Rhino 4200

Der Ersteindruck ist gut: Ein großes Display und die QWERTZ-Tastatur machen die Eingabe sehr komfortabel. Beim Einlegen des mitgelieferten 12mm Vinyl Bandes fragt mich das Gerät automatisch nach der Bandbreite und nach Auswahl der 12mm kann es losgehen. Ich versuche mich an einem “HALLO” zusammen mit einem Code 39 Barcode. Der erste Ausdruck überzeugt mich aber nicht wirklich. Ein weißer Strich zieht sich durch die Mitte und mit dem Finger kann man den Aufdruck etwas verwischen. Da es draußen relativ kalt war gebe ich dem Drucker ein paar Minuten Aufwärmzeit und probiere es erneut mit einem “TWAM.INFO”. Diesmal sieht es deutlich besser aus, wenn auch noch nicht zu 100% perfekt. Als letzter Test mit dem Vinyl Band probiere ich eines der technischen Symbole aus, die meines Erachtens sehr praktisch für die Dokumentation von Kabeln sind. Das “Vorsicht Hochspannung”-Symbol lässt sich wunderbar erkennen, lediglich die Auflösung könnte etwas weniger verpixelt sein, aber vermutlich gibt das Druckwerk nicht mehr her.

Barcode und Symbol Test

Schrumpfschlauch

Schrumpfschlauch

Als Alternative zum Schrumpfschlauch kann man Kabel auch mit der “Wire/Cable” oder “Flag” Funktion beschriften. Das Gerät fragt bei der “Wire/Cable” Funktion nach dem Kabeldurchmesser und man kann einstellen, in welche Richtung man beschriften möchte. Je nach Textlänge und Bandbreite macht die eine oder andere Richtung mehr Sinn. Ich habe mit einem 19mm Vinyl beide Richtungen ausprobiert. Bei Längsrichtung wird der Text schön groß und man ist in der Länge ziemlich unbeschränkt, allerdings reicht das 19mm Band schon bei meinem 5.8mm Kabel nicht ganz gerade. In der anderen Richtung ist der Text deutlich kleiner und man ist in der Textlänge auch beschränkt. Dafür wird das Kabel lang genug gedruckt, so das man es etwa eineinhalb mal drumwickeln kann. Die “Flag”-Funktion fragt nur nach einer Größe zwischen XS und XL und Fahnenlänge. Das Ergebnis hier ist relativ unspektakulär und hätte mit jedem anderen Beschriftungsgerät genauso ausgesehen.

Cable/Wire und Flag Funktion

Weiteres Highlight ist die “Module” und “Breaker” Funktion um zum Beispiel Patchpanels zu beschriften. Das werde ich allerdings erst bei Gelegenheit testen, wenn ich mein Patchpanel dann beschriften darf.

Für meine Sortierkästen habe ich auch noch ein Non-Adhesive Band mitbestellt. Leider funktioniert dieses auch nicht. Aus mir nicht ersichtlichen Gründen wird das Band nicht transportiert und der Drucker druckt somit auf der Stelle und kein Band kommt heraus.

Last but not least, muss der Akku auch mal aufgeladen werden. Hierbei gibt es bei mir ein dickes Minus für das Gerät. Steckt man das (im Angebot) mitgelieferte Netzteil ein und dem Lithium-Ionen-Akku zu laden fiept das Gerät sehr störend. Auch wenn dieses Fiepen beim normalen Arbeiten ohne Netzteil nicht auftritt, ist es doch sehr störend wenn es wieder aufgeladen werden muss. Hier sollte DYMO dringend nachbessern.

Fazit

Für den Preis hat der DYMO Rhino 4200 einiges zu bieten. Lediglich das Pfeifen beim Laden des Akkus und 2 nicht funktionierende Bänder (von insgesamt fünf Stück) trüben den Eindruck.

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.

In this post, I want to describe how I connected the FT232H using a UM232H development module to a LM75 temperature sensor and read out the temperature on D2XX drivers as the LibMPSSE-I2C is only available for Windows and Linux.

Connecting of the setup is rather easy: To use the UM232H in host-powered mode, we have to connect VIO and 3V3 and USB and 5V0. The LM75 is powered by the 3V3 line and needs also a connection to GND. The I²C clock line is on the LM75 on the SCL pin and on the UM232H on the AD0. The I²C data line is on the LM75 on the SDA pin and on the UM232 on the AD1 and AD2 pin (AD1 handles the output of the data and AD2 the input). Both, the I²C clock line and the I²C data line need a pull-up to 3V3. A value between 1kΩ and 10kΩ is fine for low frequencies (< 100 kHz). The address lines of the LM75 (A0,A1,A2) are all set to 3V3 to this example, resulting in an address of 0x9E for the LM75.

On the software side, we need to install the D2XX drivers. Download them and follow the instructions in the ReadMe file to install them. Download my C program lm75.c and compile it with

gcc -lftd2xx -o lm75 lm75.c

If everything worked, a simple

./lm75

should list all FTDI devices found:

Device 0 Serial Number - FTUBIQVH

Now we can adress the device by its serial number and query it with

./lm75 FTUBIQVH

and get the temperature of the LM75:

Temperature: 26.0 C

If the query fails, the problem is usually that the virtual comport driver (VCP) is already occupying the device. Try to unload the driver with

sudo kextunload /System/Library/Extensions/FTDIUSBSerialDriver.kext

The code itself should be rather self-explanatory if your familiar with I²C. If not, here’s a short overview: The first lines setup the FT232H in MPSSE mode. A list of all the MPSSE commands understood by the FT232H can be found here. The we send a I²C start condition followed by the address of the LM75 with the write bit set and the adress 0×00 (The temperature register, see LM75 datasheet for details). Next is a I²C restart condition followed by the address of the LM75 with the read bit set. Now we can read 2 bytes of data representing the temperature. To finalize the transaction we send an I²C stop condition.

This gets maybe a little clearer when we look at the transaction on the oscilloscope:

I²C transaction

The yellow curve is the SCL line and the green curve shows the SDA line. In the upper panel we see the whole transaction consisting of 4 parts: Addressing the LM75 the first time with the write bit set, sending the address 0×00, addressing the LM75 the second time with the read bit set and the 2 data bytes sent by the LM75. The lower panal is a zoom on the first block were the address the LM75 for the first time. We can see the I²C start condition where the SDA goes low while SCL is high and afterwards the clock changes nine times. The first eight cycles transmit the address of the LM75 which is 0x9E or 0b10011110. The last bit is the ACK by the slave.

[...], 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!

The 2nd generation Apple TV has only an optical TOSLINK audio output and a HDMI output, there is no way to get the analog audio signal directly. My first idea to compare the S/PDIF data streams was difficult. It was required to convert the data stream to electrical signals to be able to analyse them with my oscilloscope. As the fiber optic receiving modules TORX* from Toshiba are dependent from the power supply the signal wasn’t 100% identical. I also discarded my second idea to use simple S/PDIF-to-RCA connectors. There are either cheap and of questionable quality or rare and expensive and could also have an impact on the measurement. So I decided another way to go:

Screenshot of RAW S/PDIF data

I did all the measurements using a 10 minute 16 bit uncompressed AIFF file with a 50 Hz tone using a 48000 kHZ sample rate to have the same conditions for all measurements. The 50 Hz tone has a periodicity of 20 ms, which was the maximum time frame I was able to measure at one measurement. If I would have chosen larger time frames, the time resolution wouldn’t be enough to decode the S/PDIF signal without errors. As I would not be able to measure time delays of more than 20 ms with that method I did several test measurements with music audio data and the delay was always below 20 ms.

The following picture shows an example measurement after decoding the S/PDIF data stream. The red signal comes from the optical output of the iMac, the green signal from an Apple TV connected by WiFi and the blue signal from an Apple TV connected by Ethernet.

As we chose an exact 50 Hz sine tone it was easy to fit the time differences with gnuplot. We also fitted the time difference in reference to the iMac. In this example the green curve from the WiFi connected Apple TV has a delay of 0.42 ms and the blue curve from the Ethernet connected Apple TV has a delay of 1.39 ms.

We did a total of 30 measurements: 10 with both Apple TV connected to WLAN, 10 with one Apple TV connected to WLAN and the other one connected to LAN and 10 with both Apple TV connected to LAN. The following figure shows a summary of the time delays measured. After 10 measurements, when the connection was changed, both Apple TVs were restarted a reselected in iTunes as additional speakers. It’s strange to see, that the devices connected to Ethernet have longer delays than those connected to WiFi.

This cannot be seen that easily in music audio data as the next example shows. As both Apple TV devices output the data as a 48 kHZ S/PDIF stream whereas the iMac produces an 44.1 kHZ S/PDIF stream the signal is a little bit different, but in this example it’s easy to see, that Apple TV connected to Ethernet is about 0.1 ms before the iMac whereas the Apple TV connected to WiFi is about 0.3 ms behind.

In summary it can be said, that the latency between the different sources is less than 2 ms which is in my opinion a rather good value compared to how easy this thing is to install. Just plug it in and it just works, independent from the connection over Ethernet of WiFi.

Reiner SCT RFID basis

Im Rahmen des Konjunkturpakets II investiert der Bund bis zu 24 Mio. Euro in die kostenlose Ausgabe von sogenannten “IT-Sicherheitkits”. Diese enthalten eine RFID Kartenleser zur Nutzung des neuen Personalausweises am PC. Eine Möglichkeit an einen solchen kostenlosen USB Leser zu kommen war sich heute eine Computer-Bild für 3.70 € zu kaufen. Dieser lag heute ein Leser der Firma Reiner SCT bei. Da ich bisher schon sehr gute Erfahrungen mit herkömmlichen Chipkartenlesern dieser Firma gemacht habe, entschloss ich mich also schweren Herzens eine Computer-Bild zu kaufen.

Aus Interesse habe ich den Kartenleser dann zu Hause erstmal zerlegt. Wie erwartet findet sich dort natürlich eine relativ große Antenne zur Datenübertragung zum Ausweis (Außerdem muss der Ausweis auch über diese Antenne mit Strom versorgt werden).

Ansonsten ist kaum Technik im Innern zu finden, da dieser Leser weder ein Display noch eine Tastatur (zur PIN Eingabe) hat.

Oberseite der Platine im Kartenleser

Unterseite der Platine im Kartenleser

Testen kann man den Leser leider erst in ein paar Tagen, wenn es dann eine neue Version der AusweisApp gibt. Dank Sicherheitslücken in der ersten Version, muss man sich nämlich zur Zeit noch etwas gedulden.

spare parts

The problem is, that all iMac which haven’t been ordered with the built-in SDD miss the mounting option for the SDD and the cables. So you have to order them separately. Fortunately http://applecomponents.com has them in stock. You will need three parts:

• The power cable 922-9531 with connectors for logic board, LED backlight, hard disk and SDD which replaces the old power cable.
• The mounting kit 922-9485 for the SSD which will replace a small plastic part
• The SATA data cable 922-9538 which connects the SSD with the logic board

This will be a total of $57 plus shipping (I paid about 72 € in total with shipping to Germany plus 13 € taxes at the customs). Besides of that you will need four very flat screws to tighten the SSD to the mounting kit. As tools you should have

• a T10 Torx screwdriver
• a Phillips #2 screwdriver (to open the memory bay)
• two paperclips
• two suction cups
• a pair of tweezers
• something to clean the LCD

The whole installation isn’t very difficult if you act very careful and keep a log of every screws and cable where they came from. It is very useful if you get a friend of yours to help you, as the display and the logic board are very heavy. I had some help from Steve, who’s Job it was to take all the pictures you see in this guide (Thanks a lot for the help!) and help with the organisation of all the screws and boards and he was my 3rd and 4th hand whenever needed.

Before starting, open the memory bay of the iMac on the lower side:

memory bay

At first, you have to open the iMac and remove the display. It might be a good idea to lay down the iMac on a towel or something to avoid scratches in the aluminium:

suction cups at iMac display glass

Put the mac this way, so the top of the iMac will face towards you. Position the two suction cups in the upper left and right corner (You’ll get these in every do-it-yourself store. I paid about 7 € for each). The display is fixed with small magnets, so no screws. Pull up the suction cups upwards to lift the glass up to about 45 degrees. The pull the whole glass towards you to remove it entirely from the iMac. There are a few metal clips connecting the display with the lower part of the iMac. Store the display in a safe position, for example on the floor using your original iMac wrapping:

display glass in on iMac wrapping

To remove the display you have to remove 4 screws at each side of the LCD screen:

display screws at one side

To lift up the LCD we built a small tool using two paperclips:

tools made of paperclips to lift LCD

Now put the paperclips tools under the edges of the display and pull it a few centimeters upwards. Then put something between the display and case to fit it in the upper position:

Lifting the LCD

Before the LCD can be removed, there are four cables which have to be disconnect. The first one is connected to the LCD back-light board in the lower right corner:

LCD backlight sync cable

Be careful as this cable was stuck on the back of the iMac and so we could lift the LCD only for a few centimeters. We removed the cable from the bottom with a pair of tweezers and the lifted to LCD to about ten to fifteen centimeters. Then it was easy to unplug the cable.

The next cable is the data cable to the LCD. You have to squeeze the to display connector arms together and the pull to remove the cable:

LCD data cable

Now we need to remove the LCD temperature sensor next to the data cable:

LCD temperature connector

The last one is the LCD back-light cable connected to the LCD back-light board on the right side:

LCD backlight cable

After all cables connected to the LCD have been removed, we can remove it from the iMac and put it somewhere in a safe place. Now we have a look at everything inside the iMac:

displayless iMac

In the lower right we can see the LCD back-light next to the power supply. In the lower middle is the hard disk and the AirPort card located. On the left there is the optical drive and the whole upper part is the logic board. We will have to remove nearly everything as we need to insert the SSD mount below the heat sink between the hard disk and the optical drive.

We start by remove the hard disk. Unplug the 3 cables (power, SATA data and temperature sensor) and remember the position of the temperature sensor cable (You’ll need it later). Before lifting the hard disk we have to remove 2 screws:

hard disk

Now lift up the hard disk in the lower part and then pull it towards you to remove it. The next step is to remove the optical drive. After removing the 4 screws,

optical drive

remove the combined power/data cable from the drive and  the temperature sensor from the logic board.

optical drive

After removing the optical drive remove the screw from the fan next to it and unplug the cable from the fan. It is located beneath the ribbon cable to the RMT I/O connector:

fan

Now the continue on the lower right side by removing the power supply. There are four screws and two connectors which need to be disconnected:

power supply

The LCD backlight next to the power supply has also four screws, but only one cable:

LCD backlight

Now remove the two plastic parts located between the power supply, the LCD back-light and the heat sink (Sorry, I didn’t take a separate picture of them). Then it’s time to remove the AirPort card. Unplug the two antenna connectors by pulling the upwards (should be very easy) and disconnect the cable to the AirPort on the logic board. You have to remove the sticky tape and the pull the connector upwards. Then remove the two screws fixing the AirPort and remove it:

AirPort card

Under the black apple logo on the front of the iMac there is an infrared receiver hiding. After unplugging the connector on the logic board, pull to remove the infrared receiver board.

IR connector

The last step is to remove the logic board. There are eight screws to remove:

logic board screws

Now unplug all left over cables to the logic board. The RMT I/O connector in the upper left corner:

RMT I/O

The SD card reader below the RMT I/O connector:

SD card reader

The microphone connector between the RMT I/O and the SD card reader connector:

microphone connector

And the two speaker connectors right of the microphone connector. Notice that right speaker connector has five pins where as the left speaker connector has only four pins. You won’t be able to mix them later :

speaker connectors

In the upper right corner you will find the connector for the power button:

power button connector

And two centimeters right of it the CPU fan connector:

CPU fan connector

In the lower end of the logic board are the skin temperature sensor:

skin temperature sensor

And a bit left of it are several sensors. You need to disconnect the hard disk fan, camera and Bluetooth connector. The hard disk temperature sensors doesn’t have to be disconnected as we already removed the other end of the cable from the hard disk.

hard disk fan, camera and bluetooth connector

The last remaining connector should be the AMB temperature sensor:

hard disk fan, camera and bluetooth connector

Now you should be able to remove the logic board by lifting it a little bit at the lower side and then pulling it towards you. Be care as there are some cables on the lower side of the board (power cable, HDD data cable). Now your iMac (if you still want to call it iMac ) should look like:

empty imac

In the next step we remove the plastic part where the SSD mount will fit in:

old mount without SSD

You have to remove one screws and to remove a little bit of the sticky tape from the cables which are routed over the plastic. The pull the plastic upwards and remove it. The plastic is glue on the bottom of the iMac so you will have to pull a little more intense.

Now you will need to get four very flat screws to mount the SSD into the new plastic mount:

SSD mount

Test if the screws are flat enough so that new mount sits perfectly. Now install the mount in the position of the old mount and route the thin cable below the mount. Tighten it with the screw from the old mount. Before reinstalling the logic board we have to swap the power cable and to install the new SSD SATA data cable:

logic board power cable

SSD cables

The straight connector of the SATA data cable must be inserted in the logic board. Now we can reassemble everything:

1. Insert the logic board and check that all cable you removed are not hidden somewhere under the board.
2. Plug in the SSD data connector into the SSD and plug in the power connector into the SSD. There are two SATA power connectors on the power cable. The middle one with four pins has to be used for the HDD drive and the other one with only two pins for the SSD.
3. Tighten the logic board with the eight screws you removed and route the power and SATA cables correctly.
4. Connect all the connectors to the logic board:
   1. RMT I/O
   2. SD card reader
   3. microphone
   4. left/right speaker
   5. power button
   6. CPU fan
   7. skin fan
   8. camera
   9. Bluetooth
   10. AMB temperature sensors
5. Reinsert the infrared receiver board the connect it to the logic board
6. Put back the two plastic parts from the power supply and LCD back-light
7. Connect the power cable to the LCD back-light, glue it to the bottom of the case and tighten the LCD back-light
8. Connect the power cable and the other cable to the power supply and tighten it
9. Install AirPort card and check that the power cable is correctly routed beneath it. Plug in the two antennas.
10. Insert the fan in the upper left corner and connect it.
11. Insert the optical drive and connect the data cable and the temperature sensor.
12. Connect the power cable, the SATA data cable and the temperature sensor to the hard disk. Tighten it.

Now everything should look the before as you removed the display. Now its time to mount the display. Put it on the upper end of the case with an angle of about 45 degrees and while lowering it connect the four connectors:

1. LCD back-light
2. LCD temperature sensor
3. LCD data cable
4. LCD back-light sync

Put the display entirely down and fix it with the eight screws. Before putting back the glass panel try to remove dust on the display panel and the back of glass. Last, but not least close the memory bay.

Now, pray, and press the power button. If you’ve everything correctly your iMac should boot and you should see the SSD drive in the disk utility:

disk utility

If you got mixed up with all the different screws, this may help you:

screws I

screws II

GeotagPhotos

Bei meinen heutigen Photospaziergang hat das ganze wunderbar funktioniert. Im Gegensatz zu meinem früherer GPS Tracker, dem i-gotU, scheinen die Routen auch deutlich gleichmäßiger zu sein, da die Software nur neue Punkte speichert wenn man eine einstellbare Mindestdistanz vom alten Punkt entfernt ist.

Ich kann die Software bisher also uneingeschränkt empfehlen, und da ich mein iPhone eh immer dabei habe, ist das sogar praktischer als ein extra GPS Tracker. Besser wirds eigentlich nur wenn die Kamera dann mal das GPS selber integriert hat.

The main advantage of HDR pictures, that a greater dynamic range of luminances can be represented. For example I took this picture of Entringen:

Entringen - normal mode

Entringen - HDR mode

The normal mode picture is very dark in the lower region of the picture as the sky has some bright spots. The HDR mode picture doesn’t show this problem. The problem of taking three pictures one after another is that non-static scenes can change between the pictures. As an example I took a picture of a flag waving in the wind:

Flag - normal mode

Flag - HDR mode

The normal mode picture is fine, but the HDR mode picture shows the contours of the flag of the over and under exposed pictures.

As the iPhone saves the HDR and normal mode pictures at the same time, it is a nice to have feature.

After some googling I found Ukulele, a nice editor for creating custom keyboard layouts for OS X. So I created my own US International keyboard. I use the “USA International (ALtGr dead keys)” layout from GNOME as my draft, because I’m used to it. It has a very few differences to the US International layout described on Wikipedia.  Here’s a screenshot of it:

US International (AltGr dead keys) keyboard layout from GNOME

If you want to try, it is very easy to install:

• Download U.S. International wo dead keys.keylayout to /Library/Keyboard Layouts on your Mac
• Select “U.S. International w/o dead keys” in the Language & Text section of the System Preferences

German keyboard layout © Wikimedia Commons

This is very handy for writing German text but if you program in programming languages like C, C++, Perl, PHP, … where brackets like [] and {} and slash/backslash are frequently used it’s a pain to use it. So I decided to change to the US keyboard layout, which I thought is the best choice as it is very popular. The problem was, that typing umlaut characters is very circumstantial as there is no standard method.

Most Linux users tend to assign combinations like Alt + A for typing Ä using xmodmap, but I wanted to use a standard way which would work on all operating systems and wouldn’t be a solution I’m the only person using it. After some googling I found the US international keyboard layout which puts nearly all commonly used characters with diacritical marks on a third level of the keyboard which can be accessed by the Alt Gr key (usually the right Alt key).

US-International keyboard layout © Wikimedia Commons

At first it was unfamiliar as ä,ö and ü are not on the third level of a,o and u but q,p and y. But after a few days working of it this wasn’t a problem anymore.

In the meantime I replaced all my keyboards to keyboard with US (international) layout and I’m not regretting it at any point. I even ordered a MacBook with a US (international) layout. The only problem is when a I have to fix some computers from time to time from family & friends who use still a German keyboard layout

So which keyboard layout are you using and why?

tethering info

The iPhone OS 3.0 software update includes lots of new features, one called “Internet tethering”. It mean that you can use your iPhone as a modem to connect to the internet via GPRS or UMTS. My mobile provider O2 has a Internet flat rate for 10 € a month with UMTS speed for the first 200 MB and after this it is throttled to GPRS speed. So I asked in the local shop if it’s legal to use it with my laptop and they told me that it is. So I searched for some information how to set this up, and it’s very easy.

You only need to setup the correct information on the iPhone how to connect to the Internet. There’s .mobileconfig generator on iphone-notes.de: Just select your carrier and the information will be send to your email address. Open this mail on your iPhone and confirm to install the settings. Now you can enable Internet tethering in your settings. To use it, just plug in the USB cable (it’s also possible to use tethering via Bluetooth) and Windows Vista will automatically install drivers and do the rest for you.

tethering info on home screen

If everything is set up, your iPhone will show a blue bar on the home and info screen informing you that it supplies Internet tethering.

It ran a quick flash speed test and it got about 156 kbps download and 23 kbps upload speed but here at home I have only GPRS connection. So this is not the ultimate replacement for an cable or DSL connection, but a cheap fallback and a nice-to-have feature while being on the road.

tethering connection in Windows Vista

OCZSSDMPES-16G top side

I few days ago I found the OCZ miniPCI-Express SSD (SATA) by chance. On the website it claims to be an SSD with

• up to 110 MB/s read and up 51 MB/s write speed
• PCIe interface
• 16 GB or 32 GB size

So this is much faster than my 40 MB/s 8GB CF Card I’m currently using for my server and it’s much cheaper. Amazon sells the 16 GB version for 57.50 EUR.

So I ordered one, but I got disappointed:

size comparison with wifi card

The first problem was, that the card was longer than the standard miniPCI-Express Card (I only new about 2 different miniPCI-Express sizes: the standard size of 30x56mm and a half size of 30×31.9 mm) and so it doesn’t fit in my adapter card to use it in a normal PCI-Express slot.

So I had to remove that slot bracket and use a wire to fix the SSD to the adapter as the standard mounting holes couldn’t be used. I installed the card in the PCI-Express slot and connected the USB pins of the adapter to the USB port (miniPCI-Express slots provide additional USB and SMBus headers). It booted my PCI but neither BIOS nor operating systems (Linux 2.6, Windows Vista) did find any new PCI devices.

SSD in miniPCI-Express to PCI-Express adapter

So I googled a little bit, and found that Asus EEE PC uses SSD cards like this in some models and that other vendors than OCZ offers replacement modules for them. I even found a pin assignment for the internal SATA/IDE port of those models using an miniPCI-Express connector (but not using miniPCI-Express). I checked my SSD card and found that exactly the same pins are used here. So I disassembled an old hard disk to use it’s SATA connectors and soldered the pins of the connector to the pins of the SSD card.

After installing the card in my PC and powering up, now there was a red power LED lightened up, so this looked promising, but neither BIOS nor operating systems did find any new SATA devices. So I thought back of the problems when connection RS232 devices when TX and RX on each devices have a different meaning and you have to cross connect them (like cross-over cables for Ethernet). So I crossed RX and TX lines, but this wasn’t a good idea: As soon as I powered on the PC there some smoke signals coming from the SSD chip which didn’t agree with my cabling.

So my conclusion: Don’t buy this SSD. It doesn’t have an miniPCI-Express interface and so it won’t work on normal miniPCI-Express slots. Maybe it will work in some netbooks providing a special slot for them.

This sounded interesting, so I googled for some benchmark test to measure differences. I found nbench, which measures performance by executing some typical algorithms and compares them to a Pentium 90 based system. So I installed it and run on the i586 CHOST system, then rebuild it completely to i486 CHOST and run it again. The differences are not that huge, but on some algorithms they’re measurable:

The first 13 bars are the different algorithms. The main difference is on the string sort, which is heavily memory dependent. That last 3 rows are a index based on the algorithms. Here is main difference on memory index, as the normalized version shows very clear (positive values mean that i486 is faster):

As there is no significant disadvantage of the i486 CHOST, this seems to be the choice.

If anybody has other (free) benchmarks to suggest, please let me know.

Installating is very easy: Download the patch (GPIO drivers for AMD CS5535/CS5536 (Kernel 2.6.30-rc6)), patch it and compile the kernel:

wget http://www.twam.info/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/gpio.patch -O /root/gpio.patch
cd /usr/src/linux
patch -p1 < /root/gpio.patch

Now run kernel configuration and select

Device Drivers  --->
   [*] GPIO Support  --->
   [*]   /sys/class/gpio/... (sysfs interface)
   <*>   AMD CS5535/CS5536 (Geode Companion Device)

Compile the kernel and reboot. If you go to /sys/class/gpio there should be a file name gpiochip0. Now we can enable some pins and test them. By

echo 6 > /sys/class/gpio/export

we tell the kernel, that we want to use pin 6 from userspace. Pin 6 is connected to led. Now we configure pin 6 as an output by

echo out > /sys/class/gpio/GPIO6/direction

Now we can toggle the values by

echo 1 > /sys/class/gpio/GPIO6/value
sleep 1
echo 0 > /sys/class/gpio/GPIO6/value

ALIX.3D3: modeswitch pins

Notice, that the LED is connected to 3.3V, so setting value to 0 it will be lit. The other LEDs are connected to pin 25 & pin 27. On pin 24 is a switch connected. We can read the value by enabling the pin, setting it as an input and reading the value:

echo 24 > /sys/class/gpio/export
echo in > /sys/class/gpio/GPIO24/direction
cat /sys/class/gpio/GPIO24/value

As the pin has an internal pull up, it will show 1 if the switch isn’t pressed or installed. If you press the switch or connect to the metal pins, it will result in 0.

Don’t forget to unexport all pins after when you’re done:

echo 6 > /sys/class/gpio/unexport
echo 24 > /sys/class/gpio/unexport

Any feedback on the driver is welcome!

• Storing files
• Communication over network (IPSEC, OpenVPN, WPA2, …)

I’ll focus on the first point in this article using LUKS (Linux Unified Key Setup).

To use LUKS and the crypto block, some kernel adjustments have to be made:

Device Drivers  --->
   [*] Multiple devices driver support (RAID and LVM)  --->
   <*>   Device mapper support
   <*>     Crypt target support

-*- Cryptographic API  --->
   -*- Cryptographic algorithm manager
   -*- CBC support
   {*} ECB support
   {*} AES cipher algorithms
   <*> AES cipher algorithms (i586)
   -*-   MD5 digest algorithm
   <*> SHA224 and SHA256 digest algorithm
   [*] Hardware crypto devices  --->
   <*>   Support for the Geode LX AES engine

If you want to test with and without crypto acceleration, I recommend compiling the last one as a module. After compiling and rebooting we have to install LUKE userspace tools:

emerge -v cryptsetup

That’s all. Now we’re ready to test. As we want to bandwidth limitation from a slow CF card or USB stick, we create a memory loopback device for testing purposes with a size of 128 MB:

mkdir /tmp/tmpfs
mount -t tmpfs none /tmp/tmpfs -o size=130m
dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/tmpfs/test.img count=131072 bs=1024
losetup /dev/loop1 /tmp/tmpfs/test.img

The tmpfs ramdisk is with intent 130MB large, as the maximum default value is 50% of RAM and with that 128 MB wouldn’t fit in.

At first, we want to measure software AES performance. For this, we have to assure, that the driver for the crypto block is not loaded. You can get a list of all loaded modules with

lsmod

If there’s geode_aes listed, remove it by

rmmod geode_aes

Now we can create a LUKS device by

cryptsetup -y --cipher aes --key-size 128 luksFormat /dev/loop1

Mind the key size of 128 bit as the Geode crypto block is only capable of 128 bit keys. You have to confirm this command with a uppercase YES and entering the passphrase twice:

Are you sure? (Type uppercase yes): YES
Enter LUKS passphrase:
Verify passphrase:
Command successful.

Now we can open the container. Run

cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/loop1 test

and enter the previous set passphrase:

Enter LUKS passphrase:
key slot 0 unlocked.
Command successful.

The container is now under /dev/mapper/test and we can do some write test by running dd:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/mapper/test bs=16384

After a few seconds, dd will terminate, complaining no space left:

dd: writing `/dev/mapper/test': No space left on device
8160+0 records in
8159+0 records out
133689344 bytes (134 MB) copied, 18.574 s, 7.2 MB/s

That’s OK. We can read here there 7.2 MB/s throughput with crypto block. After closing the container with

cryptsetup luksClose test

we can load the crypto block driver by

modprobe geode_aes

and can run the same commands as above. We’ll get a

dd: writing `/dev/mapper/test': No space left on device
8160+0 records in
8159+0 records out
133689344 bytes (134 MB) copied, 4.88397 s, 27.4 MB/s

noticing that we’ve got a 27.4 MB/s throughput now! This also works with ESSIV as well. It’s a bit slower, but more secure. You can to alter the luksFormat to use it:

cryptsetup -y --cipher aes-cbc-essiv:sha256 --key-size 128 luksFormat /dev/loop1

I measured 7.0 MB/s without and 24.0 MB/s with crypto block. After all testing don’t forget to remove the loopback device and umount the ramdisk:

losetup  -d /dev/loop1
umount /tmp/tmpfs/
rmdir /tmp/tmpfs

Now you can setup your real crypto disk. You might want to initialize your partition with random data before creating the luksContainter. dd is once again your friend:

dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/XXX bs=1M

Concerning the use of the crypto block for network encryption: By chance it noticed that if I use WPA2 with AES the geode_aes has a 2 in the used row of lsmod:

Module                  Size  Used by
lib80211_crypt_ccmp     4808  2
ipw2200               115904  0
libipw                 22792  1 ipw2200
geode_aes               5464  2
lib80211                4568  3 lib80211_crypt_ccmp,ipw2200,libipw

So it seems, like WPA2 is using this as well. If you know a method to confirm this, let me know.

M/B Temp:    +59 C  (low  =    +0 C, high =   +70 C)
CPU Temp:  +71.1 C  (low  =  +0.0 C, high = +70.0 C)   ALARM

Alix.3D3 with heat sink

I downloaded the datasheet of the AMD Geode LX800 CPU to check which temperatures are OK. On page 598 I found that my model (ALXD800EEXJ2VD) is fine for temperatures from 0 °C to 85 °C. Anyway I looked in my spare part box if I could find a suitable heat sink and fortunately I found a 40mm x 40mm x 9mm one. So I ordered some thermal adhesive and installed it.

To see the advantage of it, I did some measurements. I compiled cpuburn and let it ran with and without heat sink. I tried with and without the case. All measurements were made with a Intel 2915AGB WiFi card and a SanDisk 4 GB Extreme III Compact Flash card installed. Room temperature was between 23.8 °C and 24.5 °C.

After some start time it’s possible to see that temperature differences between the with heat sink and without heat sink curves is about 4 °C. After running the board for about an hour with 100% CPU load with the case, temperature was about 66.6 °C. That’s about 4 °C less than the measured 71.1 °C in the screenshot above.

So installing the heat sink results in only about 4 °C temperature difference, but installation was very simple and cheap.

First, we have to remove 4 screws on the bottom of the case. You’ll need a T10 TORX screwdriver for them.

4 screws on the bottom

You we have to lift the cover. It has 11 points to snap in which have to carefully unsnap with a small screwdriver. It started in the middle of the front and unsnapped one from each side and so on.

Snap points on the cover

After unplugging the six antenna cables (Remember where each has been plugged into) you should be able to remove the board. On the bottom you should see 5 contacts in the upper left corner. It has the follow pin assignments:

I soldered a wire to pin 1,2,3 and 5 and run them in one of the holes in the bottom of the case.

RS232 pins

The TX/RX pins have 3.3V level signals. To connect them to a standard RS232 port they have to be ±12V. The conversion is very easy, as there are several standard ICs for this purpose. I used an MAX3233 chip. It’s datasheet shows a typical application on page 12:

MAX3233: Typical application

I connected pin4 to TX, pin 6 to RX, pin 9/10 to +3.3V and pin 5/18 to GND. On the PC side you have to use a standard D-SUB9 female connector. Connected pin 5 of the connector to GND, pin 2 of the connector to pin 7 of the chip and pin 3 of the connector to pin 8 of the chip. That’s all.

Now start your favorite terminal program, set it to 115200 8N1 and power on the Linksys. It should print something like

CFE version 1.0.37 for BCM947XX (32bit,SP,LE)
Build Date: Wed Jun 25 19:11:21 CST 2008 (ljh@team2-complier)
Copyright (C) 2000,2001,2002,2003 Broadcom Corporation.

Initializing Arena
Initializing PCI. [normal]
PCI bus 0 slot 0/0: vendor 0x14e4 product 0x0800 (flash memory, rev 0x02)
PCI bus 0 slot 1/0: vendor 0x14e4 product 0x471f (ethernet network, rev 0x02)
PCI bus 0 slot 2/0: vendor 0x14e4 product 0x471a (USB serial bus, interface 0x10, rev 0x02)
PCI bus 0 slot 2/1: vendor 0x14e4 product 0x471a (USB serial bus, interface 0x20, rev 0x02)
PCI bus 0 slot 3/0: vendor 0x14e4 product 0x471b (USB serial bus, rev 0x02)
PCI bus 0 slot 4/0: vendor 0x14e4 product 0x0804 (PCI bridge, rev 0x02)
PCI bus 0 slot 5/0: vendor 0x14e4 product 0x0816 (MIPS processor, rev 0x02)
PCI bus 0 slot 6/0: vendor 0x14e4 product 0x471d (IDE mass storage, rev 0x02)
PCI bus 0 slot 7/0: vendor 0x14e4 product 0x4718 (network/computing crypto, rev 0x02)
PCI bus 0 slot 8/0: vendor 0x14e4 product 0x080f (RAM memory, rev 0x02)
PCI bus 0 slot 9/0: vendor 0x14e4 product 0x471e (class 0xfe, subclass 0x00, rev 0x02)
Initializing Devices.

No DPN
This is a Parallel Flash
Boot partition size = 262144(0x40000)
Partition information:
boot    #00   00000000 -> 0003FFFF  (262144)
trx     #01   00040000 -> 0004001B  (28)
os      #02   0004001C -> 007F7FFF  (8093668)
nvram   #03   007F8000 -> 007FFFFF  (32768)
Partition information:
boot    #00   00000000 -> 0003FFFF  (262144)
trx     #01   00040000 -> 007F7FFF  (8093696)
nvram   #02   007F8000 -> 007FFFFF  (32768)
PCI bus 0 slot 1/0: pci_map_mem: attempt to map 64-bit region tag=0x800 @ addr=18010004
PCI bus 0 slot 1/0: pci_map_mem: addr=0x18010004 pa=0x18010000
ge0: BCM5750 Ethernet at 0x18010000
CPU type 0x2901A: 300MHz
Total memory: 65536 KBytes

Total memory used by CFE:  0x80700000 - 0x807A60E0 (680160)
Initialized Data:          0x8073A2E0 - 0x8073E570 (17040)
BSS Area:                  0x8073E570 - 0x807400E0 (7024)
Local Heap:                0x807400E0 - 0x807A40E0 (409600)
Stack Area:                0x807A40E0 - 0x807A60E0 (8192)
Text (code) segment:       0x80700000 - 0x8073A2E0 (238304)
Boot area (physical):      0x007A7000 - 0x007E7000
Relocation Factor:         I:00000000 - D:00000000

Boot version: v4.2
The boot is CFE

LEDs on ALIX.3D3

As most of the ALIX boards, the ALIX.3D3 has 3 general purpose LEDs. There is kernel support for them, but there are problems when the board has a Award BUIS as the ALIX.3D3. After reading the datasheet of the AMD CS5536 Geode companion about initialisation and use of the general purpose pins I got it finally running!

There are 2 problems with Award BIOS. On the one hand it contains no parseable string referring to the board, so the auto detection of the board in driver doesn’t work and the initialisation of at least 1 LEDs is wrong. The first problem is easy to solve, by forcing the kernel to load the driver. For the second problem I wrote a small kernel patch (see Update at the end of the post): leds-alix2 kernel patch for 2.6.29

So how to get them running? First of all we need to patch the Linux kernel and then active support. Download the patch to your box and run

wget http://www.twam.info/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/led.patch -O /root/leds-alix2.patch
cd /usr/src/linux
patch -p1 < /root/leds-alix2.patch

Now run kernel configuration and select

Device Drivers  --->
   [*] LED Support  --->
      <*>   LED Class Support
            *** LED drivers ***
      <*>   LED Support for ALIX.2 and ALIX.3 series
            *** LED Triggers ***
      [*]   LED Trigger support
      <*>     LED Timer Trigger
      <*>     LED Heartbeat Trigger
      <*>     LED Default ON Trigger

compile the kernel and adjust the kernel boot line by adding leds-alix2.force=1 to force the kernel to load the driver. If you use GRUB append it to the kernel line in /boot/grub.menu.lst:

kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/sda2 lxfb.mode_option=1280x1024@60 leds-alix2.force=1

After rebooting, dmesg should show something like

[    2.819802] leds_alix2: forced to skip BIOS test, assume system has ALIX.2 style LEDs
[    2.833003] Registered led device: alix:1
[    2.845860] Registered led device: alix:2
[    2.858804] Registered led device: alix:3

and you should be able to able to switch on/off the LEDs for example by

echo 1 > /sys/class/leds/alix\:3/brightness
sleep 5
echo 0 > /sys/class/leds/alix\:3/brightness

LED 3 should lit up for 5 seconds. If it’s working it’s time to test some triggers. Try

echo heartbeat > /sys/class/leds/alix\:2/trigger

LED 2 should blink like:   pulse – short pause – pulse – long pause – pulse – short pause – …

Another trigger is timer:

echo timer  > /sys/class/leds/alix\:1/trigger
echo 1000 > /sys/class/leds/alix\:1/delay_on
echo 100 > /sys/class/leds/alix\:1/delay_on

should activate the LED for 1000ms and then switch it off for 100ms and start again. I enabled this 2 triggers and made a simple demo video:

Update: In kernel 2.6.31 the patch isn’t required anymore, as it was accepted in the mainline.

J8: SMBus

The manual of the ALIX.3D3 board mentions a lot of pin descriptions of all pin headers on the board. J8 interfaces the SMBus of the AMD CS5536 Geode companion (which is compatible to I²C if bus speed is below 100kHz, see Maxim’s Appnote for detailed comparison). So why not add additional I²C sensors. As an example I connected an LM75 temperature sensor.

First of all we need to add some pin headers to J8 found on board next to the USB port. The pin assignment can be found on page 18 of the manual:

We have to connect these four lines with the power (pin 8), SDA (pin 1), SCL (pin 2) and ground (pin 4) of the LM75 chip. A0, A1 and A2 have to be connected either to GND or power. The level on these pins configure the slave address of the device. I connected all of them with GND. The typical application example found in the datasheet advises an 100 nF capacitor between pin 4 and pin 8 close to the chip:

If soldered the LM75 (a smd chip) to an adapter and connected everything on a bread board:

If everything is connected it’s time to add software support. I assume you already installed the onboard temperature sensors descriped in my previous article. So, only support for the LM75 is need in the kernel:

Device Drivers  --->
   <*> Hardware Monitoring support  --->
      <*>   National Semiconductor LM75 and compatibles

After compiling and rebooting you can run sensors again. It should show up the new device:

lm75-i2c-0-48
Adapter: CS5536 ACB0
temp:      +30.0 C  (high = +80.0 C, hyst = +75.0 C)

So connecting additional sensors is very easy (when they’re support in the kernel).

Lightsaber Unleashed

“Ever wished you could swing your iPhone around like a lightsaber?”

This questions is the start of the description of Lightsaber Unleashed – a must-have application for every geek.

You enable/disable your lightsaber by clicking on the lightsaber, while your iPhone emits sound effects from your phone’s speaker. When you swing around your the sound effect’s too. It’s very funny and for free!

So, I’m looking for someone to duel!