nuxx.net
Making, baking, and (un-)breaking things in Southeast Michigan.

!!!

December 23, 2007

Well, there goes my working MAME machine. Things were going well, with Windows 2000 having been installed so that I could use the win32 binary of a new version of MAME. I wanted to change the BIOS logo, so I first ran the BIOS updater from MSI to get the latest BIOS on there (the version I was going to add a new image to), and things just stopped.

The damned MSI bios updater has killed this board. The on-board diagnostic LEDs simply light as all red, which is (supposedly) indicative of a defective CPU. Bah.

Also, I’ve noticed that for the last few days the power at my house has been running at 59.9 MHz lately, not 60. I find that odd.

UPDATE: I just remembered that I had another one of these boards here, but a bad one. I just swapped BIOS chips and poof, things work again. Damned MSI.

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Dinner

December 22, 2007

For dinner tonight I think I made an upscale version of Tuna Helper.

It was:

~ 4 oz of goat cheese
~ 6 oz of half and half
~ Enough olive oil to cover the bottom of a sauce pan.
Pepper To Taste

1 Can Trader Joe’s Smoked Alaskan Salmon

One Pound Fresh Fettucini

Cook the sauce, toss with the cooked pasta and salmon, and serve.

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FLIR

December 21, 2007

Thermal ImagingTaking a picture of myself on a thermal imaging display.

When at the Museum of Science and Industry, there was a display on imaging technologies. I liked the thermal imaging display (I really, really want one of these cameras) so I took a picture of me being shown taking a picture of it.

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Post Office

December 21, 2007

When at the (very crowded) post office this afternoon a man came in, saying that he thinks he may have just dropped his cell phone in the mail box, but he wasn’t sure. After lots of berating the employees to look for his phone, they took his number and tried calling it to find the phone in the piles of mail. The man answered, saying that he’d found it in his truck.

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Back from Chicago

December 21, 2007

We’re back from Chicago. Let’s see… If I can remember right…

+ Swissotel Chicago is generally nice and our room had a great view.
– Swissotel Chicago could use more comfortable beds. Their computer service also went down so we had to wait a while to check in. Bathroom was clean and huge, but had a bit of mildew in the caulk and grout.

+ CTA seems to be pretty easy to navigate, if once can figure out the route needed. Hotel concierge is good for helping with this.

+ Downtown Chicago seems pretty nice and walkable. The bums trying to pull the hand-you-a-newspaper-then-demand-money scam would immediately stop asking if told “No, thanks.” Same with people fliering.

+ Amtrack seems nice, except for the waiting area in Chicago Union Station (crowded, not well designed), being 40 minutes late getting back to Birmingham, the REALLY rough tracks on the return trip, and the smell of burning tires coming from the train every time it stopped. Also, some of the passengers:

· The noisy two mother / grandma combo on the way to Chicago who let the kids eat lots of sugar, watch DVDs out loud, and generally run amok.
· The three beachball-shaped, oily, smelly people (mom and two sons), and another who didn’t genetically match them, but was consistently bossed around by the others.

Erm… That’s it for now. Photos coming later.

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Problem-B-Gone!

December 16, 2007

15pF caps cobbled into Ben’s TV-B-Gone
(Click for more photos…)

So, that TV-B-Gone problem from last night is sorted. Just after coming in from shoveling snow† I remembered that I had an 8MHz crystal hanging out on the EasyPIC 4 I acquired about a year ago (photo gallery retired). I just dropped the crystal on the board, squeezed in some 15pF caps on the back of the board (not sure if these are the right value, but they should be close enough), and tested it. As expected, it was now working. Also, because we used no-clean flux there wasn’t anything more to clean off. That was quite nice.

To make it a little more pocket-friendly I put some 1″ Harbor Freight Special heatshrink tubing around the main part of the body. This makes it nice and smooth, and parts are less likely to be accidently torn off. (Danielle accidently knocked one of the transistors off… Oops… This will get replaced next time I order something from Mouser or Digi-Key.)

Anyway, it’s working good now. Now it just has to get back to Lapeer and in ‘s possession so he can use it on Christmas.

† This is normally handled by the condo association, but because of the heavy snowfall I decided to do my porch and in front of my garage myself, instead of waiting for the snow clearing company to get to it.

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Rez

December 15, 2007

Wrong resonator shipped with TV-B-Gone kit.Wrong Resonator with TV-B-Gone

came over tonight to assemble one of adafruit Industries TV-B-Gone kits, his first electronics kit. While he did a great job soldering things, it doesn’t work. Why? This one shipped with the 16MHz resonator seen above, instead of the spec’d 8MHz.

At first I thought this might be okay, as a new v1.1 of the kit was released, and I figured that maybe the BOM hadn’t been updated. However, after things didn’t work, I did a bit more digging and realized that it’s just the wrong part. The microcontroller won’t even run at that 16MHz speed, the firmware says that 8MHz is required, etc.

That’s now a total of three kits I’ve ordered from there, two of which had missing parts. I hope I’m the only customer with these issues.

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