11h.net

When my roommate and I were living together, we enjoyed watching the new season of the Simpson’s… However, after we both moved to new places we missed one of the new episodes. This week we were going to be prepared to watch the Simpson’s. I took his satellite system to my new house because I thought that I had a good southern view. I do have a good southern view; just not a south eastern view.

Then I realized that my house was almost due east to west so I ran out to the front of the house with the satellite dish and held it with my hand. It was pointed into a bush. Then I went to check the receiver I noticed that the guide data loaded. This was odd. It’s not supposed to get the guide data unless it has a signal. I navigate to the system setup and view the signal… What’d you know; it’s 75% on my first try at aiming!

It helps that my room mate spent a _long_ time mounting the dish to a 4×4 and aiming it so that the 4×4 had to be aligned with each flat side facing due North, West, South, and East. All that I really had to do was eye ball if the post was perpendicular and level with the ground.

I then proceeded to figure out how I could mount this 4×4 with the dish attached. At this point I had opened the garage door just enough so that I could see the OSD of the receiver in the garage. Then I looked at the opening in the garage door and 4×4 in my hand… Since the weight of the dish was pulling away from the house, all I had to do was slip the top half of the 4×4 under the garage door, let friction and gravity do the rest of the work.

11h is embarking on a project to use a java based microcontroller (Tini) as a smart thermostat with a zone controlled HVAC system. Each floor vent will be controllable and each room will have it’s own temperature. 1-wire devices from Maxim-ic will be used to collect the temperature and motion sensors from each room and control the servo motors that are attached to the floor vents.

I’d like to throw together some ideas about the zone hvac system before writing a large IPS (Internal Product Specification) or EPS (External Product Specification).

I’ve been thinking about a system that could have a stored HVAC cycle for up to a week.

Since each DS2770 has 40 bytes of memory, each temperature sensor could store its own temperature setting. This way a configuration file or a server would not have to exist to know what the temperature is set to for each sensor; the 1-wire network could be polled to determine what the current temperature setting is for a particular temperature sensor.

User (asking)
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Tini (polling 1-wire network, responding results to User)
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|\_StoredTemp 1 (Living room)
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|\_StoredTemp 2 (Dining room)
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\_ StoredTemp 3 (guest bath)

After recently moving to Washington States’ captial, I began DSL service with Zhonka Internet Services. Setup couldn’t have been easier for a n00b, but leave it to two software engineers to complicate the installation. In short: RTFM and make sure the setup notes are sent to the correct address.

For my DSL installation, I opted to rent an Actiontec GT701-WG DSL modem with built in wireless B and G. Cool.

After setting up my little DSL AP I happily connected to the office from my laptop. And then I re-connected. And then, anything that used the network just froze.

As it turns out, the damn wireless adapater on my laptop would just fail while connected to the AP. No real errors. In fact the log file of the Intel 2200 BG would show that there were no connection errors. At this point you may blame the Intel Wireless 2200BG adapter but then you would be WRONG! If I use the same laptop with a D-Link 2100AP, everything works just fine!

For now, I’ve disabled the wireless AP on the modem and I am using the D-Link 2100AP instead.

The next step is to hack the DSL modems firmware becuase it runs Linux!
BusyBox on dslmodem login: XXXX
Password:

# cat /proc/mounts
/dev/mtdblock/0 / squashfs ro 0 0
none /dev devfs rw 0 0
proc /proc proc rw 0 0
ramfs /var ramfs rw 0 0