ejs

a snaphot of time

Weekend project – USBasp

Sep 21

Posted by ejs in Hobbies, programming | 1 Comment

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I had some ideas to go out before, but as i got terrible cold last Friday, I had to postpone all of them.

I feel a bit better today, so decided to build USBasp – an USB port ISP programmer for Atmel product family. I used STK 200/300 dongle before, but it works from parallel port only.
USBasp: fresh PCB
Lets start: the schematics is from http://www.fischl.de/usbasp/ . You can find some schematics and pre-routed PCB’s there.

What I need is USB B type or MiniUSB connector, SMD parts, small footprint, single – sided PCB. The one I liked is by Thomas Pfeifer, http://thomaspfeifer.net/atmel_usb_programmer.htm. The problem is I found no files for Eagle there and had to re-create the PCB.

Additional features are:

  • RC filters on MOSI, MISO and SCK lines to suppress ringing, as suggested in AVR Freaks forum;
  • Signal from oscillator (XTAL1) is routed to the pin 3 on IDC connector via jumper – a handy feature to debrick the MCU if you accidentally fused external oscillator;
  • Inductor on the power line.

The PDF files with the layout are here, an A6 – size mirrored image for direct printing on OHP is here.

Added on 2008-10-01:
USBasp top side, populated
USBasp bottom side, populated
First, it works. Both connected directly or via USB hub.
Second: don’t create anything while you are ill. Actually, pin number 5 on miniUSB connector MUST be grounded, while pin number 4 can be grounded or left floating. I’ve used i jumper wire to solve the issue.

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Hacking the FlexLM keygens

Aug 21

Posted by ejs in Hobbies, Software | Comments off

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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 »

Make Samba and CUPS in Debian friends again

Apr 15

Posted by ejs in *NIX | No Comments

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I’ve seen a lot of these entries in logfiles recently:

[] printing/print_cups.c:cups_job_submit(656)
Unable to print file to - client-error-bad-request

And the printing is stopped, of course.

The solution is simple:

LANG=en_US.UTF-8 /etc/init.d/samba restart

In short:
/var/log/cups/error_log shows a lot of

E [] Unsupported character set "iso-8859-1"!

CUPS requires UTF-8.
In the case of default login in Debian, the console IS in UTF-8, but is not if you have customized it and use `su` for administrative tasks.

C’ia.

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Let’s go get lost

Feb 25

Posted by ejs in Hobbies | 1 Comment

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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

Feb 24

Posted by ejs in Hobbies | Comments off

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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

Feb 22

Posted by ejs in Hobbies | 2 Comments

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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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Troubles in remote server management

Nov 19

Posted by ejs in *NIX, My job | Comments off

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Had a severe issue with Samba server recently: it refused to serve after some undefined amount of time. It could work for a days perfectly or could be completely unreachable in several minutes after restart. Logs were useless, even in the highest possible debug level.

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PHProject in Unicode

Jun 28

Posted by ejs in *NIX, My job, Software | No Comments

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The final migration stage from file-based Ganntproject to Web-based solution just began. I’ve set up PHProject in the office site. PHP5, Apache2, Mysql4 and Debian is enough.

The very first problem was Unicode support. Seems like PHProject was developed keeping MySQL3 in mind, althow ir works with a bunch of database backends, like Oracle, PostgreSQL, DB2, MSSQL.

So, to use UTF8 encoding in MySQL, add the following into lib/db/mysql.inc.php:

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Netgear WG511 Wi-Fi card in Debian

Feb 7

Posted by ejs in *NIX, My job | No Comments

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Long time ago i’ve bought Netgear WG511 PCMCIA WiFi card. It’s version 2, and is supported by prism54 module. the basic info is in jkx page, but at least 3 years have passed 😉

In order to run in Linux, you need:
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More complicated KDM and Xorg configuration on my laptop

Jan 10

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the initial size of the desktop

The 1024×768 screen of my laptop from ESC is quite small. I got it when I had to change some preferences in Cinelerra. The confirmation buttons were far below the edge of the screen.

Well, manually editing files in ~/.bcast is a bit time-consuming, so i really needed these buttons 😉

There were two ways to press the button: either use bigger, so called ‘virtual’ desktop, or try to run two X serers with different layouts.
Using virtual desktops is more simple. Just add “Virtual x y” lines to /etc/X11/xorg.conf and you are done. The minor problem is that when the window gets maximized, it expand over the whole virtual desktop, not just the visible part of it.
The other way is more interesting. I should mention I prefer KDM as desktop manager.
So, good old Goooooogle showed me the way: [1] and [2]. The first one is quite interesting, but seems like kdm from KDE 3.5.5 is not reading Xservers file at all.
The temporary workaround is to use the ugly XDM as desktop manager. Read the rest of this entry »

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