Because of the interest in hardware hacking that I've been able to act as catalyst for, there's been a need to branch out of the NCLUG mailing lists and create our own community (which is still closely connected with the LUG here). So I've created a mailing list for the FoCo Hardware Hackers. Go sign up, and post your projects, etc.

The slides from my talk tonight at NCLUG are posted here for anyone who'd like to see them. I'll be posting the video soon.

In preparation for my talk at NCLUG tomorrow, I've been fiddling around with OpenWRT on a few of my WRT54G devices. One of the things I've most appreciated about many of the embedded linux devices is their attention to detail in getting every little device to work on it. I usually don't spend the time mucking with my desktops to that degree. The cool thing about OpenWRT is that even the front LEDs can be controlled through the /proc filesystem. Since I found myself writing lots of scripts that manipulate these LEDs, I wrote a generic script that I can run from the command line to manipulate the LEDsa as well.

#!/bin/sh

usage () {
  echo "ledset - A program to set led values"
  echo " Usage : ledset led_name value"      
}                                      

if [ $# -ne 2 ]; then
  usage              
  exit 
fi    

if [ -f /proc/diag/led/$1 ] ; then
  echo $2 > /proc/diag/led/$1     
else                         
  echo "No led found named " $1
fi

This is big news. Apparently, AMD is promised to publish specs for cards >=R500 which is great news. I've been a fan of ATI for a long time, and I've even become a bit of an expert when it comes to the fglrx driver. I don't have any problem getting hardware acceleration to work on any of my boxes, but I've had to fight with it on SuSe and RedHat.

While I suspect that Dell had something to do with this, with their fancy shmancy Ubuntu Linux line of desktop computers, this is great news. If I thought for one second that the radeon driver would compare with fglrx driver (which it honestly doesn't), then I would have taken the free driver over the proprietary one. However, I'm not gonna cut off my nose despite my face in the name of "Free as in freedom" I'm a GPL kinda guy, but there's a limit to my fanaticism.

I am excited about this. However, a point was brought up on an IRC channel I frequent that while the GPU specs may be published, there are other decoders on the card for HDMI, DVI, and other encryption and DRM enforcements that most likely will not be published. Why? ATI is probably under a pretty strict NDA from their vendors. Although I'm not super familiar with HDCP, it also has engineering requirements which restrict the firmware on those cards, and can't be controlled via software, so no go for HDCP with any new drivers. Of course, I'm sure you'll be able to find something similar to the non-free repositories that we all go to for libdvdcss2 (which is illegal in the U.S. - come and get me...)

This is great news for the linux community though.

I've been looking into various microcontrollers as a hobby, and am now going to just sit down and do an albeit informal workshop at Bazcamp on microcontrollers. I've settled with the ATMega128 for several reason. First, I started reading the Beginning Embedded Electronics tutorials from SparkFun as a starting point, and that tutorial used ATMega8's which apparently aren't available anymore, so the kit they sell now has a ATMega128, which is essentially the same. I picked up a few kits and some extra micros.

About halfway through building the first prototype programmer on my breadboard, I started realizing a pattern on Make. There were quite a lot of projects using the Arduino kit. So I bought a few (from Sparkfun...they're one of three resellers in the U.S.). The nice thing about Sparkfun is that they are in Boulder, so their Fedex Ground shipping takes the same time as the overnight shipping.

So the Arduino came, and I started playing with it. It's also got an ATMega 128 on it, but it's got some extra stuff. It's great for prototyping, and it's quite fun. One thing to keep in mind is that the Arduino can be built for $10-$15 dollars with parts from your local Radio Shack (I'll post schematics for it). The basic kits I bought from Sparkfun use parallel as the system interface, and so the USB on the Arduino is nice. I also like the headers that the Arduino board pins out, so you don't have to count pins out to figure out what is where.

I can see the Arduino serving two purposes for me. The first is educational purposes. My Basic STAMP was my intro to micros in general, so I didn't really need that. However, I can definitely see it replacing the STAMP as every tech's "first" in the future. The second is for quick prototyping for implementation on a more static protoboard or PCB later on. Other than that, it's just a toy...but a fun one!