives you the abliity to test various parts of your code (html,css,javascript), along with some other great tools for measuring image sizes. Every website should be w3c valid. This tool allows you to validate your code!

2.ColorZilla - This is another Firefox extension that reads the color value on any point of your browser. I must for graphic designers! ColorZilla also can display a pallete and allow you to pick the color and give you the value.

3. del.icio.us Extension - If you do not have a del.icio.us account go sign up now. This is a social bookmarking website that keeps track of all of your bookmarks. This is great for people who have a lot of bookmarks or websites they need to know the URL, but do not carry a laptop with them 24/7.

4. Gradient Image Maker - with the new web 2.0 crazy, every website wants a graident image somewhere. Since I do not use GIMP everyday or carry a photoshop install CD with me, this is the easiest way for a web developer to make their own graidents without any knowledge of any graphical program. Dynamic Drive is a great site for web developers. It also features some other tools like a favIcon generator. A favicon is the image that shows up in your tab. You just upload an image and it will resize the image specific for the favicon and give you stub code to use for your web site.

I am sure I will be adding or posting to this again, but if you do not uses these please go download and play with them. Suggestions, Comments, etc. email smitten at avronics dot com

Posted by smitten

Permalink