Archive for category Hobbies

Hacking the FlexLM keygens

Ok, it’s ugly and illegal, i know. The information here is for educational purposes only.

Sometimes i’m asked to “cure” one or another product, protected by registration or network license manager, like FlexLM. And you know, a lot of keygens for these product found in the Internet, do not work. The usual error is “Internal Error #{1..6} – Please be sure the app is running and on the license screen!”. What’s wrong, why the keygens from the glorious crack groups do not work any more?

Search on the Internet revealed almost nothing: from “the kyegen does not work” to “it works perfectly”, some says one must use genuine windows the keygen to work (wow…).

Let’s start a little investigation. Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s go get lost

Full trip (amost)Actually, up to Munich i had no GPS signal when the Asus was charging in the car cradle – a stupid problem.
When surfing web in Munich I’ve found a patch to solve the problem in WM5 from the same Asus. After this everything went fine and you can see the whole journey here.
Asus had solved this problem in later firmware releases for WM5 as well as for WM6. So, let’s start exploring Italy: Full trip (amost)
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Creating eye-candy from dead i-GO tracks

sample track

As, I’ve mentioned earlier, we had a pleasant trip through Italy the last summer. I have recorded the whole trip to my GPS unit using i-GO navigation program. Seems like 10 second recording intervals are fine and the track is quite precise and smooth.
Unfortunately, during upgrade from WM5 to WM6 I had to reinstall i-Go and all tracks just dissapeared from track list in i-GO. Stupid me, i HAD to save ‘igo.db’ file somewhere.
I found no way to put them back, so let the fun begin.
A short glimpse into one of the files and..

...
$GPGSA,A,3,04,20,13,23,31,11,,,,,,,2.0,1.2,1.6*33
$GPRMC,061120.287,A,5414.2734,N,02337.5314,E,54.08,261.55,290707,,,A*50
$GPGGA,061121.000,5414.2726,N,02337.5281,E,1,06,1.2,152.2,M,31.0,M,,0000*54
...

Hey, do You think the same way? Yes, it’s NMEA data in plain text.
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Screen change for Asus MyPal 639

little hand

The unit served as almost perfect GPS navigator for our summer trip though the Italy. One regular February evening i took my Asus PDA and…
Yep, a small problem. And a serious one.

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ESR meter

partly assembled ESR meter board

Sometimes i need to check the ESR values for second-hand or fresh electrolutis capacitors. Although ESR meters are available, it’s hard for me to spend a lot of bucks on one of it. So: the schematics is from ludens.cl, the case is from local supplier (a low-cost analog multimeter from China).
OpAmp, resistors and SMD capacitors are mounted. Black stripes at the bottom are milimeter marks on the metal ruler.

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Wire size calculations ;)

Q: Given a single 0,35mm² copper wire, how much current it will handle?
A: ~60A

Stupid me. Used DIY regulated transformes to start my Alfa Romeo today and hooked on the wrong connector. Alfa started. The insulation on the wire made a blue smoke, but … still working 😉

Anyway, got 6mm² wire for replacement.
It’s time to replace car battery too, i think. Or check the generator.

PCB for Atmega

515

As promised earlier, i started the temperture controll project.
The last Atmel AVR in DIP package i had went to some ‘black box’. Have no sources for firmware, so i don’t want to touch it now.

It happens i’ve got Atmega8 in TQFP package. The only problem is the connection of TQFP to veroboard is either complicated or expensive. Read the rest of this entry »

Home automation: temperature sensor

Brrrr… Too cold.
Ever had a cold shower in (almost) winter time?

This is because the boiler behaves strangely. Although the it’s full of hot water, cold water is going out.

So, the pile of details gave me: MCU Atmega8, by Atmel; some LM335, temperature sensors by National.com. A pair of CD4051 will allow to use up to 16 analog inputs to the Atmel MCU.

Also, schematics at
http://www.geocities.com/vk3em/avr-tempc/avr-temp.htm
. It has some weird details, anyway i will try to master some kind of temperature sensor for the boiler. Just to make sure the will be enough hot water when i’m going to the shower.
Brr…

Colorization

505510

Quite interesting article on image processing. The MatLAB source, presented on the site, need some minor enhancments. Authors may contact me, if they want ;).
Attention: the program is really slow. I used ‘direct solver’, and it took almost 10 minutes to proceed the image.

JPEG-2000 in MatLAB

Any idea how to produce and read the JP2 file in MatLAB?
The easiest way should be writing middleware in Java to specific library. The things are complicated, as i need to get and modify data from every stage of encoding/decoding, like color space transformations, quantization, EBCOT (including bit-plane decomposition, bit-plane processing, encoding) and rate-encoders. Read the rest of this entry »