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DYMO Rhino 4200 Beschriftungsgerät

Vor ein paar Tagen habe ich bei Reichelt elektronik das Beschriftungsgerät Rhino 4200 von DYMO entdeckt. Statt 89,95 € kostet es im Angebot in der Promotionszeit bis zum 30. März 2012 nur 79,95 € und es gibt noch Lithium-Ionen-Akku und Netzteil gratis dazu, so dass man keine sechs Mignon Batterien benötigt. Da ich in nächster Zeit einige Kabel verlegen und aufräumen möchte, war ich sehr angetan von der Möglichkeit Schrumpfschlauch zu bedrucken und auch spezielle Modi für Kabelfahnen und Schellen zu haben und habe gleich zugeschlagen.

Der Ersteindruck ist gut: Ein großes Display und die QWERTZ-Tastatur machen die Eingabe sehr komfortabel. continue reading »

I²C via USB on OS X using FT232H

Many sensor chips use the I²C bus, sometimes called TWI or SMBus, for communication. Most microcontrollers support I²C also natively and if not I can be implemented easily in software. Connecting I²C devices to a PC is much more difficult as soldering them onto the mainboard (where a SMBus can be found usually) is not a viable solution. Up to now I usually used a Atmel AVR microcontroller in teamwork with a FT232R (a standard USB↔RS232 converter).

The USB 2.0 successor of the FT232R, the FT232H, has a Multi-Protocol Synchronous Serial Engine (MPSSE) included which is designed to support serial interfaces such as I²C, SPI or JTAG at speeds up to 30 Mbps. This sounded to me as an interesting option to test I²C and SPI devices directly from my PC. continue reading »

Steve Jobs at Apple Store Munich

When I was at the Apple Store Munich yesterday, some people where “drawing” a picture of Steve Jobs out of Post Its on the glass front of the Apple Store. You can find some information on the event on Apfeltech, MacRumors and a Facebook Page. Today, I came back to make some pictures of the finished picture. So enjoy: continue reading »

Simultaneity in the AirPlay Universe

Most Apple products support the streaming of audio (and some even video) data through the network to
AirPlay enabled devices like Apple TV, AirPort Express or third vendor products. Apple advertises the AirPlay technology with:

[...], you can stream your tunes to more than one room simultaneously, [...]. AirPlay works over Wi-Fi or an Ethernet connection, or a combination of both.

But how simultan can these devices stream under real world conditions? I tried to address this issue with two 2nd generation Apple TVs and an iMac Streaming through Wi-Fi and Gigabit Ethernet. It proved to be a difficult task to measure this precisely! continue reading »

Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Park

As I am on the Extreme Solar Systems II conference in Grand Teton National Park, my colleague and I used the opportunity to visit the National Parks nearby.

We arrived in Salt Lake City on Sunday, September 4. We directly headed to the hotel to get some sleep, after we had a delay of about 1.5 hours as our plane had to be repaired in Atlanta.

Monday was Labor Day. After some shopping in the Tanger Outlets we visited the Antelope Island State Park which is the largest island in the Great Salt Lake. We saw a lot of Bison within flowers which looked like wild sun flowers.

On the next day, we went to Jackson Lake Lodge within Grand Teton National Park. We drove a nice scenic route along Bear Lake and saw a lot of famous towns including Paris, Montpellier and Geneva. After check-in at the hotel, we enjoyed a gorgeous sunset at Jackson Lake. continue reading »