This is the first growing season in our new house. We have quite a bit of gardening space, so my wife and I will be attempting to fill that space with beautiful and edible plants.
In an attempt to keep this information handy for my own reference, I have decided to start a journal. I’ve made it public in the hopes that it someone might care to share some advice or learn from my inevitable mistakes.
The blog is called The Nu Leaf.
I’m working to revive the Seattle PHP users’ group. If you’re interested in PHP and live in the Seattle area, come to our next users’ group meeting at the new Seattle Northgate library on September 12th.
Details can be found on the SEAPHP wiki:
http://seaphp.net/
Add it to your calendar:
I worked at a company that made accessories for telecommunications equipment. Most of the telco equipment still uses deprecated RS-232 serial ports, and so all of their products do too.
At one point, I was tasked with making a device that could send an identical serial port data stream to several devices at once. Shortly thereafter, the Megapus was born.
This crazy device took 1 serial port data stream and a 12VAC power supply and split it out into twenty devices at once.
We considered calling it the Icosapus considering the 20 outputs, but I actually crated the device to be infinitely scalable simply by adding more I/O cards with a power supply every fifth one.
The PCBs (printed circuit boards) I used happened to be unpopulated parts for other products that repurposed nicely after shuffing a few components around. Hence the two circuit boards for each layer of four outputs.
In my previous post, I mentioned getting a new motherboard. I’ve just uploaded new photos with more details on the current status of the project.
The new motherboard is Mini-ITX with a 1GHz processor. For a power solution, I got a picoPSU-120 and a 6.6A brick converter to go with it. It’s a clean and elegant solution that keeps the wires in the case at a bare minimum and makes for much more free space. I’ll now have room to put two full size speakers in it.
Not mentioned in the previous post: Damn Small Linux is set up to connect to a network and start playing music on boot. Using Monkey web server and PHP, I created an interface that allows someone to pick any shoutcast station and control the media player, XMMS. The audio plays to some PC speakers I’ve connected until I get a small speaker amp and some decent speakers to install.
For the past few months, I’ve been working on a web radio boom box. I’ve hollowed out a perfectly good radio and made room for a tiny motherboard and power supply that are set up to run Damn Small Linux off of a USB flash drive. There is a wireless card inside, and the box is configured to sniff out wireless networks and automatically start streaming web radio on any friendly Wi-fi network.
I’ve come across several obstacles along the way, ranging from the actual hollowing out of the stereo to linux wireless headaches to my most recent discovery: the new, smaller motherboard I found for this project has very anemic audio output.
I fully expect to install a small audio amplifier to drive the speakers that go with the stereo, but sound quality is still very tinny even with the EQ fully tweaked out in XMMS (a Linux Winamp clone). I’ll have to do some more experimenting to see if this motherboard can be made viable. In the meantime, I’ll continue to work on my other projects. More about those later.
