Jonathan Oxer's Storefront

Jonathan Oxer\'s Brain(cell)

• A netbook is not a laptop substitute!

  2009 Nov 04

  A while ago my 15.4" laptop (Celeron 1.5GHz, fairly basic machine) died after a number of years of faithful service. I'd been wanting a netbook for a while and it seemed some were getting to the point of being fast enough to do everything a laptop can do, but in a smaller package.
  
  So I ended up with an HP2133. VIA 1.6GHz, 1GB RAM, 120GB disk, very nice keyboard, 1280x768 display, and all the usual stuff like WiFi and Bluetooth.
  
  
  
  As a netbook goes it's pretty sweet other than problems with sleep and a pathetic 3-cell battery that lasts about an hour. As a laptop-replacement it's been a nightmare.
  
  I spend hours every night working from the couch in front of the TV and I figured a netbook with decent resolution would work nicely. Boy was I wrong.
  
  For occasional use in emergency situations, or for having a laptop handy while travelling without taking up much space: perfect.
  
  Sitting on the couch for 5 hours peering at an 8.9", 1280x768 screen (that's something above 160dpi resolution, folks) leaves me with a headache, a sore back, a sore neck, and my wife telling me that I'll end up permanently crippled.
  
  I still like the HP2133 as a *netbook*, but I've come to the conclusion that netbooks are not just small laptops, they're something entirely different and are for a different purpose. So last night I fished out an old Dell Inspiron (an 8200, I think) that had been put on the "too old to bother using" junk pile at IVT and loaded up Ubuntu on it. The battery is stuffed, the hinges flop around, it has no WiFi or Bluetooth, and it sounds like a jet engine but ahhh, the bliss of a 15" screen!

• Practical Arduino: done

  2009 Oct 19

  Originally posted on Practical Arduino
  
  Or at least it's done as far as Hugh and I can influence it, anyway. It's all in Apress' hands now: don't let us down, please!
  
  I don't think I'm emotionally quite ready to do a de-brief post about the experience yet but I can give you a couple of stats about it.
  
  

  • Words: 143,048
    
  • Projects considered: 92
    
  • Projects shortlisted: 45
    
  • Projects commenced: 22
    
  • Projects included: 14
    
  • Total chapters: 16
    
  • Hours: far enough beyond 1,000 that it's scary
    
  • Life lost: 7.5 months
    
  • Prototyping shields used: 47
    
  • Arduinos purchased: 25
    
  • Trips to Jaycar: dunno, but I have a reserved parking space

  
  And we now have a shiny looking cover.
  
  
  
  Can't wait to see the real thing!

• Car engine datalogger project update

  2009 Sep 27

  Originally posted on Practical Arduino
  
  The final project of the book is turning out to be epic. It's taken me far longer than I expected, and I've hit quite a few snags along the way. I've also had to make quite a few compromises because if I implemented everything I wanted it would take up half the book.
  
  The big problem initially was communications with OBD-II, which was a piece of cake for my previous car datalogger (running on Linux) but turned out to be more tricky on an Arduino. Eventually it got to the point where I just cried and twitched a little bit whenever I thought about working on it, so to save my sanity I ditched my original codebase and switched to working on OBDuino instead.
  
  OBDuino is an offshoot of the MPGuino project, which is primarily intended to be a tool for helping people drive more economically by providing real-time engine performance and fuel consumption information. It's developed collaboratively on the EcoModder website and it's a perfect example of what Arduino is really good at: providing a cheap, simple, flexible platform to allow people to develop something to suit their own requirements. There is now dedicated MPGuino hardware that has grown beyond its Arduino origins, but that's a good thing. It shows Arduino did its job.
  
  Anyway, the point is that in the end it's been easier to take the functional code I had for GPS, flash memory storage, and a serial console, and graft those features onto the existing OBDuino codebase rather than graft OBD support into my codebase. So now I have an OBDuino variant that requires a Mega to run (unlike the original, which will run on a Duemilanove) but adds GPS and datalogging. The datalogging feature is really cool, because it logs GPS plus OBD-II data which can then be correlated and converted to other formats. This afternoon I went for a little drive and when I came back I wrote a script to parse the CSV file stored by OBDuino and generate a KML file to pass into Google Earth, with the result that I can now generate things like this:
  
  
  
  (Click the image to see the whole thing full size)
  
  The track is generated from the lat and lon stored from GPS, and the height indicates the speed of the car. By switching the columns selected by the script I can plot position against RPM, load, temperature, or any other value logged from the OBD-II data.
  
  The prototype hardware is still a total mess and the code is only half done, but as long as I don't sleep for about the next 5 days the project should just sneak in within the publishing deadline.