Vacation is fun, but not when your systems decide to go on one too

Typical. I was on a 4 week vacation, the first two weeks in Greece and the last 2 weeks around Finland. I was semi on-line only, checking my mail, twitter and facebook from time to time, but kept myself away from anything work related or coding, including my various maemo projects. So I never checked my web sites...

My database virtual Xen machine had decided to go off-line, or to be more specific the virtual network from the database server to the rest had died for some odd reason. Other virtual machines in the same host and network where just fine. And the database server was also running.

Anyway, everything is up and running again now. Enjoy, maemo.tal.org, mapper.tal.org and talinux.tal.org.

More openstreetmapping of Limnos, Greece

It's only 4 weeks until our 2 weeks holiday on Limnos. I've made pretty good progress on mapping from the bing satellite images, the island is not empty anymore, but there is still plenty to do. The costline is still blocky in some places, not a big priority but goes with the beach mapping nicely.

I've started to draw forest (what little there are, not much), scrubs and farmlands also to get the island to look more "green", the default grey must be somekind of psychological way to get people to draw nature areas...

Some details:

• Wind power stations
• Myrina, still much to do on the ground. The satellite images aren't good enough to draw all streets as buildings shade too much.
• A very strict street layout, wonder what it is?
• Plaka
• Some building complex up the mountain area

But as you can see, there is still very much to do, plenty of tiny tracks and a lot of farmland to draw. And beaches as there are many of those all over Limnos.

New camera-ui in CSSU

There is a new, open, camera-ui in the latest CSSU. It looks like to the but has some impressive new feature also. Distance to focus point, configurable startup/shutdown of camera app, more geotagging options (gps/location), image effcets, triggering from touch screen, timer and quick access to White balance and ISO sensitivty settings.

Screenshots below:

New camera-ui main interface, notice the new focus distance information, timer, trigger, image effects and the two 'A's

New startup/shutdown options

Look just like the original

Now you can select how to geotag your images, with GPS position and/or textual location

Capture timer

And last, image effects.

Great work! And thanks to the whole CSSU team for their awesome work.

gdspeak, a D-Bus espeak service

I've been planning on doing this for a while now (a year or so, sigh), a simple and easy to use D-Bus service for speech output, using espeak.

What it does is queue text with a simple priority system, with just a few simple D-Bus calls. There are two interfaces, on fire-and-forget and one that can be used for tracking the output so calling applications know when it's speech has been output. It will also send signals for spoken words and such. Language and voice settings can be changed.
Currently LC_MESSAGES is used to set the default voice, but a proper control panel applet is planned.

It is still work-in-progress but works mostly. My current problem is that when using pulseaudio output espeak won't report any events. Testing version is available in extras-devel, but not recommended yet for any serious use.

•  Git repo here
•  Not uptodate documentation here

TODO:

•  Fix the event reporting
•  Make control panel applet

Arduino and GPS

I found a a cheap GPS module from a finnish electronics dealer, Partco, for only 10€. It's a bit old, from 2004 but whatever, it's cheap :) It's a Fastrax uPatch100 with a Sony chipset (CXA3355 and CXD2956). There are four different models, but the only one available is the -C9 with CMOS level serial output. Acctually that is perfect as the Arduino as you can plug it directly into the arduino (well, almost, TX can, RX needs a level conversion as the Arduino I/O pins are 5v).

I did it :)

The module outputs plain NMEA so it's easy to parse. You can also talk to it and set different parameters. Datasheets are available on the net, just google for uPatch100 and you should find them.

Anyway, I'm not very experienced with electronics but I've done my fair share of soldering, but mainly easy stuff like making my own RCA or RS-232 cables. Or easy "high" pitch breadboard.

The pitch of the device was a bit scary at first, but I was able to solder a ribbon cable just fine after some careful soldering.

I used a long flat cable and a IDC for easy attaching for any GPS project. I didn't have a female IDC connector so it cut one from an old motherboard serial port adapter and soldered that to a breadboard. And on the breadboard a pin strip for easy plugging to a solderless breadboard.

I made a very simple arduino sketch to read the serial TXD0 port from the module and output it to the serial port. I used the softserial library and first thought it was the reason for the problem I had. Only the first couple of NMEA messages came trough succesfully and then output stopped. The datasheet mentions for the RS-232 level module that "RXD0 line must be electrically connected in the uPatch100-Rx versions even if it is not used!"
My module was not the -Rx version but I connected RXD0 to ground and that fixed my problems. Clear NMEA messages startet coming!


Next is to make something fun with all this :)

Deciding on vacation destination and mapping the destination

Me and my gf finally decided where to go this summer, first the country and the final destination. We where to Parga, a nice little village in Greece, last summer and fell in love with greece. Friendly people, very good and cheap food, especially the sea food.

So, it was easy to decide on Greece for the country this year too. Then to pick the destination. After looking around in various (finnish) travel agencies we found Limnos (or Lemnos) (Λήμνος). Aurinkomatkat had a cheap 2 week package, but when we finally had decided, it had gone. But who cares about packages... so we just booked the flights EFHK-LGAV-LGLM-LGAV-EFHK from blue1 and now we are looking for somekind of hotel.

Anyway, I beeing an openstreetmapper (and semi-active geocacher) checked out the map of Limnos.. google maps sucks, bing sucks and openstreetmap sucked, but not anymore ! Thanks to the Bing satellite images available I've been tracing roads couple of hours per day now for almost month and it's starting to look like something now.

My target is to have every single road that I can see from the satellite images drawn before going, so I have about 3.5 months time to do it :)

Unfortunately there are only on geocache on the whole island.

Arduino and a 16x1 LCD (Displaytech 161A)

Got myself an Arduino last year, unfortunately I didn't have time to get into it that much yet, but I started playing with my LCD display today. You would imagine that the LiquidCrystal library would take care of the 16x1 display but no, it needs a bit on tweaking as you have to address it like a 8x2 display.
Below is my very simple serial monitor testing code. It will just take whatever comes in from the serial line and write it to the display and wrap to the beginning every 16 character.

/* Testing code for using a 16x1 LCD display with Arduino LiquidCrystal library.

   LCD used is a Displaytech 161A 16x1 display.

  See this page for an explanation how it works (161A is a "Type-1"):
  http://web.alfredstate.edu/weimandn/lcd/lcd_addressing/lcd_addressing_index.html
*/

#include 

LiquidCrystal lcd(12, 11, 5, 4, 3, 2);

int c=0;
int r=0;

void setup(){
  lcd.begin(8, 2);
  Serial.begin(9600);
  lcd.clear();
  lcd.cursor();
}

void loop()
{
  int i=0;
  if (Serial.available()) {
    while (Serial.available() > 0) {
      i=Serial.read();
      if (i==-1)
        break; 
      lcd.write(i);
      c++;
      if (c==8) {
       r=(r==1 ? 0 : 1);
       c=0;
       lcd.setCursor(c,r);
      }
      Serial.print(c);
      Serial.print("\t");
      Serial.print(r);
      Serial.println("
      ");
    }
  }
}