The FEZ (Freakin’ EZ) Domino and it’s sibling, the Mini.

Now, that last part was as hard for me to say as it was for you to hear (or is it see?). I’m not a Microsoft fanboy by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, I’ve earned my living for the last 5 years as a Linux system administrator — and I have no intention of ever returning to a Windows domain of my own volition. That said, there’s no denying the power of the .NET framework, C#, and the Visual Studio environment and their impact on rapid prototyping and development cycles.

Loyalties aside, the FEZ Domino is somewhat akin to an Arduino on the juice . In fact, the FEZ Domino even maintains pin compatibility with the Arduino so the drawer full of shields you’ve accumulated over the years won’t be going to waste. And, if your stepping up from a Parallax BASIC Stamp, then the FEZ Mini has you covered as a drop-in replacement for your old BS2 projects.

There’s nothing like a little competition, and that’s true in open source as much as in business. I don’t know when the FEZ Domino was released, but I’m glad elektor ran an article about the .NET Micro Framework in this month’s issue, or it may have continued to go relatively unnoticed in the hobbyist community.

And sure, you could argue about the merits of avr-gcc, or the flexibility of creating your own makefiles. But let’s be honest with ourselves for a minute. The Arduino (and clones), the BASIC Stamp, and the FEZ Domino aren’t really targeted at professional, manufacturing-grade engineers. They’re targeted at people like me an you. Yeah, you with the ThinkGeek t-shirt and Nerf gatling-gun hidden beneath your desk. People who like to explore technology, and to share their discoveries with the rest of the world. People who like to build, tinker, and Make, and to see their ideas come to life in the real world.

FEZ Domino just made it even easier to do just that.

I plan to update both of the applications as time permits, and with any luck, push a few more applications out into the wild over the coming months.

Now that the bad news is out of the way, I feel a bit of good news is in order. I *am* working (albeit slowly, I just started a new job and moved into a new home) on an updated version of Comic News Stand that includes the much-requested cover images in the list. Here’s a picture of an early build to whet your appetites!

There is still quite a bit of work to be done on this new version. It involved a complete rewrite of the code, but it is on my short list of things to do in March.

Thanks so much for using the app, and for understanding that I am just one guy doing something fun in my spare time!

Tim

Last night I mentioned that my wife and I recently purchased our first home, and that I had a new workshop for the imagitronics lab. I thought I would throw up a few pictures of the new shop to give you an idea of just how great my new setup is.

Moving back to the states and finding work with an amazing company like Slicehost / Rackspace has really inspired and motivated me. What’s more, now that I have an actual garage and not just a small table in a tiny Japanese apartment, I can really start to tackle some larger/longer term projects that just weren’t feasible in that little space. I’m unbelievably excited as the second month of the year comes to a close, and I can’t wait to see what the next couple of years have in store!

As an aside, now that I work for Slicehost, I decided to migrate imagitronics.org from it’s old GoDaddy-hosted home to a speedy new Slicehost VPS where I can have complete root access to the slice where this blog resides.

Cheers!

Update: Per this discussion on the remastersys forums, my fix will be included in remastersys 2.0.14.

This week, I was using remastersys to create a custom ubuntu-based distribution (more info on this later). One of the things that I noticed about remastersys version 2.0.13-1 was it’s lack of compatibility with Ubuntu’s USB Startup Disk Creator utility.

I have created a simple patch to address the issue. You can download it at http://www.imagitronics.org/download/ubuntu_creator.patch.

Alternatively, you can edit the file /usr/bin/remastersys and insert the following code immediately before Step 7.

#Step 6.5 - Added by Tim Farley. Make ISO compatible with Ubuntu Startup Disk Creator (Karmic).
echo "Making disk compatible with Ubuntu Startup Disk Creator."
touch $WORKDIR/ISOTMP/ubuntu
touch $WORKDIR/ISOTMP/.disk/base_installable
echo "full_cd/single" > $WORKDIR/ISOTMP/.disk/cd_type
echo $(uname -a) > $WORKDIR/ISOTMP/.disk/info
if [ "$LIVECDURL" = "" ]; then
LIVECDURL="<a href="http://www.geekconnection.org/remastersys" target="_blank">http://www.geekconnection.org/remastersys</a>"
fi
echo $LIVECDURL > $WORKDIR/ISOTMP/.disk/release_notes_url

This version allows you to set an addition variable in your /etc/remastersys.conf called LIVECDURL that points to the address of your custom distribution. The LIVECDURL variable defaults to the remastersys homepage if left unset.

Enjoy!

Tim

It’s not ideal as it requires the programmer to declare an output array large enough to hold the result of the encoding procedure. I tried everything I could think of to avoid this by using the size of the input string (strsize(in_ptr)*(4/3)) to store the output, but I couldn’t get it.

Download the updated base64.spin.

Sample usage:

CON
_clkmode = xtal1 + pll16x
_xinfreq = 5_000_000

OBJ
text : "TV_Text"
b64  : "base64"

VAR
byte outstring[25]

PUB start | i
text.start(12)

b64.encode(string("admin:admin"), @outstring)
text.str(@outstring)
text.out(13)

b64.encode(string("admin:password"), @outstring)
text.str(@outstring)
text.out(13)

b64.encode(string("Die SPIN Die!"), @outstring)
text.str(@outstring)
text.out(13)

b64.encode(string("meh"), @outstring)
text.str(@outstring)

repeat

And a sample image from the above code:

If anyone has any tips that can help get rid of the need to declare the output variable’s size, please let me know. Tim

Well, it’s not very interesting (yet?) but I started working on a uTorrent download monitor using the ybox2. At the moment, it’s really nothing more than a simple hack. The ybox2 is running a slightly modified infowidget. When I say slightly modified, I mean I added one line to insert a Basic base64 authentication header for the uTorrent webserver:

tel.txmimeheader(string(“User-Agent”),string(“PropTCP”)) tel.txmimeheader(string(“Connection”),string(“close”)) tel.txmimeheader(string(“Authorization”),string(“Basic YWRtaW46YWRtaW4=”)) tel.str(@CR_LF)

I haven’t figured out how to write my own base64 encoding routine in Spin yet, so for the time being, I used python to generate the base64 encoding of the default username/password for the uTorrent web server (admin:admin).

Apart from that, I’m using a uTorrent python library on the web server to generate a properly formatted document for the infowidget and the file is updated every minute by the Windows Task Scheduler: The simple python script can be found at http://pastebin.com/f2a47b927. 

TODO:

• There’s a lot that I’d like to do, but I’m currently in the midst of a hate/hate relationship with Spin.
• Ideally, I’d like to create a base64 encoder routine, and create a set of routines in Spin that can query the uTorrent webui natively without the python proxy.
• If/when that happens, I’d like to add remote control, scrolling, and the ability to select a download to view details. We’ll see how my relationship with Spin evolves. I’m not exactly a good programmer to begin with, and Spin is shaking me up pretty good.

It’s really not the language or the chip that’s difficult, per say, but rather the ybox2 specific libraries that implement the TCP/IP stack. A lot of the code is left up to your application, so even the simplest of the network-enabled widgets work out to around 300 lines of code. That’s a lot to digest when you’re just learning a new architecture and language.

Not to mention I’ve been pretty spoiled by Visual Studio and Eclipse for the past 4-5 years. I’m so used to having all the documentation described to me as I type, that having to find the source files and check what methods/constants/variables are available is a real drag!