Tuesday, 8 May 2012

Productive beach holiday.




The previous 2 weeks have been quite a productive holiday for me:

  • I wrote the start of a bazaar java library.
  • I learned the intro of The Call of Ktulu on the guitar (My brother happened to bring a guitar along and I had the tabs and I wanted to stay in practice, although nylon strings hardly breaks the skin).
  • I finally started reading The art of community (17% so far on my kindle)
  • I played a little of Warzone 2100 but got stuck on a transporter mission.
  • I finally got a new personal communication device (Samsung Galaxy SII)
  • Went to the mall almost every day.
  • I listened to 2 books, one driving down and one driving up. (Millionaire Upgrade - it was free ok, and Love & Respect)
  • Oh yeah I also went to the beach, built some sand castles and played with my son Dawid. It was his first time at the see and at 15 months he is the cutest boy in the world right now. He was a bit of a hand full on the beach, exploring far an wide, making friends, breaking my sandcastles... 
  • We also went to Croc-world and uShaka Marine World.



Thursday, 19 April 2012

Ubuntu 12.04 LTS release party in Pretoria

Yup it is time for a Ubuntu release party again!

It's been almost a year since we had one in Pretoria

and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Precise Pangolin is shaping up to be super stable, productive and enjoyable when it is released on 28 April. It may even give Windows8 and Metro a run for it's money :) .

We intend to have our launch party on Saturday 5th May 2012
from 10:00 to 13:30
at the Karoo Cattle and Land in the Irene Village Mall

Shop 176
Irene Village Mall
Corner Nellmapius and Pierre Van Ryneveld
Irene

Bring your laptop, memory stick(Flash drive) or external hard disk and get copies of the latest Ubuntu and join us for exited conversations over a nice brunch with other Ubuntu enthusiasts. (Also bring power multi adaptors, blank cds or dvds and some networking equipment if you can so we can all work on our laptops and share Ubuntu 12.04 data freely :)

See the event detail on loco.ubuntu.com .

See you there! \o/


Monday, 28 November 2011

My quest to program a ATTiny85 with my Arduinon UNO using ISP

While doing the Arduino advanced course at house4hack a while ago, the Ubuntu 11.10 (oneric) guys could not manage to program their ATTiny85 chips although the windows and Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid) guys managed fine. Today I spent a lot of time trying to get it to work and FINALLY did. Below is the main errors I saw and how to fix it.

Error1:
Binary sketch size: 688 bytes (of a 8192 byte maximum)

avrdude: stk500_getparm(): (a) protocol error, expect=0x14, resp=0x14

avrdude: stk500_getparm(): (a) protocol error, expect=0x14, resp=0x01
avrdude: stk500_initialize(): (a) protocol error, expect=0x14, resp=0x10
avrdude: initialization failed, rc=-1
         Double check connections and try again, or use -F to override
         this check.

avrdude: stk500_disable(): unknown response=0x12

Solution1:
http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1286589145
"I think I found one myself.
the problem is that the init request is sent 3 times but only one answer is expected, the following patch should fix":

bilibao@nbarizzi2:~/ELE/arduino-0022$ diff -u examples/ArduinoISP/ArduinoISP.pde /home/bilibao/sketchbook/fixed/fixed.pde
--- examples/ArduinoISP/ArduinoISP.pde  2010-12-24 23:12:25.000000000 +0100
+++ /home/bilibao/sketchbook/fixed/fixed.pde    2011-01-12 01:10:41.373212997 +0100
@@ -54,7 +54,7 @@
  pinMode(9, OUTPUT);
  pulse(9, 2);
}
-
+int initSent=0;
int error=0;
int pmode=0;
// address for reading and writing, set by 'U' command
@@ -399,7 +399,8 @@
  uint8_t ch = getch();
  switch (ch) {
  case '0': // signon
-    empty_reply();
+    if(! initSent) empty_reply();
+    initSent = 1;
    break;
  case '1':
    if (getch() == CRC_EOP) {

I applied the patch above manually and hurray I got a different error!

Error2:
Binary sketch size: 688 bytes (of a 8192 byte maximum)
avrdude: stk500_getsync(): not in sync: resp=0x15
avrdude: please define PAGEL and BS2 signals in the configuration file for part ATtiny85
avrdude: please define PAGEL and BS2 signals in the configuration file for part ATtiny85

avrdude: stk500_paged_write(): (a) protocol error, expect=0x14, resp=0x11
avrdude: stk500_cmd(): programmer is out of sync

Solution2:
Get the following version of the ArduinoISP and apply the patch from solution 1 again.
http://mega-isp.googlecode.com/files/ArduinoISP.04.zip
(found the solution here)

My tiny is now happily blinking away, at last.
I sommer reported this as a bug too, so it may stand a chance of getting fixed.