I thought I could get away with utilizing the onboard 6V from my cannibalized motion platform…aka the orange thing…in order to power both the DC motors and my IOIO. My bluetooth connection was cutting out…indicating that I needed to introduce a separate power source for the board and for the motors. My workaround didn’t pan out…time to rethink the build. Guess what I have on my desk: Adafruit Motor Shield for the Arduino. Two good looking H-Bridges staring at me….that’ll do. I never thought I would find myself treating my Arduino gear as a scrapheap, but the day has come. The H-Bridge will allow me to cross over (think of a capitol H) and provide bi-directional motion from the hardware level. 3.3V digital outputs…no more open drain needed (bonus.) Anyhow, I ended up putting together a little test board…socket, some male pins, and eventually some wires for a more secure connection. Sucking some serious soldering fumes… It looks sloppy, but here is the hardware in its entirety: Here is a quick video of my testing. I fired up my IOIOSeek program, which has two simple digital outputs triggered via buttons… Early success? Yep. Except for the early part…this has been more work than I had assumed. More EE work…hoping the UI and hardware containment goes smoothly. Tune back in.

The only better thing than one nice monitor is two nice monitors. The only thing better than two nice monitors, is one really nice monitor and a hi-res laptop monitor. The only thing better than one nice monitor and one laptop monitor is that, in addition to one sort of lousy monitor. So, I guess I am winning that game…my work setup is equally that: I need to step it up and go for quad monitors. Quads would be great…I get sort of jealous when I see something like this when I am daydreaming of the perfect work setup: Imagine something like that, with three of my 24"s from work sitting perfectly on my desk. Symmetrical, clean, and awesome. I found myself on Mulitiplex’s site looking at some of their setups…I am completely in awe of this guy: And hence the title of the post…I have an itch to put together a quad monitor setup. Big time. I am up in the air as to whether a single monitor on top of the triple monitor setup would be better than the giant quadrilateral, but either one would be amazing. Maybe I can get this up and going…

Hey nerds. Guess what? Spotify on Linux. Super easy too…fire up a terminal [ctrl-alt-t]

Step one: cd /etc/apt

Step two: sudo vim sources.list

Step three: add “deb http://repository.spotify.com stable non-free” to the file

Step four: sudo apt-get update

Step five: sudo apt-get install spotify-client-qt

That is that. It is not a supported version, but I doubt anyone installing via aptitude will really care about that item.

Side thought: How sad is it that my favorite album came out in 1993? Old balls.

So close… I hit another snag with respect to my IOIO specs butting heads with actual power yield. An early success: …followed by being unable to replicate via battery control, despite higher voltage. I might be running into a similar incident that I saw when putting together the PowerSwitch Tail project. I’ll get there…might have resisters coming out the ass, but I should be able to solve this issue with a creative open-drain setup as well. Tune in again…

The hardware phase is complete… … …now I just need to mash together some code and awaken this orange beast.

I am going to have to wait until my caffeine levels are at some sort of equilibrium before I tackle this series of wire joints… …this is where I stopped. I may be spending more time playing the new Zelda, and less time freezing balls in my lab working on my IOIO project. I’ll get on it.

If there hasn’t been enough reason to root your phone and flash a custom ROM in the past, this whole CarrierIQ mess ought to be the death blow to factory junk. It is a rootkit, and it is ridiculous. What does this thing do? All of this stuff from Verizon’s website:

Verizon Wireless will use the following categories of information: Mobile Usage Information: • Addresses of websites you visit when using our wireless service. These data strings (or URLs) may include search terms you have used • Location of your device (“Location Information”) • App and device feature usage Consumer Information: • Information about your use of Verizon products and services (such as data and calling features, device type, and amount of use) • Demographic and interest categories provided to us by other companies, such as gender, age range, sports fan, frequent diner, or pet owner (“Demographics”) How is this collected? CIQ logs it. In plain text, disregarding https, etc…read this article to be blown away by the degree of privacy infringement. Moral of the story: root your phone. This garbage is unacceptable.

I’ll update this thread first thing in the AM, but there is some major unbelievable nonsense going down with Carrier IQ and assumed secure connections. Consider this article a primer until I can dig in more completely…

Oh? Zelda Twilight Princess? Conquered it. The hardest part of snapping this pic was avoiding eye contact with Katie, who was on the couch laughing at me. Tradition is tradition. As I was preparing the shot, I noticed that my phone was picking up the infrared LEDs from the Wii sensor bar… I had pegged the Wii bar as a passive unit…a la IR receivers only. I guess I was wrong, and now have an urge to rip one apart. But I digress. This game took me ages to complete…feels good to be done with this one. Not quite as fun as Ocarina, but Twilight was a good time. Rumor has it that the new Zelda for Wii is borderline unreal…look for me to post a ‘conquered it’ picture on this site in 2016.

My new IOIO project is in the ‘bunch of pieces’ state. It also happens to be in the ‘my effing hardware works’ phase as well.. I’ll keep mum on this for the time being…a bunch of coding and refinement remains to be seen. Stay tuned for this one…