I came across a video of a text-to-speech laptop I made a few year ago on an old youtube account. Â I am trying to move it over to s1axter and post it here, which is proving to be a little more difficult than one would expect. Â Related to that video was this one about computer speech from the 50’s. Not only am I impressed with the signing, the relationship with HAL9000 and Siri is kinda cool. Take a look:
I just upgraded from the cluster that is Ubuntu to Mint and tried to install MPLABX and the C30 compiler from Microchip. Â The install went flawless on Ubuntu 11.10 however there was a problem running the .bin files on Mint, something about GTK themes or something. Â There is an easy fix add “–mode xwindow” after the bin files
I am getting back into some video editing and wanted to update my Ubuntu install to use the latest unrestricted FFmpeg build. Â After some searching I found this site about how to get the latest ffmpeg and h.264 codec. Â Worked like a charm on 11.04.
Also, check out the latest little video from MyBitBox: 4x4x4 LED Cube
A few days ago I mentioned on my sustainable fuel site TheSmartDrive that I was given a Tesla Roadster to drive for a few days. I was asked to see what ECU information is available, collect and parse the data from it….enter python
Like I said last post, I’m going to be posting random stuff here, so get used to it.
I’m a big music fan, I am always playing something whether in the car or on the PC. My main genre is rock and punk. Sub genres include post-hardcore, pop-punk, classic rock, 80s rock, hard rock, alternative rock, etc. Anything with a solid beat, good riff, guitar and good lyrics. I also like Techno, kinda an oddball but it’s high energy and goes well with coding. Right now I’m rocking some Senses Fail.
If anyone else out there likes music when they work but doesn’t want to be tethered to a desk via normal headphones, check out some bluetooth headphones. I got a pair of Motorokr S9-HDheadphones a while ago and I freakin love them. A full charge lasts for like 6-7 hours, so you can rock pretty much all day at work. I work with car systems, so I am always working on the PC, then the car, then back to the PC. These things don’t fall down, are light and sound pretty good, I know I am not at a live show, but they sound better than any other headphones I’ve had.
I use a version of this AZiO adapter with Windows, it works well and has a pretty good range
I’ve also used the Motorola s805 over the ear headphones, they last forever and the sound is great
I had a realization over the past few days. I realized there is a bunch of stuff I do that never makes it to full projects and write ups but would be pretty cool to post online for fellow electronics and software peoples. Then I wished I had a personal blog. Then I hit myself and asked why I’m not posting here more often. So I’ve made the decision that myBitBox is going to have more short posts on cool things rather than wait for the once every 6 month post. And I’m talking about everything, so don’t be surprised to see things on cars, software, analog hardware and even “music of the moment” when I am coding.
So I’m an embedded engineer and work with PIC processors on custom hardware. This hardware is designed to be in cars, connected to other PIC boards, not connected to a PC. Because of this, the communication protocol between the boards is packeted with commands and data payloads. This works well in the system, but is kinda a pain in the ass when you want to test things from a PC. Because of this, I wrote a little terminal program in Python to wrap serial commands in packets to talk to my systems. Yesterday I was doing some research on pyserial and came across this site with a few write ups on serial packets and framing in Python.
This guy has a lot of info on frame wrapping, byte stuffing and how to build a pretty robust serial receiver class, anyone who does serial with Python should check it out.
As for my python terminal program, I don’t have code I can post right now, but I do want to put something up for everyone at some point.
Holy crap! Has it really been a year? Damn, I’m not good at this whole blog thing. Eh, well can’t keep a crazy engineer down, over the past year I have been working as an embedded engineer working on battery systems for hybrid electric vehicles, really cool stuff. For some of my other projects take a look at my site on electric and vegetable oil powered vehicles: http://thesmartdrive.com
If you take a look at The Smart Drive you will see I have an electric car I built with friends and family back in 2001. A while ago the speedometer started to give out in it (hey, it is a 91) and I got the crazy idea of replacing the gauges in the dash with an LCD to show speed and cell voltage. This back burner project has started to get some traction and I wanted to share my endeavors with everyone else. Take a look at the full article!
After making the Standalone Voltage Regulator I decided to see what else could be made on one of the single IC boards from RadioShack. About a year ago I built a mini-guitar amp using an LM386 audio amplifier and a small 8 ohm speaker from an old computer, you can see the post on geeksinside.com. Since the LM386 only needs a few capacitors and a resistor I wanted to see if it can be crammed on to one of the boards. After a bit of study the answer is yes! This week I soldered the unit together and mounted it an acrylic box you can find at craft stores. I plan on doing a write up like the regulator, with part numbers and part layout, however for now I have a gallery up showing the finished product.
Here is a short list of the parts I used, for the ambitious:
Cool Stuff | s1axter | 
November 22, 2011 3:26 pm | 
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