Bret Kuhns

This is a little gem I found recently when I needed to communicate with my OpenLog board. A lot of tutorials want you to pull up HyperTerminal in Windows to talk to OpenLog over the USB->UART bridge. My biggest problem with this is that I’m primarily a Linux user, where HyperTerminal is unavailable. That’s all well and good, however, I’ll just boot into my Windows 7 install and do it, right? Wrong. Windows 7 no longer ships with HyperTerminal. I jumped back to my Ubuntu Linux install and started hunting for a HyperTerminal replacement. The best solution I ended up finding was a command-line application called minicom. This handy little app is a bit to get the hang of, but once you’re using it, it works like a charm. Here’s a quick rundown of connecting to a serial device over USB using Minicom. read more »

I recently hit a bug in the Sparkfun OpenLog v1.1 firmware that left the device useless. I found out the hard way that version 1.1 only supports up to 255 log files. Once it hits this limit the firmware doesn’t know what to do with itself and loops endlessly. This even prevents you from entering command mode where you could otherwise reset the log number. Nate Seidle at SparkFun quickly released an update, v1.2, to correct this problem I was having. But now I had to figure out how to flash the firmware on my OpenLog. It turns out the process is extremely easy in Ubuntu, but the GitHub documentation targets mostly Windows, so I decided to document the process for Ubuntu users from start to finish here. read more »

The last semester of my undergrad program in CSE is finally here! This semester I have a Senior Design course where students form their own groups and come up with an idea related to the curriculum and implement it. Now if only I had an idea of what to design…

I’ve been participating in autocross events for years and have always wished I could afford a data acquisition system like those you see used in Formula 1, Indy, Le Mans, and/or NASCAR. With a DAQ, I’d be able to see exactly what my car is doing at an event and use that information to help me drive the course faster on my next run. Hopefully.

That got me thinking. Surely I’m not the only amateur autocrosser wishing for an affordable data acquisition system made for the weekend warrior. In fact, LOTS of people across the nation, and across the globe would probably love such a system. I didn’t know of any that existed on a college student budget, so I figured why not make one? It just so happens this senior design semester is the perfect time to get started. But where to begin? read more »

SparkFun Electronics held their Free Day event on January 7th, 2010 at 11am EST. I had a few parts that I wanted to order for my senior design project this semester (more coming on that in another post) and was really excited to be able to get those parts for free during the event!

Or maybe not. I hopped into the #Sparkfun chatroom on irc.freenode.net the morning of Free Day to check out what people were chatting about. To my dismay, hours before the event started, there were already almost 700 people in the chatroom. According to Sparkfun’s limitations on the event, only 1,000 $100 orders would be awarded. The numbers were already daunting. I pulled up the Sparkfun website to find their recently updated web servers were already buckling under the load of people preparing their shopping carts. Uh oh. As time neared 11am, the chatroom hit the 1,400 user mark and my hopes of free electronics started to dwindle. read more »

Google recently announced their Google Chrome OS project that will see release some time in 2010. It certainly looks to be a promising idea, though I can’t help but think that the project’s success lies heavily on a very small window of implementation decisions. The slightest deviation from the “perfect” solution could make Chrome OS more a gimmick than anything. As the OS aims to be the most web-driven ever designed, it’s clear Google will use their slew of online applications to support the OS. In their current state however, the use of Google Apps as a true replacement for desktop applications is laughable. The biggest flaw in the implementation of all Google’s online applications is the necessity to sync the app before going offline. In their current state, if I were to go offline and maintain my current online experience, I would have to sync my Google reader feeds, my Gmail inbox, and my Google Docs files before going offline. How is Chrome OS going to be useful when it’s applications are worthless during unexpected spurts of offline use? read more »

Ars Technica reported on a recent lawsuit filed by Microsoft against the GPS maker, TomTom. What’s interesting is the potential ground this lawsuit may cover, including Microsoft’s FAT filesystem. FAT is well documented, runs on any version of Windows and almost universally on Linux and Apple operating systems. This universal OS support makes it an attractive candidate for mobile storage media such as digital camera memory cards, MP3 players, phones, GPS units, etc. Although Microsoft mostly disregarded FAT as a hard disk filesystem for it’s desktop/server operating systems in favor of it’s newer NTFS filesystem, FAT is still widely used today throughout the entire industry outside of Microsoft itself. A copyright lawsuit against TomTom for the use of FAT could create an enormous ripple in the computing industry that relies so heavily on it’s use. read more »

I updated my laptop from Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) to 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) about a month or two ago. I noticed that I haven’t really seen too many updates come through in a while. I finally took a look at my software sources list and noticed everything was still configured for Hardy. I changed everything to Intrepid, and the update floodgates opened!

I wonder why my repository list never updated during the dist-upgrade…