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I’m having some issues with my Neutrino,
The space bar is being very strange..

I’ve made this reddit post to seek help

I suspect it’s something to do with the stabilizers because they’re not really locked into the plate.

I’ll see how I go!

On my way to a friend’s birthday I noticed the new opal machine at my local train station was finally uncovered.
I took a quick look so I know what it’s good for, amongst useful things such as finally being able to add money with cash/coins, and contactless payment support, it also had an option for a”single use opal”.

This one got my attention pretty quickly, I was curious if the machine would print a regular paper ticket, if it would dispense a plastic opal card, or a hybrid.

I percussed a child ticket for $2.70 to see what it was like, and to my delight it’s a cheap paper NFC tag!

Branded opal card and everything, but the good thing is, it’s going to be discarded by people.
How is this good might you ask?

I love finding NFC tags discarded in public, there’s always ways to reuse them!

I did a scan of the tag and it output the following data:

http://pastebin.com/XaiFqQ5M

From this we can see it’s a Mifare Ultralite C tag.

I am curious to find out if there is any success in other countries in terms of breaking the ultralite tags, I do know they’re used in a few places with electronic ticketing systems.

I’ll do some more research on these and report back!

I have had this Cisco Tandberg PrecisionHD 1080 4X camera for quite some time now, but I never really had a go at making it work.

This morning I decided to give it a quick go and got it going right away!

I looked up some manuals online:

http://www.manualslib.com/manual/716206/Tandberg-Precisionhd-720p.html?page=22#manual

http://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/td/docs/telepresence/endpoint/camera/precisionhd/user_guide/precisionhd_1080p-720p_camera_user_guide.pdf

http://www.pmdtkt.upc.smm.lt/dokumentai/Medziaga/inzinerine/mm8/medziaga/TANDBERG_PrecisionHD_1080p.pdf

From these I was able to find the pinout of the ‘control’ port on the back of the camera.

There is a section in the last link that has the pinouts for things.

I then used some random pinouts of the DB-9 Serial port and RJ45 Jack, to figure out what should go where.

I had a console cable for SOMETHING laying around, so I used a multimeter to trace out where the pins went on the RJ-45 end from the DB-9 end. I labelled these out of an RJ-45 jack and then took my cable from the camera and hooked up the RX to TX, TX to RX and GND to GND.

It looked like a monster..

I cleaned it up a fair bit once I knew it was working, here’s an imgur album:

View post on imgur.com

I was able to connect to the camera over serial with some random non-freeware that I used a trial of, but it wasn’t that great. seemed to be a little jerky in its control.

 

Then I found a link to a zip file provided by Sony for their cameras also using the VISCA protocol.

Here’s where I found it:

(found name of zip: http://www.churchmedia.net/forums/video-and-film-cameras/42436-software-visca-rs-232c-controlled.html?langid=2)

http://j3soft.net/webcam/evi-d30.htm

I will attach a mirror in case it gets lost. (d30e.zip)

I just started it with default options and hey presto! The camera worked! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsV55G9IztM

The software looks like this:

PT and Z work, but the others not so much. Speed does nothing, and the aperture controls can turn it off (closed) but aren’t so great at opening it again! (it turns off the camera and closes the iris but does not re-open it when you turn the camera back on, and I can’t find how to open it manually…)

 

I think now I will clean the camera a bit cosmetically, and it will be good to go for the use I have 🙂 (live streaming camera through HDMI capture card)

73!

 

 

Update:

Found out what the USB is for, “Future use” 🙁

From this manual: http://video.global-one.by/files/precisionhd_1080p-720p_camera_user_guide.pdf

Yesterday was the first of many eleague.gg LAN parties.

It was great, will organised, lots of fun, a bunch of contests with plenty of swag and prizes to be had/won!

I got there a few minutes before opening, and quickly set up my GoPro to take a time lapse of the morning, I’m pretty happy with how it turned out too!
You can watch it here:

I also found out you can add copywrited music to YouTube videos now! It will just monetize your video and give the profits to the copyright holder.

This was the first LAN I have been to in a while, and possibly the first EVER with a decent, and stable internet connection.

The venue had a solid 1gbps symmetrical connection, and boy was it nice, I would really love something like that at home.

The 4 minute long, 4k time lapse uploaded in mere seconds, I was able to do a live stream to YouTube of playing some games with friends, all whole the entire event was being streamed to multiple streams, and every other atendee was using the net as well!

Now on to the multicopters.

A friend ofine from PAX AUS was there at the LAN, and I took my little Hubsan X4 Camera out the front of the venue to fly around a little.

My friend saw this and brought out his DJI Phantom 3 Advance to play around with.

All was good. We were each flying our own craft and it was swell, we decided to give each other’s a go.

I hadn’t properly flpwn a Phantom before so it was a new experience for both of us.

I figured that he was a trustworthy pilot considering what he owns.

This was the mistake..

He was very, very unprepared for how light the Hubsan was, and how powerful. Within seconds, he had flown it high into the sky! And into the wind..

I wasn’t paying attention because I was concentrating on the Phantom, but then my friend panice and shoved the Hubsan TX into my hands, and took his Phantom and said “I can’t control it”

I looked up, and saw the hubsan in a gust of wind, above the warehouse building, shooting down and towards the roof..

I stuck it in ‘advanced’ flight mode and tried with all my might to regain control of the craft, but alas I just did not have time, and could not see it.

Less than 5 seconds after being handed the Hubsan TX and it was gone.

I’m more disappointed that I lost all the video footage I had taken that day, and the brand new Micro SD card.

My friend has organised with security at the venue that they will help him try and get it back but until then he has lent the Phantom to me.

If they can’t get it back he is going to replace it for me (might upgrade to the FPV model…)

Until then though, I am going to learn to fly the Phantom, and get the best footage I can with the time I have!

You can expect to hear more about that soon.

Now all this multicopter stuff has come out of nowhere because the blog has been offline, but essentially I’ve recently gotten into quadcopters, and have a fair few toys.

I have a zmr250, a f550, (had hubsan x4) and some cheerson cx-10 quads.

I also picked up a TBS Discovery Pro that I’m in the process of restoring to flight condition. The poor craft had probably been stuck in a tree for two years..)

I’ll post more about that too.

That wraps it up for this post, leave a comment below if you have any questions.

Not being content with the painful to wear headset my friend received with their baofeng uv-5r radio, they asked me to make an adapter to use regular headphones with it.

I went one step further for them and included support for headphones with microphone, and PTT button.

This is the working prototype, have to tidy it up a little, and mount things nicely in a box.

It break out to two 3.5mm sockets, one for speakers and one for mic. From there I’m using a spare adapter I had that turns the two separate sockets into a single 4-pole socket!

This let’s you use 4-pole earphones with mic

The volume is crazy loud at the moment so I’ll have to add in a resistor. And nothing is soldered yet, just twisted in, Hehe. I’m in a train (y)

Anyway, I can’t test the mic yet, but the PTT button does work. Not sure where it would be most convenient yet

I’ll figure something out. For now enjoy these images :

SRC: http://r4f.su/transivers/baofeng_bf-888s/kenwood_ham_pinout.gif

Modified a pro mini to run at 1.3mah.
Will be using it to make a low power sensor for easyiot 😀 wish me luck!

Also, I FINALLY GOT THE NRF24L01 WORKING ON THE RASPBERRY PI

Now to make a sensor network with mysensors !

I’m just making this post to vent out my anger,

In my personal experience, the Raspberry Pi is THE SINGLE MOST UNRELIABLE DEVICE I HAVE EVER OWNED.

I have had two raspberry pis, neither of them show better results.

For me, every time I power on my Pi its a matter of praying to the gods that it turns on.

I have tried all range of SD cards, from $100 sandisk extreme cards to $2 chinese cards to the official one itself!

It seems that almost every second time I turn the damn thing on, I am met with the god damned faintly lit green LED that means theres no OS detected.

GOD DAMNIT THIS THINGS USELESS

I always shut down with ‘sudo shutdown -h now’

BUT THIS SAME THING HAPPENS STILL

IS IT TOO MUCH TO ASK FOR IT TO JUST WORK CONSISTENTLY ?!

WHY DOES IT CORRUPT? WHAT AM I DOING WRONG???

WHY DO PEOPLE STILL USE THIS POS!?

Welp, time to spend another few hours setting everything up from scratch again or trying to repair the filesystem.

 

For a while now I’ve wanted a coaster to take to parties that makes my vodka (alcohol of kings) glow fancy pretty colors!

Yesterday I finally got around to it while on Skype with someone.

Didn’t take any photos but its pretty darn self explanatory,
The Pro Mini drives the single 5050 RGB LED ( common annode )
That’s connected to +5v through a resistor (I forget the value haha)
And PWM pins 3, 5 and 6.

I searched instructables and found a random sketch (LINK) that fades through colours, uploaded it, then wired up a switch, and a lithium charging circuit, to a err… What I THINK is a LiPo battery. Searching its name brings up references to other LiPo batteries…
Charger *seems* to work on it and voltages look normal sooooo….

I’m not sure if the Pro Mini can run off 3.3v (I have some spare 3.3v regulators)
So the battery is currently connected to GND and RAW.
Seems to work okay 😀

I’ll seal around the switch later with hot glue in case of spills, and the rest of the circuit is raised on some foam.

Its all shoved inside the enclosure that some apple ear buds came in, I removed the plastic inside with great difficulty, and it all fits in quite well.