I got tired of poking around with LCD drivers with my Arduino. Time for a quick project to mix it up…staring at a surge protector always puts 120V on my mind. As it turns out, I tore apart an old humidifier a while ago on my ‘workbench.’ Monday night is Katie’s reality TV night…time for something sweet. Investigating duty cycles on this plastic fan: I figured that I could horse around with my PowerSwitch Tail, and make it somewhat mimic a PWM 5V setup. I was curious how long I would have to ‘pulse’ the switch with juice to keep the fan constantly rolling. I started with it fully on, and kicked my ‘active’ duty cycles lower until I reached a nearly-continual state of motion. Pause for Arduino code snippet:

/* PowerSwitch Tail Template - 120V AC Driver w/ LED indicator - Joseph Swanson 2011 | https://swantron.com */ void setup() { // declare pins (13, 7) for writing pinMode(13, OUTPUT); pinMode(7, OUTPUT); } void loop() { // Fire relay / LED digitalWrite(13, HIGH); digitalWrite(7, HIGH); // Configure for “on” time delay (50); // Kill relay / LED digitalWrite(13, LOW); digitalWrite(7, LOW); // Configure for “off” time delay (950); } Pause for a small small-video break: As that code and vid indicate, 1/20th of a second is all it took to keep the fan rolling, with 19/20th of a second idle. Not bad. Not sure what the takeaway is, but that is something to mention. Put that knowledge somewhere safe, provided the question of humidifier fan duty cycles should spring up.

I’m back on the command line…look out… So, I am still poking away at various ways to interface between the bash and various web components. This stuff is still shaking out of my Twitter to CLI to LCD project. I have been using some of the usual suspects (wget, python url libraries, etc) in an effort to find one that is best suited to sniffing and parsing html info. I have found that writing to serial is the most fail-proof means of mashing around data quickly, so that is my inspiration. Anyhow, I was horsing around with curl on the command line. It turns out, that spoofing user agents is pretty simple to implement. Take this two-line one liner for instance: swantron@Dell15:$ x=10 swantron@Dell15:$ for (( y=1; y<=x; y++)) ; do curl –user-agent “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)” swantron.com ; doneIn a nutshell, this is acting to snag this site ten times, with credentials indicating the machine is running Windows 2000 and MS Internet Explorer 5.1. The success is indicated by my server statistics: Before: After: Not too bad. I am considering using this as a testing tool for my site. Messing around with PHP and CSS…I can put together a quick regression using some legacy operating systems and browsers to make certain that I can still snag my content. Granted, the example setup may seem like gross overkill, but as those stats indicate, I do see quite a few requests from ancient machines. Makes you wonder.. Anyhow, this layout is in need of some serious testing. If anyone is interested in a copy, drop me a line. Cheers.

As a gadget guy, I am always searching for new tech stuff. Every once in a while, I stumble across a new Gadget Blog that is awe-inspiring. I recently found one that blew my mind, due to some of the inanely cool stuff they dig up. Like this bad boy… That iPhone case almost makes me want to get rid of my Droid 2 and snag an iPhone 4. Almost… Geekalerts.com is where I found that. I have been checking the site out for a while, and they seem to post a handful of awesome entries a day. I have no idea how they keep coming up with this stuff, but it is great. I obviously need to hone my interweb skills, as I would have a hard time finding a few head-scratcher nerd items in a week, let alone in a day. This whole work thing is for the birds. I need more free time. Or, more time to check this site out; they seem to have it figured out. In addition to the gadgets themselves, these guys do a great job tracking down coupon codes for sweet geeky savings. I ran across an Office Depot coupon that is sort of the catch-all for gadgetry. Office Depot is perhaps a step above gadgetry, since they purvey hardware. Hardwaretry? I am fairly certain that isn’t a word. Take a look at this Vistaprint coupon for another example. Pretty slick…plus it beats checking out the sites of places you might buy from. Again, the whole time thing. Anyhow, I am off to check the webs for a Droid old school calculator case. That is too cool.

After the whole fiasco that came with my upgrade to WordPress 3.2, I decided to shell my old layout and go with a new free website builder. Not only was it too bloated with jqueries, but the whole thing was sort of outdated. Time for some new blood, to go with my new (faster?) server. Introducing: Swiz3 Way quicker than the Swiz2* series. It turns out that WP has introduced a bunch of the custom menu junk that I formerly have fought with into their release, so out with the old. Consider this a working beta, and pay no attention to anything wonky on IE…haven’t even looked at this site on that. Cheers.

My good friend Alexi from Siteground assured me that my new server is a good one. One that has MySQL 5.0 and PHP 5.2.17. Even though my cpanel was reporting 5.2.17, such was not the case for my PHP version…as fate would have it, my Wordpress update to 3.2 puked violently. I did the prudent thing; edited my .htaccess root file, etc. After getting good old swantron.com up and rolling, I still couldn’t access my admin page. That let me know that my SQL junk was also fishy. Looks like I need to look into self-hosting options. Long story short, Alexi got me migrated to a server with some real deal software. Siteground may have had my site hosted on some bullshit tech, but they did get me up and running quickly. I have done some research, and my server neighbors used to be primarily pr0n sites…I wish them luck with their hosting. Guessing they were unaffected by this upgrade that made me stumble, but if not, my condolences to the pervs. We will see…I might get into the hosting biz.

Still dining finely on fancy lunches in the cubicle. This week’s installment…three gourmet burgers. I find three to be the ideal number of main entree items at the office. —————————————————————— Unit 1, consumed at 10:00 AM, acts to lessen the coffee shakes. Unit 2, consumed around noon, acts to kill the smells of coworkers’ lunches Unit 3, consumed at 2:00 PM, pretty much just food show-boating at this point +1 food show-boating

I have two speeds when it comes to projects: percolate and bazooka. Whereas my swantron comment / to / LCD project was bazooka, this Twitter deal has been percolate. Haven’t been able to jump in completely, rather, I have been poking this one with a stick. Still poking… Making progress…snagging my Twitter page via Python, and dumping it to LCD: I just need to hammer out some parsing, and I will be good to go. I really need to figure out some sweet regex and drop this whole ‘import (some junk)’ stuff. Who knows…at this rate, I just may.

I guess I had better find a new bucket list entry… I was so excited upon beating Ocarina of Time, I snapped a self portrait with the end-screen… …and, I am in my 30s. Wow. Now what? My nerd bucket list needs a new entry. Maybe I should finish my LED cube project. Maybe I should finish my command line Twitter work. Maybe I should take on Ocarina of Time 3D… Probably not the last one…not pumped about the 3DS. Something great will ensue.

Don’t call it a comeback. Or a re-branding. You can’t really re-brand something that lacks, in large, a brand. Let’s just say, I’m dropping the ninja. The robot stays, but knows his place. Carry on.

A while back, I collected my first Woot BOC. The prize crap in the bag of crap was, without any doubt, the radio controlled Batman helicopter. Great Scott… Wrong movie catch phrase, right? Well, so too are the aerodynamics of a helicopter SHAPED LIKE BATMAN. She is not a very sky-worthy vessel. The rotors push air directly into the clear plastic tab connected to his booted feet…it is not stable at all. Time to tear it up. I figured that I could remove the obstructive plastic and have a machine that would function well enough to navigate around the garage-shop. I removed the guys legs, which were light enough to be approximated with a zip tie. As I had hoped, the new lower portion acted to dampen some of the erratic flight. It was stable enough to allow me to snap that picture…not a possibility with the unmodified original. Curiosity got the best of me, as it always tends to. I had to break this apart to see how it worked. I am sort of impressed I took the intermediate steps this time…most of my tear down sessions are done quickly and rabidly. This was sort of impressive, actually. The foam chest cavity was hollow to allow for the constituent components…including the mechanical gears. Light, protective, and durable…the triple threat. It was, until I removed it completely… There you have it…pretty basic design. Two variable motors, an IR receiver, a battery, a DC power jack, a switch, some caps and resisters, and a chip to run it. The IR sensor was hidden in Batman’s utility belt. Great Scott that is clever. After all of that, this puppy still flies… I was pretty gun shy to let that rip. It took a couple of dives in my first two picture attempts, wrapping the battery cord around the rotor assembly. It still works…pretty tough little guy. Next step…I’m going to get into that controller. It acts as both the charging unit and IR sender, in addition to providing the variable control to the motors. It shall be awesome. Stay tuned.