It's science, but it works like magic.

Making

2012-03-04T20:55:00.000-06:00

I mentioned last time round that I blew out my Davis Weather Station VP2 wireless console. A new one should be here by next weekend, and I really am being held up on my alternative weather station console in the meantime. What I need to understand is the preamble sent by the ISS before real data is sent. I have a rough idea what this is, but there are enough permutations and combinations that just guessing my way through it would not be fun.

There is, however, other stuff to do. But before I get in to that, here is an aside for ya. A lot is being said these days about "Making". Make Magazine is the poster child for the movement, and the Arduino is that child's favorite toy. Sites like Instructables (make your own Light Saber!) and Hack A Day show you how to do stuff. Places like Adafruit and Sparkfun are places where you can get stuff. I remember the days of Radio Electronics and Byte magazine. They had articles showing you how you could make a television descrambler or a taser. But every project had at least one part that was impossilbe to buy (usually an inductor). There was no Internet and I had no credit card, so I would mail a hand-written letter with a post office money order inside and hope for the best. Now it is different. Anybody can get almost anything, and almost all of it is ridiculously cheap. An Arduino kit costs $20. My first computer, an Apple //e, was something like $3000, and the Arduino is arguably much more powerful. I really believe we live in a great time for stuff like this.

Case in point: item #3 on my list of goals for this year is getting some basic home monitoring setup going. I mentioned the plan to use some JeeNodes from JeeLabs to make this happen. I had ordered these from Modern Device some time ago. It was time to crack the box open and start playing with software. There was only one problem.

Some Assembly Required

Time to break out my handy dandy Hakko FX-888 that I picked up from Solarbotics late last year. This thing is great. It was pretty quick work to go from that to this.

Wireless Goodness

But Making isn't always about electronics stuff. Not to me anyway. I want to make great food. Try #31 of Tartine Bread, for example. This bread has nothing in it besides flour, water, and salt, and it is fantastic.

I Love Carbohydrates

I am still searching for the perfect combination of a crispy crust and open crumb. I now seem to be getting the crust right, but the big open holes I used to be able to get in the crumb have deserted me. I'm baking this bread once a week now and I try a few different things each time in my search for perfection. Once I get it, I plan to put up a page on this blog that will basically serve as "Tartine Bread: The Missing Manual." While Chad Robertson has written a fine book, it is sufficiently vague in enough spots to leave a bread-baking noob like me up shit creek. I hope to fix that.

Try #31 got served along with a Sirloin Butt Beef Roast cooked in my Sous Vide rig for 15.5 hours at 58C. This was honestly so good that it was unfair to anybody else who ate something today.

I Love Protein

We seasoned it very simply with kosher salt, pepper, and rosemary. We seared it in a smoking hot cast iron pan for a minute per side to finish it off. It was so tender it was almost falling apart, yet the texture was absolutely fantastic. You could be served this meat in any fine restaurant, after which you'd go looking for the chef to give him a big sloppy wet kiss in appreciation.

That was lunch. And then it was time for supper. Keeping a sourdough starter going as we do gives you a bunch of discard that you've got to use up. So we gave these sourdough waffles from the gang at King Arthur's Flour a shot. They were good. Really good. Stupid good.

I Love Waffles

A couple flavor combination I can heartily recommend:

Plain yogurt, Saskatoon berries, and chocolate sauce
Cottage cheese, bananas, and chocolate sauce
Pretty much anything and chocolate sauce

Not a lot of headway in the hacking department this weekend, but things got made nonetheless. And I had a great weekend doing it.

Make Your DIY Davis Datalogger Work With Weatherlink

2012-02-20T13:35:00.000-06:00

Progress comes in fits and starts. That is why the iPad preceded the iPad 2, why there had to be light before there was a light bulb, and why there had to be a Martin Sheen before we were fortunate enough to get a Charlie Sheen.

I Need To Come Up With Better Examples

So it is with reverse engineering. First I figured out how to get a computer connection to a Davis weather station console without buying their overpriced Weatherlink software / hardware combo. That was all well and good, but my DIY interface didn't have datalogging capability until a tip on a wxforum post gave me the clue I needed to implement that too. This was my iPad 2.

What's that you say? The release of the iPad 3 is imminent? Drat. Indeed it is. I need a problem to stretch this dubious metaphor even further. And that problem is the fact that Davis software products like Weatherlink and the firmware updater don't work with the DIY interface and logger. The software would scan through all the ports on my laptop and pause at the COM port assigned to the USB to Serial Adapter, but wouldn't initiate communications to it.

I thought that Davis was likely doing some kind of factory initialization on the flash chip that I was not privy to, and I wasn't going to bother disassembling the firmware image to figure out what I needed to do. Cumulus works great and is free for personal use, and the Weatherlink software has been beaten to death with the ugly stick. It burns my eyes.

Windows 95 Called - They Want Their GUI Back

Still, this problem bugged me. Until now. Enter belfryboy. He is the Mr. Watson to my Alexander Graham Bell, the Dr. Watson to my Sherlock Holmes, and the supercomputer Watson to my Ken Jennings. belfryboy is the guy who designed the schematic and PCB layout for a DIY logger. He's made the Eagle design files publicly available and he'll even build one for you if you want. He also lives in the UK, where they add a superfluous "u" to many words for no particular reason (the phrase "for no particular reason" is also superfluous in that sentence when you think about it, but I'm not about to start letting "thinking" get in the way).

It turns out this problem was bugging him too. He took a different approach. What if it had nothing to do with some factory initialization? What if it was a handshaking issue? So he started playing around and actually got it to work!!! Here is what you need to do, and this applies to both a straight serial or a USB to Serial interface to the console.

Connect CTS to RTS
Connect DSR to DTR to DCD
Make sure to use the 1Mb dataflash chip. The console will not recognise the datalogger with larger capacity flash chips, even though it will log to it

To illustrate this, I opened up the Sparkfun USB to Serial converter schematic in Eagle. The dashed lines show the changes that need to be made.

A Pretty Standard RS-232 Hardware Handshaking Dance

This is a pretty easy job to do on the back of an RS-232 DB-9 or DB-25, but you'll need a steady hand and some good soldering skills to do it on the FTDI chip on these USB to Serial converters. The connections are mostly not adjacent to each other, so it will take more than just a simple solder bridge between pins. Time to break out the 30 AWG wire.

But maybe you aren't up for this? belfryboy has got you covered once again, as he has a new version of the DIY datalogger in the works and will build you one if you'd like. He'll also be making the design files available once again for anybody to build their own. I'll put up a link to them on this blog once they are available.

I have to take my hat off to belfryboy because this solution wouldn't have occurred to me. Ever. The console does not have any lines for hardware handshaking, just TxData and RxData. Why didn't Davis just ignore hardware handshaking in their software instead of hardwiring it on to the logger board? It makes no sense, but that is the way it is.

By the way, please spare me any wailing about how this encourages piracy of the Davis software. There are many legitimate reasons for enabling this functionality in a DIY interface. Here are a few. There are others.

Your Davis branded logger got zapped and no longer works (happened to belfryboy himself)
You've got a Davis branded USB logger that is dropping out all of the time
You've got multiple consoles and want a DIY version for the second one
You've got the Davis branded logger but want to build a DIY wireless version of the interface
You want to use the Davis updater software to update the firmware in your console

I haven't tried implementing this hardware handshaking fix myself yet. Unfortunately, it seems that I have somehow fried my console after digging in to its innards one too many times. I had thought it was just the LCD that was blown, but I got a replacement and that isn't working either. These are the hazards when you mess around like I have been. C'est la vie. This is going to put a temporary hold on any progress on my alternative wireless console, but rest assured that I will pick it up again once the new console arrives.

So there you have it. A DIY datalogger that has 100% of the capabilities of the Davis version, and more than two weeks before the antipated announcement of the iPad 3. That's how we roll here at Mad Scientist Labs.

This Is Me - Part 2

2012-02-06T02:00:00.001-06:00

In the first part of this two part post, I talked about the motivation that got me to pull up my socks and change some things about myself that I wasn't happy with. But prior to that, I wrote about some of the things I wanted to get gone this year, mentioning that a list like this helps to motivate me. That post contained a set of specific goals I set for myself. One of the things I wrote was this:

My best lift is the deadlift. Pick a weight up off the ground and put it back down. Simple enough. I can usually do something like 350lbs to 365lbs for five or six reps depending on the day with a bodyweight in the low 140lb range. Not bad. This should translate into a 415lb+ one-rep max... So...

Goal #1: Deadlift 405lbs for a single rep. That's four wheels a side. This goal should be doable. I just have to do it.

Italics added. Keep those in mind.

I also wrote in Part 1 about some of the reading I've been doing in regards to working out. One of the sites I didn't mention there that I hit up pretty regularly is Jamie Lewis' most excellent Chaos and Pain. This site is NSFWOAE: Not Suitable For Work, or Anywhere Else. Don't click that link. You have been warned.

This Is Not Me

Jamie has a way of writing that doesn't just give you a wakeup call: his writing delivers violent and repeated blows to the head using your own arm as a club. It leaves you lying in a pool of your own blood and other bodily fluids.

In this recent post (once again, don't click that link), he wrote:

One of the most virulent and offensive exhibitions of this "I suck and can't help it" mentality is the practice of setting a New Year's resolution. In setting a NYR, you're doing a couple of things, all of which are about as cool as those grown men who brag about watching My Little Pony and write fan fiction for the show. First, you're announcing to the world that you've identified a fault within yourself and refused to resolve it. Second, you've decided to procrastinate on even pretending to resolve the issue until an arbitrary date. Third, you're making a hell of a lot of noise about nothing, since only about 12% of people who make New Years Resolutions enjoy anything resembling success.(Quirkology) It's a fucking embarrassment of fat, drunken David Hasselhoff with a hamburger proportions. If you think you suck, fucking stop sucking immediately. Women, I'm pointing at you and your motherfucking diets- there's no goddamned time like the present. Stop putting shit off until tomorrow like you're a modern day J. Wellington Wimpy, who is perhaps the cartoon character most deserving of a curb stomp in history.

Can you hear the wake-up call? One of my goals for the New Year was to do something I already believed I was capable of doing. So why hadn't I done it? Because I suck. Because walking up to a bar loaded with almost three times your body weight and lifting it off the ground is hard. It was time to grow a pair.

I did this two day's after reading Jamie's blog.

This Is Me

Not only did I hit a goal I had set for myself just days before, but it looks like I could have gone heavier and still have made it. It isn't everyday that I can say I learned something from a barechested crazy man in an Viking hat, but I can today. So can you.

Now go click on a few of those links.

This Is Me - Part 1

2012-02-05T00:01:00.000-06:00

I have always been a skinny guy. I have the genes of Phasmatodea, wrists like twigs, and legs like toothpicks. This made Junior High and High School not a lot of fun at times. It is apparently a lot of laughs to pick on the little guy. And if he just happens to be a nerdy little guy, well... so much the better.

This Is Not Me

As the years went by and I grew older, so did everyone else. Maturity does pretty much everyone some good, and I wasn't picked on anymore. I went about my business as so many other skinny guys do: I jogged, put rocks in my pockets when the wind came up, and avoided all you can eat buffets.

Enter university, and my hair started thinning out. The new round of jokes made at my expense were sometimes funny, sometimes not. It didn't help that there wasn't much I could do about it. It was also depressing in that thinning hair and a skinny frame did not make for the most attractive combination. I came to believe that I would die a lonely death.

But as a friend of mine would say, "I'd rather be lucky than good". I met someone wonderful who would later become My Lovely Wife. She said that my thinning hair and skinny frame did not bother her. Maybe. Hopefully. But it bothered me. Each of these things had been a noose around my neck for too long, and I decided I would cut each of them away.

I would embrace the thinning hair. I would shave my head and go from male pattern baldness to Lex Luthor cool in one go. Easy.

This Is Not Me

But not so fast. There was one problem: the combination of a bald head with my skinny frame would have me regularly mistaken as a cancer patient. And that isn't cool at all. I would have to put on some weight, but all of my years of being too thin made me fat-phobic. If I was going to put on some weight, it would have to be good weight. I started working out. Not easy.

And I made mistakes, many of them. My biggest mistake was believing what all of the workout gurus on the Internet were saying: you need to do endless amounts of crunches to get good abs, you need to hit the muscles from all angles to get them to grow, you better eat every few hours or your muscles will fall off, and you need to buy tons of supplements to get anywhere. I would learn later that all of this is wrong. All of it. But I'll get back to this in a bit.

When I started working out, I bought a simple weight bench and a set of "standard" weights that you see collecting dust in so many basements. I did endless amounts of curls with these things, along with other assorted bits of randomness. And then one day I started to notice that my arms were getting a little bigger. Not a lot, mind you, but enough to give me the positive reinforcement I needed to keep going. When you've been skinny all your life, this is a big deal.

I began doing some research as I kept exercising, and my understanding of what is effective and what isn't as it came to exercise and nutrition gradually improved. I learned that to get strong, you need to lift heavy things. It sounds crazy, but it is true. I decided that I would get myself an Olympic style bar and set of weights totaling 300lbs. 300 lbs! I'd never need to buy more weight again! But one solution leads to another problem, and the idea of pinning myself under a heavy barbell, only to be found dead two weeks later was not a good one. So I bought myself a power rack. I could then lift heavy weights safely in my own basement. I was still making mistakes, but I was on the right track and continuing to gain strength.

At least I did one thing right. I ate a ton of food. Even though the workouts I was doing were far from optimal, my undersized and undernourished body soaked up calories like a sponge. I was gaining a pound a week, and most of that was good weight (i.e. muscle). I hit the scale every Monday and watched with glee as my "newbie gains" took hold and the dial on the scale inched upward.

My research led to to a couple of sites that I became very grateful for. They actually had some science behind what they had to say. This was a refreshing change from the "bro-speak" that is pervasive on the web. If you've ever heard someone say something along the lines of "Everybody knows that you need to do X to get Y", you've got yourself a perfect example of bro-speak. "Everybody knows that you need to eat breakfast to kick-start your metabolism in the morning". "Everybody knows that you need to eat brown rice and chicken breasts if you want to get lean." Etc. Bro-speak is a good example of correlation vs. causation, and it is important to know the difference. Sure, there are a lot of bodybuilders that eat endless amounts of brown rice and chicken breasts and get very lean doing so. But just because they did so doesn't necessarily mean that that was the cause of their getting lean, and that they couldn't have gotten lean by eating some other way. Consider this: ice cream sales go up in summertime. Drownings go up in summertime. This must mean that ice cream causes drowning, right? Of course not. Ice cream sales correlate to drownings (they follow the same kind of trend), but one doesn't cause the other.

Back to those sites. The first site was Lyle McDonald's Bodyrecomposition.com. I'd recommend that everyone read his site from top to bottom to really understand how the nutritional processes work in your body. The sooner you understand how you get fat, that a calorie is a calorie, and that your weight depends simply on calories in vs. calories out, the better off you'll be.

The second of those sites was Leangains.com.

This Is Not Me

This is Martin Berkhan, the man behind Leangains. A man who doesn't use steroids. A man who walks around all day everyday at around 6% bodyfat. And a man who once figured out he ate on average of an ounce of cheesecake every day for a year. Martin developed a version of Intermittent Fasting (IF) where you restrict your calorie intake to within an eight hour window and fast the other sixteen. He uses some pretty solid research to put a knife through the heart of many myths related to exercise and nutrition. This is another site you need to read from top to bottom. You'll learn that your metabolism doesn't slow down if you don't eat every few hours, how partitioning calories around a workout can benefit getting stronger, and that "clean eating" is not a requirement to getting big and lean. And he's got the clients to prove it.

A lot of what he wrote made good sense to me and I was thinking I'd give it a a shot. The one thing that held me back was that I thought (like so many other people) that I would starve to death if I didn't have breakfast. But then again, how do you know if you don't try?

Read that last bit again.

How do you know if you don't try?

How many times have we shot ourselves down when we might have been easily capable of doing something? And I'm not talking about jumping off a bridge here. I was talking about skipping breakfast. If I didn't like the experiment, no harm done.

I remember the first day I gave this a shot. I stopped eating at 10:00 pm on a Friday night and didn't eat until 2pm the next day. My expectations were that I'd feel crappy, tired, and hungry until I ate that day. I was amazed that it actually went the other way. The coffee I was drinking (caffeine helps to curb appetite) was like rocket fuel on my empty stomach. I was full of energy. And I also experienced another benefit to the fast that I had read aboout but thought was bullshit: my concentration levels were way up.

That night, I put a major hurt on an all you can eat buffet. And this highlights another benefit of Intermittent Fasting: when you eat, you eat big. The same amount of food eaten in a narrower window seems like more and leaves you satisfied. If you've ever done the "eat every three hour thing" and always felt hungry, then give IF a try.

I've been eating this way now for the last two or three years and don't think I'll ever go back. Eating big rocks. I will often eat 1500 calories within around 90 minutes after my evening workout and then go to sleep for the night (for point of reference, a Burger King Whopper has 670 calories). I don't get fat thanks to calories in vs. calories out. Simple.

The Caloric Equivalent of Two of These Before Bedtime
Plus An Order of Value Onion Rings

But the bigger benefit to me has been how my ability to concentrate has increased. This is something I noticed was degrading as I grew older. I think my focus is now at least as good as it ever was.

Am I a big and lean like Martin? Nope. Not even close. I could very likely eat more and train smarter, and my age and crappy genetics in this regard don't help. But I am decently strong for my size and have around 20-25 lbs more muscle on me than when I started. Years ago I was picked on. Now friends and family will say to me out of the blue that I look really good. That feels great, because I've worked damn hard to put those pounds on. That positive reinforcement gives me the extra push I need when I'd otherwise feel too tired or lazy to go downstairs and hit the iron for the night.

Anyhoo, if you made it this far, you might be wondering if I have any point to make in all of this rambling. I do, but that will have to wait to Part II.

IM-ME Proof of Life

2012-01-29T11:58:00.000-06:00

I have been making progress on using a Pretty Pink Pager as a receiver for the Davis Instruments Wireless Integrated Sensor Suite (ISS). The ISS, in case you weren't aware, is the outside part of the weather station that records wind speed, wind direction, rainfall, temperature, and humidity. Anyhoo, I got this going last night.

Click to Embiggen

Here is what this display is showing:

Freq is the frequency the IM-ME is set to receive to, in Hz. The hex value below that is the corresponding settings written to the FREQ2, FREQ1, and FREQ0 registers on the CC1110 processor in the IM-ME. I wrote a simply Python script to make sure I was properly converting the raw frequency to the register values as a double-check.
Chan is the channel ID. The Davis system uses 51 channels for its Frequency Hopped Spread Spectrum (FHSS) scheme. This really doesn't do anything. Yet.
Cal is the result of the frequency calibration executed using the RFST_SCAL command. This value gets written to the FSCAL3, FSCAL2, and FSCAL1 registers on the CC1110 processor.
RSSI is the current Received Signal Strength Indicator. In other words, this is the received power picked up by the IM-ME. It updates many times per second.
Max is the good stuff.

I fired up my little program and watched as the RSSI value bounced around in the noise at a value of around 65 to 70. Then I brought over my wireless console over and put it into diagnostics mode by pressing the TEMP and HUM(idity) buttons at the same time. Pressing 2nd CHILL brings up a second display that shows the channel number the receiver expects the ISS to transmit next.

Just after the Davis console started scanning for Channel 0, the Max value of the RSSI jumped from around 70 to the 113 value shown above. YES! The IM-ME was seeing the power in the signal transmitted from the ISS. This made me pretty happy to say the least as it proved out a number of things:

I was properly calculating the frequencies based on the hex values sniffed when I worked out the Davis frequency hopping sequence.
I was getting other basic aspects of the radio configuration correct.
I can write a simple program.

The first bit about the frequencies being calculated correctly was a big deal. I had been led to believe from some of the Davis FCC documentation that the 51 hop frequencies were evenly spaced by 500 kHz between 902.5 and 927.5 MHz. The values I sniffed in the link above told a different story: the frequencies were only roughly aligned to that spacing, with significant deltas of 100 kHz or more in places. I wasn't sure which was correct, and I wasn't prepared to take my ISS to work to look at the signal on a spectrum analyzer to find out.

One thing I built in to my little test program was the ability to adjust the center frequency of the radio in steps as large as 1 MHz and as small as 1 kHz. This let me tune to other channels in the hop sequence. If I saw a big spike in the RSSI value at the right time, I would know that I wasn't getting lucky on just the first channel. And indeed, I was able to tune to the next calculated channel frequency and watch the Max RSSI value jump up at the right time in the sequence, as expected

As far as being able to write a simple program, that is probably overstating it a bit. If it weren't for the amazing work by Michael Ossman, who wrote the IM-ME spectrum analyzer on which my program is based, I'd be totally screwed. Michael, in turn, based his work on an earlier reverse engineering effort on the IM-ME at Dave's Hacks. And so on down the line it goes. I will of course share whatever I come up with once things get further along.

So I can see the power in the signal now, but I'm still a ways off from getting actual data. The first problem that I have to overcome is determining how the ISS sends synchronization and preamble information to the console. I never really realized how much this involved until I dug in to it this weekend. The CC1021 in the ISS and the console leaves this chore to the firmware of the processor controlling it. The CC1110 does a lot more to handle this automatically, but you still have to tell it what to look for. And the problem is I don't know what to tell it to look for: that information isn't available for sniffing on the SPI bus. What I think I'm going to have to do is open up the console yet again and look at the signal lines that carry the data bits back and forth between the CPU and the radio chip.

Stay tuned.

Baby Steps

2012-01-22T20:44:00.000-06:00

Tool chain: Check!
IM-ME: Check!
GoodFET: Check!

Let's get this party started.

Blogger, You Suck Hard

2012-01-18T21:57:00.000-06:00

I am angry.

This evening I went to sit down and finish yet another epic blog post that I've been working on for days. Just a quick proof read plus a few cleanups here and there. I open the post in Blogger's editor. It goes on for pages. It looks great, and it should, because I have put all kinds of effort in to this. I type a couple characters and hit Control-Z. Suddenly every word and image in my post disappears. I see the Autosave button flash.

And I am right fucked.

Because it is gone. All gone. Undo does nothing. Hitting the Back button does nothing. Closing the post and reopening does nothing. Frantics searches bring up nothing that can bring it back. Why don't I just revert to an earlier draft? Because there is no revert to a previous draft.

What the fuck Blogger? Is a working undo something that is really that hard? Really??? Why can't I revert to an earlier draft? Why didn't the Undo work? I am not the only one complaining. There are many more who have suffered this problem. And tell me, why do you sit there with your thumb up your ass and not respond to your users? It goes on an on and on. You could always do a Google Search to see how pissed off people are. Are you too blind to realize that the best workaround being suggested is to use Windows Live Writer as an editor? Even with that I am still up shit creek because I use Linux.

So fix this. Fix it now. And then how about a basic table editor, for chrissake.

Happy Birthday to My Best Friend

2012-01-12T20:27:00.000-06:00

This blog tends to cover a lot of ground: from landscaping to food to hacking. Some stuff is pure technical geekery, while other stuff is more personal. This blog entry will be some of the latter.

It has been said many times that man's best friend is his dog. Here is mine. Her name is Abby and she is indeed my best friend.

Say Hello to Abby

I write this on a special day as it is Abby's 11th birthday. Her mother was a purebred Chesapeake Bay Retriever and her father was a German Shepherd that happened to be nosing about at the right time. Abby was an accident, but a happy accident. Happy Accident #1.

My Lovely Wife and I were new in town, and we were about to move into our new home on an acreage in a week. She was phoning around for alarm systems when someone told her that she'd just be better off with a big dog given our remote location. Our friend gave us directions to a pet store, but since we didn't know the city, we went to the wrong place. Happy Accident #2.

It was very much love at first site, despite knowing nothing about her breed. We looked it up in one of the books at the pet store and it described Chesapeakes as "large, solid dogs". Indeed, she weighed 18lbs at eight weeks of age. We didn't know it then, but the size of her knees were a giveaway that she would someday fit the advice given to us by the alarm system salesperson.

We took her home a week later. Our new home was about a half hour drive away from the store. We were within a quarter mile of the new place before she turned her head towards me and threw up all over my jacket. Happy Accident #3.

Over the years, Abby would grow out of her car sickness and grow in to her knees, tipping the scales around 82 lbs at one point. We brought her with us when we picked up and drove 2000 miles to our current home around eight years ago. One of the prerequisites in picking our new home was some place that would be dog friendly. Chesapeake's were bred to retrieve game fowl from the icy waters of the Chesapeake Bay on the U.S. East Coast, and when a nice place right on the river came along... well...

Less Icy In the Summer

Our home on the river means we have lots of wildlife wandering by, and then fleeing for their life once Abby catches wind of them. The trails we maintain through the forest alongside the river's edge makes walking the dog a joy, not a chore. My Lovely Wife's "job" is to keep the home fire's burning while I am at work, and they enjoy several beautiful walks each day. The two are inseparable.

Abby On Bush Trail Patrol

Fortunately for us, we don't have to worry too much when Abby tears after some critter like a bat out of hell. She is big enough and strong enough that she can handle herself for the most part. For the most part. Abby likes to act first and think about questions later. A good question to ask up front might have been "Should I really go after that porcupine? Again?"

Not Such A Good Idea, As It Turned Out

Another Chesapeake behavior that Abby features is a certain stubbornness. Strangely, this feature is not mentioned in books that encourage people to get a Chesapeake. She listens to us when she wants to. At times this is maddening; at other times, hilarious. But it gives her an unpredictable nature to her character that makes Abby the dog she is, and I'm not sure I'd want her to be any different. I like to think of it as selective understanding.

While she has many Chesapeake qualities, her German Shepherd side comes through in several ways as well. The coloring around her muzzle is one obvious spot, but another one a little less obvious is the Shepherd instinct to always walk a little bit ahead and lead the way. This has an interesting side effect: she is in every picture we have ever taken.

Abby Hamming It Up... Always

Abby's many interesting qualities and the environment she lives in have combined to give an endless stream of wonderful stories over the past eleven years. Since it takes a long time to type in an endless stream of wonderful stories, I'll pick three favorites.

Story #1: A year after we got Abby, we had a visit from some friends whose daughter was maybe a year old at the time. She was just getting good at walking but was not yet at the point where she could build a lot of speed. Somehow, this little girl quickly built a connection with a dog that was much taller than she was and many times her weight. The little girl would toddle out from the kitchen table to the living room with Abby walking slowly behind. They would switch around at the coffee table in the living room so that Abby walked in front on the way back to the kitchen with the little girl following behind. They did this once or twice before anybody really realized what was going on. It was one of the most amazing things I've ever seen.

Story #2: My Lovely Wife plugged a kettle in before heading upstairs to take a shower. Abby started barking soon after. My Lovely Wife yelled at her to stop but Abby keeps at it. Finally, My Lovely Wife heads back downstairs to see what all the barking is about before starting her shower. It turns out that the cord on the kettle was shorting out and the kettle's base was starting to smoke and melt down. My Lovely Wife was able to unplug it before any serious damage was done. Abby just might have saved our house from catching fire and burning down.

Story #3: Not that long ago, a group of people came in to our yard to sell us some religion. They rang the front doorbell and Abby went crazy. My Lovely Wife mistakenly answered the side door. She was busy and didn't have much patience for what she knew this crew was here to do. She was holding Abby by the collar at the side doorstep as Abby was working hard to pull away.

Them [nervously]: "My! HE's a big one! I hope HE isn't hungry!" [Abby gets called a HE all the time because of her size].

Abby decided to answer the only way she could, and she did so with the timing of Bob Hope.

Abby: BEEEELLLLCCCCCCCCHHHHHHHH.

Them: "Oh, I can see you are busy. We best get going now."

And they drove the hell out of our yard at high speed.

I think you get the idea. My Lovely Wife and I believe that Abby is a very special dog and we love her will all our hearts. She has certainly slowed down over the years, and I know she won't last forever. But neither will I. That is why Abby's will bequeaths everything she owns to me, and why my will bequeaths everything I own to her. Until that fateful day comes to pass, I cherish every day with her. Every single day. And that is no accident.

Happy Birthday Abby, and many more.

--------------

P.S. If you'd like to know more about Abby, My Lovely Wife keeps a diary of her various adventures here on Dogster. There you'll find many more stories and pictures that will be sure to get a laugh. Skip anything related to garter snakes if you are squeamish.

Troubles with IM-ME and the GoodFET

2012-01-08T15:53:00.000-06:00

I have been spending some time recently with my IM-ME Pretty Pink Pager and my GoodFET. Most of this time has been unproductive, unfortunately. I think I might finally have sorted out all the issues causing this, and I'm using this post as an opportunity to record it all so I know what to do next time, if there is a next time. This is all running under Linux: your mileage will vary under another OS.

I came across my first hurdle some months ago. Commands like this:

goodfet.bsl --fromweb
goodfet.monitor test

would give me this:

Resyncing
Resyncing
Resyncing

These messages would spit out every couple of seconds. Now these commands don't require any kind of connection from the GoodFET to the IM-ME: the messages indicate that the laptop and my GoodFET can't communicate. After much pulling out of hair (made more painful with the fact that my head is shaved), I discovered that my GoodFET PCB had two bad vias. Unfortunately, these vias were under the processor, and the processor is surface mounted to the PCB. It took some tricky soldering, but I was able to patch around these vias and get back in business. However, it seems I needed to use the --slow parameter to goodfet.bsl to get it to work. Whatever, I was happy.

Tricky Soldering

Then over the Christmas break, I broke out the IM-ME and the GoodFET in the hopes of getting something productive done. No way.

Resyncing
Resyncing
Resyncing

This would again spit out once every couple of seconds despite the fact everything seemed to be working well the last time I'd left it. More hair pulling ensued. Nothing would work. In a fit of desperation, I went back to an older version of the GoodFET client that I had on my laptop.

It worked perfectly.

I'm not sure why (maybe this?), and right now I don't care. But a fairly recent version of the GoodFET client software was totally broken for me. The client dating back to Feb 26th 2011 works great. And I just checked out the lastest SVN version of the GoodFET code and that is worked great as well. Just my luck.

So everything is working. Fantastic. I sit down at my laptop this afternoon to see if I can get something productive done once again.

Resyncing
Resyncing
Resyncing

Argh! This time the messages were flooding across my terminal window. Last time, they were separated by a second or two. This seemed to be more an issue on the laptop side than the GoodFET. I had noted that the laptop had been put to sleep since it was last working. "Simple enough", thought I. Something wasn't being handled coming out of sleep and all I needed to do was unplug the GoodFET's USB connection and plug it back in again. No luck. Taking the batteries out of the IM-ME while unplugged from USB either didn't help. Restarting the laptop fixed the problem, but the problem would come back every time coming out of sleep. A bit of Googling and I came across a blog post from years ago that discussed a fix for a similar problem for stuck USB memory sticks. That particular trick didn't work for me, but this one does. As root:

# modprobe -vr ftdi_sio
# modprobe -v ftdi_sio

The ftdi module is responsible for communicating with the USB to Serial chip (FTDI FT232RL) on the GoodFET. Apparently, the ftdi driver has a sleep problem of some kind. Removing and re-inserting the ftdi module sorts things out. This is with the 3.1 Linux kernel, BTW. Hopefully this gets fixed sometime.

I noticed that the Feb 26th version of the GoodFET client software would flood the screen with Resyncing messages after the laptop came out of sleep, but the latest version of the software does the usual message every second or two. Dunno why this is. Either way, the modprobe dance above fixes either version.

Finally, if you see something like this:

[dk@laptop client]$ goodfet.cc info
File "/usr/local/bin/goodfet.cc", line 22
print "# %s" %s;
^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax

then you are getting burned by Python versions. Distributions like Arch Linux default to Python3, but the GoodFET client assumes Python2. To fix this, edit the first line of the various GoodFET scripts you use from this:

#!/usr/bin/env python

to this:

#!/usr/bin/env python2

and you'll be good to go.

Now to get something useful done...

ADDENDUM: So just after posting this, what did I get? You guessed it..

Resyncing
Resyncing
Resyncing

The only thing I changed this time was the USB cable. I went from a longer, more flexible cable with a choke at the end to a shorter, stiffer cable with no choke. Operation with this shorter, cheaper cable is definitely unreliable. Moral of the story: try a different cable if all else fails.

Pretty Pachube Plotting Progress

2012-01-02T11:14:00.000-06:00

Edit: January 4, 2012. My Pretty Pachube plots seem to be showing up only part-time. I suspect that there is some throttling going that I need to get a grip on, perhaps because the feed data I am plotting is not my own. Please leave a note in the comments if you have an idea of what might be going on.

In my last post, I wrote about motivating myself for 2012. Goals #1 and #2 had to do with working out, but I felt like a bucket of crap on the first day of the New Year and had little energy and less motivation (thank you very much, rhinopharyngitis). I just felt like lying around like an inanimate carbon rod.

The Only Thing Keeping Me From "Employee of the Week"

But NO! I have things I've gotta get done, so I thought I'd work a bit toward Goal #3. Goal #3 was to get a basic home monitoring system set up, and one of the ideas I had was pushing that data out to Pachube to act as a repository for the data I would collect. I'm not actually pushing out any data just yet, so I thought I'd dig into the presentation side of it.

Searching around on the Pachube web site, I came across the Zoomable 30 day graph documented on the apps section of their site. There is a nice little setup there where you can set up the graph's basic configuration online. Give it a feed and datastream ID, a few parameters on size and color, and it spits out some code to cut and paste into a blog entry or web page. Simple, eh?

Don't use it. It has a couple of limitations:

It can't put multiple lines on the same plot
It doesn't work.

It actually does work until you try and plot more than one graph on the same web page. The script doesn't handle multiple instances properly, and you end up wasting a bunch of time before finding this out. Ask me how I know.

The link above does, however, include the following comment:

Note: if you are looking to combine multiple datastreams on the same graph, either by summing them or displaying them separately, see this post in the community forum for a solution.

That is almost a solution, but it doesn't work with non-numeric data stream names. What you really need to use is the script pointed to in this link. This works great, and here is a summary of getting it to work on any web page or blog post.

First of all, you need these two lines of script before trying to show a plot:

<script src="http://www.google.com/jsapi" type="text/javascript">
</script>
<script src="http://thecodergroup.com/store/pachube/pachube_multi.js" type="text/javascript">
</script>

Once you've done that, you can follow the examples in this forum post for the Javascript needed for the plots themselves (if you want to see the Javascript behind each of the examples below, just hit Control-U to see the source of this page). These examples use data collected from a bash script from this page running on a DD-WRT powered router.

Let's start off simple. First, here is a plot of the uplink datarate.
Next, a plot of the downlink datarate.
Let's geta little fancier. How about a plot of the uplink and downlink datarate on the same graph?
Or the sum of the two values plotted as a single value?
Pretty cool, I'd say. There is one thing to be careful of here though. The "div name" that is the first parameter to the script needs to be different for each of the plots you use. This keeps the data behind each of them separate. Weird things will happen if you don't.

There are other ways to present Pachube data. I could just look at the data right off the Pachube web site. Look here for the Pachube version of the plots I presented above. Nothing fancy, but not bad. There is yet another method of plotting data out there using the iGoogle Pachube Gadget and the associated method of publishing to a web page discussed here, but I found that to be a lot less flexible.

Despite taking a little longer to sort out than I anticipated, I'm pretty happy with the flexibility of this presentation. But wait, there's more! There are more apps, such as ones that will send SMS alerts or Twitter messages when a particular condition is reached. I haven't dug into these yet, but it is on my list of things to do once I've got my own data going in.

Motivating Myself for 2012

2011-12-30T15:42:00.000-06:00

It is that time of year that people look back on the year it was. I look back and I'm pretty pleased with how it went down. I've gotten some things done that I've been meaning to get done for a long time, I have challenged myself to learn new things, I have had good success at work, and I like to think that I am a little better person than I was when 2011 was about to roll in.

It is said that one way of making sure you carry through on something is to tell other people what you are doing. The more people you tell, the more people you are letting down if you fail to follow through. With that thought in mind, and with 2011 drawing to a close, it seems like a good time to look ahead and set some goals for 2012 in a couple different areas.

Working Out

I have been working out pretty diligently over the past four years or so and have become decently strong on a few lifts. This despite having the frame of a Japanese schoolgirl and the fact that the testosterone train left the station long ago (i.e. I'm old). I'm not expecting huge gains in muscle mass but I do think I have the capacity to put on a few more good pounds if I eat enough and don't get hurt.

My best lift is the deadlift. Pick a weight up off the ground and put it back down. Simple enough. I can usually do something like 350lbs to 365lbs for five or six reps depending on the day with a bodyweight in the low 140lb range. Not bad. This should translate into a 415lb+ one-rep max. Should, but probably doesn't, at least for me. I find that my body doesn't seem to obey the basic predicted formulas for one-rep max

one-rep max = weight / (1.0278 - (.0278 * reps))

and that my reps go down sharply as the weight goes up. So...

Goal #1: Deadlift 405lbs for a single rep. That's four wheels a side. This goal should be doable. I just have to do it.

This is 495lbs, but you get the idea

One of my weaker lifts is the squat. Yesterday's workout was 235lbs x 4 for a calculated one rep max of 256lbs. This lags well behind my deadlift. I feel my hamstrings are letting me down and will work to strengthen them up. I really need to build up my bottom position strength before I see some decent gains here. Because this lift sucks for me, I'm thinking...

Goal #2: Squat 280lbs for a single rep below parallel. 285lbs - 290lbs would be even better, as this would be 2x bodyweight.

I get mistaken for Tom Platz all the time

My other lifts are decent enough, so I'd be OK with basically maintaining them as I bring these others up. I can pretty easily Military Press my bodyweight, and I can do weighted chinups with an extra 77.5lbs of weight (around 55% bodyweight) hanging off a belt for 5 reps or so. Bench press? Screw it. It has done my shoulders far more harm than good in the past. I might play around here a little bit, but pushing serious weight with them isn't something I'm planning on.

Work

Work isn't really something I talk about this on this blog, so I won't. Suffice to say I just hope I'm not putting in crazy amounts of extra time that would take substantially away from all this other stuff I want to do.

Hacking

This year we went away for a few days to spend Christmas with the family. We had our neighbor check in on the place while we were away. You never know if the furnace might go out or a pipe springs a leak or something like that.

Actually, you can know. And it isn't that hard. I've spent a bunch of time researching this lately. There are a multitude of ways that data can be collected and made available so I could know right away if my furnace stopped working or a pipe sprung a leak. Then I could just make a phone call for somebody to check into it rather than having them waste their time when everything is fine. One strategy would be to collect the data with some JeeNodes from JeeLabs and the incomparable Jean-Claude Wippler. JeeNodes are a kind of Arduino clone with built in network capabilities and an emphasis on low power such that a single remote node ran on a single LiPo for a year without breaking a sweat. More here. And did I mention that these things are crazy cheap?

Now, that data has got to get onto the net, so why not just hook up a JeeNode to my router and write a script like that used to collect data from my weather station and push it out on to the web? If only there was a site that was willing to store all of this data for me and make it easy to get to.

It turns out that there is. Pachube is happy to take all of the data I send to them. They have an open API. Look at the data from their web site or pull the data into a Google gadget and display it on a web page. And you can retrieve the data whenever you want in three different formats. All for free. So how about...

Goal #3: Get some basic home monitoring going by Christmas 2012.

This is what I have in mind.

One more thing that I have been playing with for some time is trying to understand how the Davis Weather Station outdoor sensor suite is monitored by the indoor console. What I'm working towards is some means of building a standalone receiver that could listen in on its transmissions and collect the data without depending on the console. I had initially proposed a Pretty Pink Pager for this task, and indeed, I was playing with this just the other day. Unfortunately, I'm struggling with some kind of problem with my GoodFET where it doesn't want to talk to the IM-ME, and this is slowing me down.

There is a problem with this approach though. The number of people that have a Davis Weather Station, an IM-ME, and the means to hack it is a number one less than two. The IM-ME is a good prototyping platform for this kind of thing, but it isn't an accessible solution for others. The biggest problem is the CC1021 chip in the console is not exactly hacker friendly. The documentation is great, but actually building a board around this thing is not: the components are tiny and a good layout is critical to decent performance. Development boards also tend to be either expensive or very expensive. Then I came across the XRF module from Ciseco that puts a CC1101 processor (CC1021 RF compatible) onto an XBee form factor board for just £10 plus another £2.50 for shipping. What a deal! This leads us to:

Goal #4: Get a standalone receiver picking up the transmissions from a Davis outdoor sensor suite by the end of 2012.

Let's Do This. You and Me. Mano-a-Mano.

Wrapping Up (Finally)

Well, that is enough for now. There are still a lot of other things I want to get done this year, such as

I have a bunch of landscaping to get done.
I'd like to get a little hydroponics setup going so I don't have to wait until fall for a decent tomato. Life is too short for shitty tomatoes.
I'm going to keep working at improving my breadmaking skills. Incidentally, this Sourdough Rye bread is outstanding.

These things lead me to...

Goal #5: Keep this blog going, share the adventure, and enjoy the ride.

What are YOUR goals? What do YOU plan to do? We live in a great time where pretty much anyone can learn about anything. The greatest threat to this is a lack of motivation. Don't waste the opportunity you have. Get started today.

Happy New Year from all of us here at Mad Scientist Labs.

DD-WRT is Dead! Long Live OpenWrt!

2011-12-30T09:27:00.000-06:00

The Christmas break is upon me and I am trying to get a few things done rather than just sit around and eat cookies.

Chose to Eat Cookies

One of these things was to change the firmware on my trusty Linksys WRT-54G, perhaps one of the greatest routers of all time.

The Muhammad Ali of Routers

It's greatness was largely accidental and stemmed from a license violation. Linksys used Linux as the brains behind this router. However, they did not realize at first that the GNU Public License that Linux is released under requires all changes to the source code be made public. Their hand was forced, and the source code was released in July of 2003. The open source community tore into this code like a pack of wolves and custom versions with additional features sprang forth. Before long, this $60 router had the features of a $600 router. It became the router of choice for geeks and hackers everywhere, and Linksys sold approximately eleventy billion of them. Read this if you want more of a history lesson.

Linksys came out with many different versions of this router as time rolled on. I have one of the best: a Version 3 with a staggering 16 Meg of flash and 4 Meg of RAM. Later versions halved the amounts of flash and RAM, forcing subsequent versions of custom firmware to cut back on features to make room.

I don't remember when I did it, but my first cut at custom firmware was DD-WRT. I picked this because it had more features than I would ever use, was well supported, and had a nice GUI to control everything. Sadly, DD-WRT doesn't seem to remember where it came from anymore, and you can't build the whole shebang from source. Want to modify the GUI? Be prepared to jump through some nasty hoops to do so. Development of DD-WRT has also slowed to a trickle: the last release for my router was in 2009, and that was to fix a software vulnerability.

Screw this. Time to switch, and switch I did. Yesterday I put OpenWrt and the Gargoyle "router management utility" on it and the process was relatively painless. Note that I said relatively painless. There were a few bumps in the road that tripped me up briefly. This is what got me going.

I went to this page on the Gargoyle website and chose the Firmware Image for the Broadcom architecture for the latest stable branch of the code. This image has the OpenWrt firmware rolled in already. Nice.
The brcm47xx-squashfs file was what I needed, but should I download the .trx or the .bin version? According to the install guide...

If you are installing from another third-party firmware such as DD-WRT or Tomato, you should also use the .trx file.

Sounded to me like I need to download the .trx version. Turns out this was wrong. More on that in a second.

The Installation Guide on the OpenWrt Wiki told me that all I should have to do was "Open the WebUI of the original firmware with your web browser and install the OpenWrt firmware image file using the "Firmware Upgrade" option of the original firmware." Easy peasy. I backed up my DD-WRT settings from the GUI and then tried to load the .trx file. DD-WRT greeted me with

Incorrect Image File

Not good. That is when I started Googling around and started reading about all the people that had troubles upgrading to OpenWrt from DD-WRT. The problems people were having were broken charts in Gargoyle and wireless that just plain didn't work afterwards. This got me a little nervous because this is the only router I have, and botching this upgrade would make me very grumpy. But no guts, no glory. I proceeded onward.

This post suggested resetting to factory defaults within DD-WRT before doing the upgrade. This made sense to me: clearing the NVRAM in the router before going to a new firmware version would let OpenWrt start with a clean slate. Resetting to defaults caused the router to reboot into DD-WRT, after which I had to re-login with the default password of "password". I'd have never guessed.
The next step was to rename the .trx file to .bin and again use the DD-WRT "Firmware Upgrade" option, against the advice of the installation guide. DD-WRT happily accepted this file. Several nerve-racking minutes passed while the router re-flashed and rebooted itself. I pointed my browser to 192.168.1.1 and...

Success!

But I wasn't through yet. Wireless wasn't working. I dug around the GUI a bit and saw that it was disabled by default. I enabled that, set the SSID and security stuff, and saved my changes. This caused the router to reboot and... still no wireless. This is what I had read about and I was starting to get a little nervous again. I unplugged the router's power supply for 30 seconds, plugged it back in, and it worked! Yay me!

Looking back, I realized I was fortunate doing this upgrade over a wired connection. The default of wireless being disabled and the temporary problem I had with getting wireless going would have caused addition grief if I hadn't been wired in.

A question you might be asking yourself is why I am still playing around with such an underpowered, ancient router that only supports the B & G standards. Well, when all you have 2 Mbits/sec of downstream bandwidth and 128 kbits/sec of upstream bandwidth, Wireless G is all you need. But more than that, this thing is completely and utterly reliable. It quitely does its thing, hidden away in the basement. The custom firmware also gives it far more capabilities than I need, and it is still incredibly well supported. What is not to like?

Well, it doesn't have anything in the way of extra ports and it could use more memory. But there are a ton of easy hardware mods for this router that I might take a shot at that would give me exactly this. One thing that I really want to try is this 1-wire mod that will let me connect simple devices like temperature sensors to this thing. A reader of my blog has even written a script that lets a WRT54G with a serial port hacked on upload data from a Davis Weather Station Console directly to Weather Underground. How cool is that?

This baby still has a lot of life in it yet.

Please Read This

2011-12-11T11:07:00.001-06:00

Christmas was the best day ever when I was a little kid, just like it is for so many kids today. But as I've gotten older, there are a few things about it that are like old clothes: for some reason, they just don't seem to fit quite as well as they used to. I still enjoy the socializing and the food. It is more the gift thing that just seems a little awkward now.

Best Christmas Movie Ever, Bar None

I am not a very materialistic person. I also understand the difference between "need" and "want". If I need something, I get it because I actually need it. If I want something, I tend to mull it over for some time. What I have found is that the things I think I want are fleeting, and what I think I want one month, I am no longer interested in the next. To quote Sheryl Crow:

It's not having what you want,
It's wanting what you've got.

It is very rare that I will buy something I think I want on the spur of the moment. This discipline serves me very well. It saves money and keeps down on the amount of clutter around the house. I've found clutter like this tends to depress me, so avoiding it in the first place just helps me feel better.

I Am A Few Ounces Of Discipline Away From This...

I also have gotten to be pretty particular about the things I buy. If I decide I want something, I'll get something that does all the things I want it to do. I do a lot of research before putting down my hard earned cash. That doesn't necessarily mean that it is expensive. It means it does what I want it to do at a good price. The internet is an absolute godsend for me.

So lets get back to Christmas. I was getting gifts in recent years from very well meaning friends and relatives that I wasn't really enjoying or using that much: books I wouldn't get around to reading, stuff that I never used, etc. It just seemed kind of wasteful despite the best of intentions. This stuff and another incident I won't get in to started turning me off the whole gift thing. So after Christmas a couple of years ago, I decided it was time to do something different. I simply asked everyone that in lieu of a gift to me, that they instead make a donation to a charity of their choice.

You see, one of my numerous shortcomings is that I don't donate much to charity. My request would indirectly address this shortcoming and take some of the commercialization out of the holiday season that was bugging me as well. I was killing two birds with one stone. Sheer genius, eh? I'm right up there with the great physicists of our time: Einstein, Planck, and Spears.

First Row, Fourth From the Right

So last year was the first year that there were no gifts under the tree for me. How did it work out? Much better than I had expected, without a doubt. It was a little weird in that it was different for me. However, I felt great each time I heard of other person's act of giving.

Srsly

I learned of the most memorable of these events when I drove home on Christmas day 2010 to see my mom and spend the day with her. She told me that she had made a donation to the Children's Wish Foundation, whose goal is to bring some happiness to children who are facing a pretty dire situation. This is a charity dear to her heart (again for a couple reasons I won't go in to). She had made her donation to Children's Wish earlier that month, and that was great. But for her, what really made it was when the charity phoned her just before the holiday to express their gratitude. They didn't ask for more money, they simply thanked her. She told me that this was the best thing that had happened to her all holiday.

That made me feel pretty awesome. I'm getting a little choked up typing this in even now.

Fast forward a year to 2011. I got a Christmas card from my mom in the mail just the other day. I opened it up so I could read it and put it onto the mantle with the rest of them. But this was no ordinary card.

I didn't realize it was my Christmas present until I opened the card and started reading.

A goat brings lasting abundance to hungry families.

For impoverished families, a gift of one or even two goats is a fantastic milk, food, and income source. The family will also receive training on how to breed the goat and start a business. Because of you, this precious gift can even be the start of a flourishing dairy business for the family that receives it. Thank you!

Mom had done it again. I was totally taken aback. The card was from World Vision. They work "to improve child well-being and to serve people around the world regardless of religion, race, gender or ethnicity". Mom had chosen this goat from the many options listed in their gift catalogue. Her choice meant some family I will never meet will get a shot at a better life vs. me getting something I don't really want and won't use. Seems like a pretty good deal to me.

Whoever said it was better to give than to receive was right. I know that now.

Why not find this out for yourself if you haven't already done so? Consider giving either some of your cash, some of your time, or some of what you might have coming your way this season to a cause you support. Or maybe you've enjoyed what you've read on this blog or learned something useful and want to show some appreciation? That works too. Pick a cause and help them out. Whatever cause you choose isn't important, as long as it is important to you.

If you decide to do something, that would be fantastic. If you don't, that is OK too. Your choice. Whatever you choose to do, the staff of Mad Scientist Labs wishes you a safe and happy holiday, and the best of 2012.

Shattered

2011-11-27T11:47:00.001-06:00

My lovely wife and I live out of town on an acreage. Our nearest neighbor is a half mile away. We have no yard light and don't want one, either. At night, it gets dark outside. Very dark. It looks a lot like this:

Seriously

We also have a dog. A large dog. A large dog that refuses to take advantage of modern conveniences like indoor plumbing. If she has to "go", she has to "go outside". "Going outside" is her favorite thing in the world, as it is with most dogs. But our dog is also rarely more than a few feet away from either my lovely wife or myself. If we try to let her outside to do her dirty, filthy business, she'll just stand on the step and wait for us to come out. She would probably blow out a kidney waiting for an escort to take her into the tall grass where relief awaits before heading out there to do her business on her own.

Now going outside sometimes means going outside at night. At night, it gets dark outside (we've been over this - remember?). And at night, there are various critters that like to come out as well. We regularly hear the coyote packs howling under the moonlight. And then there are the porcupines. Our dog has tangled with these and other critters. Usually she comes out on top because of her size. Sometimes, not. A dog can't win against a porcupine, but they don't seem to be able to figure this out. These battles can be painful. And expensive.

Our Dog: Post Surgery after Porcupine Battle #2

So because our dog needs to go out at night, and because it gets dark at night, and because we have to go out with her, and because there are dangerous critters outside at night when it is dark, and because we can't see in the dark, we need a flashlight. A bright flashlight. A flashlight that can light up the night for a great distance. A flashlight that can find the critters before our dog does and hopefully scare them away. We started off with a four D-cell MagLite flashlight.

Great For Smashing Some Thing's Head In, But Not Great Otherwise

This thing threw a pretty decent amount of light. We also got a good workout lugging it around. And it would also go through batteries like Wynonna Judd goes through donuts. Not recommended.

I Am A Mean Person...

Then I discovered the wonders of LED flashlights. I coincidentally also discovered the wonders of Deal Extreme. They have Deals there! And they are Extreme! After much research a year ago, I picked up this bad boy: an Eastward YJ-XGR2 Waterproof Cree R2-WC 2-Mode 250-Lumen LED flashlight. It is amongst my most cherished possessions.

Is It Wrong To Love An Inanimate Object?

The first night I tried it out, my lovely wife and I were outside. I pointed this baby at her eyes and she had to look away. "Big deal", you say. "That would happen with any flashlight." Sure. But I was 200 yards away at the time. This thing is light, far brighter than the Mag, and one charge of its single rechargeable batteries last up to 10 hours. I love this thing.

That is why I was devastated to discover this after the pup and I went for our morning walk-about.

The Lens Was As Shattered As I Was

We don't know how it happened. But it happened. This flashlight was in critical condition. What to do?

There was no way we could go back to the Mag: I am a man of modest means and cannot afford the batteries it chews through. I had to develop a recovery plan, and fast. Fortunately, all the pieces of the lens were still in place and nothing of any size had fallen out yet. If I could only keep the lens together for the short term, I could then work out a longer term plan. So I dug out a roll of clear packing tape.

You Can See Where I'm Going With This...

I used a razor to trace around the lens and lightly pressed the tape around the glass. This held things together enough so I could open up the flashlight and tape the back side together using the same method. This would hold things together in the short term.

Next, I remembered from my research that Deal Extreme also sold flashlight parts. I search for flashlight lenses and, lo and behold, they sell replacements. Yay! But the replacements come in 20 different sizes. Time to dig out my calipers make a measurement. Fortunately I had a banana handy to support one end of the caliper so I could free my hands to take a picture.

Better Eat That Banana - It's Getting A Little Ripe

The measurements vary from 41.6mm to 41.8mm depending on where I measured (smashing a piece of glass tends to affect its symmetry somewhat). Not shown is my 1.5mm measurement of the lens' thickness.

Back to Deal Extreme. And wonder of wonders: they sell a 41.5mm Diameter, 1.5mm Thick Replacement Glass Lens. In ten-packs. For $2.78. For all ten. And free shipping. And no minimum order. The well-intentioned recommendation of my cousin to consider somewhere else for a "decent light" falls on deaf ears.

This Makes Me Very Happy

So now that this post is written up, I'm off to put in an order to Deal Extreme. Unfortunately, the "Add To Cart" button on that site is made of crack cocaine: you can't stop at just one hit. I have a funny feeling I'll be spending more than $2.78.

Bad News and Good News

2011-11-27T08:46:00.000-06:00

First the bad news. In my last post detailing how to build your own Davis console datalogger, I speculated that using a bigger memory chip than what Davis used in their original design might get picked up by the console and allow more archive records to be stored. Unfortunately that is not the case. The Davis 1 Mbit version tops out at 2560 records. So does my 4 Mbit version. If you are going to build your own (more on this in a second), save the 43 cents and stick with the 1 Mbit chip.

The Bane of the "Off by one" Programming Error

Now the good news. When I got my DIY logger working a couple weeks back, I made a wxforum post detailing what I had found. I made a similar post when I figured out how to build your own computer interface to the console, and comments poured in quickly. This time around, it was a little different...


Kinda Quiet Around Here...

But little did I realize that despite the initial, deafening silence, great things were at work: wxforum member belfryboy put his head down and got busy. After an iteration or two, behold!

A Schematic!

Yes indeed. He did what I should have done and put together a schematic in Eagle. This has a connection for both the Atmel flash chip for datalogging and a six pin connector for hooking up something like the Sparkfun FTDI cable. These two pieces give you the complete equivalent of the Davis USB logger (except that this version will maintain a reliable connection). Now, behold again!

A PCB Layout!

This is the corresponding board layout for the schematic above. The ground pour isn't shown for clarity, and so you can see the shout-out that belfryboy gave me on the bottom layer. This board is single sided and therefore DIY friendly. Speaking of DIY friendly, the design can be easily pulled into the freeware version of CADSoft Eagle so that anybody can have a look and play around with this. All you need to do is grab the design files from here and you are good to go. And if you don't have the means to build your own circuit boards, belfryboy will build one up for you.

If you do build this, remember from my last post that you need to use a terminal program to actually activate the logging function in the console since Cumulus doesn't do this automatically. I think I'll ping the author to see if he'd be kind enough to add this function. belfryboy has a setup utility in the works and I'll add it to the design files once I get it.

So what the heck are you waiting for? Get out there and build something. Anything. Figure something out. Learn something new. The reward is the journey. Remember: You Can't, You Won't, And You Don't Stop.

My Earworm Of The Day: Now It Is Yours...

Build Your Own Davis Console Datalogger!!!

2011-11-12T23:22:00.000-06:00

It all started off with my seminal post, Davis Weatherlink Software Not Required, to which I added not one, not two, but three exclamation points to get across the enormity of the discovery. With a $15 USB to Serial Adapter, you no longer had to pay the exorbitant sum charged by Davis to get a computer connection to your Davis weather station console. Enthusiastic enthusiasts then charged ahead with several wireless solutions. How about a wireless XBee link as written up by af4ex on this wxforum post? Or what about gwynethh's Wi-Fi interface via the almost perpetually out of stock Roving Networks RN-XV (only $35!) as written up on this wxforum post? If you don't think a weather station with its own TCP/IP stack is cool, then you have no soul. Or you don't care. One or the other.

But there were still murmurs of discontent in wx-land, and they centered on two bits of criticism. The first, of course, was this was no plug and play solution. Wires would need to be cut and soldering irons plugged in to get anywhere. That was until SLOweather pitched in and started selling ready to go serial adapters based on the console logger pinout. It is nice to know that this discovery enabled a cottage industry to spring up, though it must be said that it is an extremely small cottage.

The second criticism was that my hack did not have a data logging feature. Indeed, this did suck. I knew the pinout at the back of the console, but this wasn't enough for me to figure out how the logging function worked.

The Pinout That Started It All

It wasn't until I tripped over this post by wxforum member wxtech that things got really interesting. This is a guy who obviously isn't afraid of letting the magic smoke out of his electronic devices. He actually unpotted the Davis dongle to see what made it tick. He wrote "U1 is an Atmel 45DB memory", and it was already well known that the logger had one megabit of memory. That was all we really needed to figure out the datasheet for the Atmel 45DB011 Dataflash chip.

Technically, it all became clear with the datasheet in hand. The console talks to the flash chip via I2C, and the remote PC talks to the console. The remote PC is not directly connected to the flash chip. That's why my homebrew serial interface works: the datalogger and interface functions are completely separate. And that's why Davis brought out the I2C lines to the rear connector.

It gets better. The 1Mbit version of the 45DB011 will set you back less than a dollar. So you know what that means...

It Means A Cheap Excuse To Embed A Song I Really Like

After a summer spent preparing to feed the rabbits this winter, I got off my butt and ordered up some parts to see if I could make a DIY version of the Datalogger. I ended up putting my order in to Mouser Electronics, rather than the usual suspect. The reason was quite simple really. They were the only outfit I could find that both stocked 1mm pitch ribbon cable by the foot rather than the roll and also had an SOIC breakout board. The flash chips can be found just about anywhere. Here is what I ordered up.

A couple Atmel 4Mbit Flash Chips and a couple 1MBit Flash Chips to store my data. I wanted to try an experiment here to see if the console could actually read chips of the larger capacity. I bought a couple of each just in case I wrecked one.
A 20 pin, dual row, 2mm pitch IDC header to plug into the back of the console. I bought four of these to stock up.
A 16 pin SOIC to DIP adapter so I could prototype this on a breadboard. Why 16 pins for 8 pin parts? My plan was to solder on one chip of each capacity, and try the bigger one first to see if it would work. This way I wouldn't have to mess with desoldering one to try the other.
Some 1mm pitch ribbon cable to connect it all together. I bought three feet, so I could make a couple cables if need be. Note that the pitch of the ribbon cable is twice as fine as the header, because it has to pack twice as many conductors in to the same width.

You'll need solder and a fine-tipped soldering iron, of course. While I intend to buy myself a Hakko FX-888 at some point this winter, I continue to get by against all odds with a pencil-type soldering iron I bought at Radio Shack sometime in the 80's. You'll also want some kind of solder flux. I have a flux pen (looks kind of like a highlighter) and it works great.

This first shot at things was going to take a prototype approach in case I had any wiring incorrect. A 1Mbit and a 4 Mbit flash chip were soldered to the SOIC to DIP adapter. I followed the Curious Inventor's most excellent instructions for soldering these fine pitch components like I did when I built my GoodFET.

And here is how it came out. The stuff that looks like water droplets on there is just some flux that didn't burn off. This is way bigger than actual size, BTW. 4 Mbit on the left, 1 Mbit on the right.

Not Bad, Given My Crappy Eyesight

I would figure out only later that I screwed up the chip on the right: the 1MBit part. See how this is a 16 DIP breakout and yet there are 24 connections to solder to? The rightmost pads don't actually connect to anything. They are apparently there just to mess with people's heads.

Undaunted, I next built up my cable to go from the console to the breadboard. It is easy to build up your own insulation-displacement flat ribbon cables as you can see here. All you need is a vise or some kind of flat clamp to apply even pressure across the connector as the insulation is displaced in each contact (hence the name, Insulation Displacement Connector). It actually takes a decent amount of force to press these on, so don't think you can do it with your fingers or mash it on with a screwdriver. That will just ruin the connector and make you angry.

Of course, Davis would throw a wrench into things. The connection on the back of the console doesn't leave room for the top clip on the IDC connector or the key that makes sure you get the orientation right. I had to pull the top clip off and use an Exacto knife to shave the extraneous plastic bits off. That got the console side of the cable done. On the other side, I tinned the wires and soldered them to some 0.1" breakout headers stuck through a piece of perfboard. This gave me something that was fairly robust with lots of flexibility for future prototyping.

Turned Out Pretty Well, I Must Say

Next I had to wire things up. Based on the datasheet and the expansion port pinout, I came up with this pinout to connect the console to the flash memory chip.

Console Pin   45DB0x1 Pin
1 - SS        4 - CS*
2 - SCLK      2 - SCK
3 - MOSI      1 - SI
4 - MISO      8 - SO
7 - RST       3 - RESET*
14 - VCC      6 - VCC
14 - VCC      5 - WP*
16 - GND      7 - GND

And now a word of caution:

Before you get all excited and start wiring something yourself, be aware of this: in the pinout diagram above, Pin 1 is shown on the bottom right. If you use an IDC connector like I did, Pin 1 will be on the top right. So the blue edge of the cable that normally represents Pin 1 will actually be Pin 2, the second wire over will be Pin 1, etc. Now don't go blaming me for the confusion. Way back when I was determining the pinout, I picked Pin 1 as I did because that one has the square pad on the circuit board where the rest are round (proof here). So I called that pin to be Pin 1 because Davis did. Now we are stuck with that. Just remember that the console pin numbers shown above correspond to the diagram at the top of this post and you should be fine.

I wired the cable connecting to the breadboard to the 4Mbit part for my first attempt. I then powered off the console and plugged in the cable. Note that the console only looks for the logger on powerup. If you plug it in after that, it won't be recognized. Note also that Davis recommends that you enter setup mode before popping the batteries on the console (press and hold Done, then press the '-' down arrow button).

Here is what everything looked like plugged into my breadboard.

L-R: USB to Serial Converter, Cable to Console, SOIC to DIP Breakout with Two Flash Chips

So once I hooked everything up, I powered up the console and none of the magic smoke escaped from the station or my circuit. A good sign. I then fired up Cumulus, told it to use the datalogger, and set the archive interval. I then shut Cumulus down and left it for 10 minutes, hoping to see archived data when I fired it back up.

Nada.

I did't get it. When I fired up Cumulus, I saw the LED activity lights on my USB to Serial interface flashing like crazy for some length of time, but there was no data? It didn't make sense. I thought it might have been because I started with the 4Mbit part, but it did seem to recognize the chip or the converter LED's wouldn't have been flashing like they were. I tried a bunch of things until I came across this post on the Sandaysoft forums. Just because you specify to use the datalogger on the GUI and are able to set the archive interval, that doesn't mean that it actually configures the console to use the datalogger or sets the archive interval.

Argh.

That post said you "have to" use Davis' Weatherlink software to actually activate archiving and set the interval, but that isn't exactly true. You just need the Davis serial protocol document I linked back in the original post.

Here is the magic incantations I entered.

"SETPER 1": Sets archive period to 1 minute. 1, 5, 10, 15, 30, 60, and 120 are OK too
"START": Enables the creation of archive records.

Remember you need these commands to be entered using a terminal program set to 19,200 8N1. Set half duplex to see what you are typing and make sure all commands ARE ALL IN CAPS. Like this:

Activating The Logger... Hopefully

So I gave that a shot and fired up Cumulus again. This time it spent less time looking for the data but actually showed a progress bar during the download - something it didn't do before. And then I got this.

Six Records Is More Than Zero

Success! Now ask Cumulus to show me some graphs:

First Third Party Archived Data Ever

w00t! We are Free At Last! And all it took was a few bucks in parts. You can actually build something up even cheaper than the route I took here. You could use this SOIC breakout for less than two bucks, and you might even be able to take an Exacto knife to a 2.5" laptop IDE cable you have lying around that has the correct 2mm pin spacing. Either way, you are in business for around $5 - $10. That plus the $15 Sparkfun converter, and you've got a bulletproof console interface with data logging capability. But of course it goes without saying that if you try to build one of these things and break your console in the process, then you get to keep both pieces and I will disavow all knowledge of your mission.

By the way, this is the capacity of the standard 1MBit data logger.

1 Minute Archive Interval . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 hours
5 Minute Archive Interval . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 days
10 Minute Archive Interval . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 days
15 Minute Archive Interval . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 days
30 Minute Archive Interval . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 days
60 Minute Archive Interval . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106 days
120 Minute Archive Interval . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213 days

Will I get more capacity because I'm using a 4Mbit part? I guess I'll find out in a few days. I'll let you know in a future post.

So like the post that started all this off, the title of this blog also has not one, not two, but three exclamation points. I thought it rated that. Good luck to anyone else that gives this a shot. I'll keep an eye on the comments for anybody who needs a hand.

Filling In A Few Gaps

2011-10-24T20:28:00.000-06:00

I broke my blogging log jam earlier this week with a bit of advice on How To Feed A Rabbit. As informative as that post was, I wanted to get back to something else I've been digging in to on this blog: exploring the innards of the Davis Weather Station console. There are a couple things that have been figured out since I last wrote about the thing, so let's fill in a few gaps.

Some time ago, I opened the console up and worked out the pinout on the console's expansion connector. Remember this picture? Of course you do.

Back when I published this pinout, I was left scratching my head as to what TXD1 and RXD1 did after successfully getting data out of TXD0 and RXD0. Leave it to wxforum member C2520, the guy who successfully disassembled the Davis firmware and then poured over it for a couple years to figure out how it all works (I AM NOT WORTHY!). He wrote on this post:

That's easy, USART1 is used for the cabled version. Just look at the interrupt vector table, only the cabled firmware version has an interrupt vector for USART1.

These things are obvious once you know the answer, I guess.

While we are filling in the gaps, here is another one. When I first opened up the console, I found this mysterious character:

Later on we figured out that this was the atmospheric pressure sensor, but didn't know much more than that. But we know more now. Thanks to the keen eyes of wxforum member adnadeau, the mystery was solved in this post. Borrowing some of my own verbiage from that thread...

The part is a Measurement Specialties 5534CM. Applications include "Weather control systems" according to its product page (man, I'd love to be able to control the weather). Here is its product page, here is where you can buy it, and here is some Arduino code to drive it!

The cool thing about this part is that it has a digital interface rather than an analog one I had originally guessed at. It also is factory calibrated. Davis was smart and kept things simple: the amount of A/D they have to do in the console is exactly zero. But there seems to be a price to pay for this simplicity: $27.27 for a single piece, to be exact. Good thing they are cheaper by the 1,000.

This all goes to show how good things can happen when you put some information out there. Other people either know something as well and are willing to share, or somebody sees something that you missed. I get a kick out of it every time a new piece of the puzzle gets put in place.

Speaking of which, I put in an order to Mouser Electronics last night for a new Davis-related project. So hopefully there will be some good news to share in the next two or three weeks. I already have my blog post mostly written: I'm banking on success!

How To Feed A Rabbit

2011-10-23T16:23:00.000-06:00

Boy Howdy, has it been a long time since I have blogged. I anticipated as much though. My time is very short in the summer, as I think I mentioned the last time I blogged. With the Great Landscape Redesign decided upon, I spend most of my free time outside busting ass in the summer time. I'll give you one example of that ass-busting today. Here is my secret technique for feeding rabbits.

First find a nice spot to dig a hole.

Now, start digging! This starts off pretty easy.

But life isn't always easy. You might hit the odd rock.

It might take a bit of effort, but you'll get that rock out. Aren't those little bunnies worth it?

There might be more than one rock. Don't start slacking off now!

Now get your ridiculously expensive tree planter out of the garage. Head on out to the garden and set it up around one of the trees that you have been nursing since it was just a couple inches high (the tree only took five or six years to get this size: it all went by in a blur, really).

Now take that sledge that shows up on the left side of the tree planter. Lift it up and drop it down to drive the tree planter spades in to the dirt. The sledge weighs something like 35 pounds, so hopefully you ate a good breakfast this morning (feeding rabbits is no job for wimps!). By the way, you better hope that there aren't any rocks that the spades of the tree planter will hit as you drive them down. Otherwise you'd have to dig those rocks out from under the spade so you get enough root and the tree doesn't die on you later. Boy, wouldn't that be a miserable job (ask me how I know).

OK, now that the tree is dug out, it is time to cart the tree over to the hole we dug before. My, there sure were a lot of rocks that had to be dug out of that hole.

The tree isn't going to grow in all those rocks you dug out. You're going to need good topsoil to fill it in, but where do you get the topsoil from? Good question. You can't dig it out of the garden, or you are just shooting yourself in the foot. Best to spend a pile of money to get a truck to bring some in. But what is the right amount to get trucked in? Well, considering that you are going to need a lot of dirt for all the other projects you have going on, that you live out of town, and that mileage makes up a significant proportion of the costs, you might as well get a semi-trailer load full. That is 20 square yards of dirt. Let me tell ya, whoever coined the phrase "dirt cheap" had no idea what the hell they were talking about. But think of the bunnies!

Fill in the hole with some proper topsoil. Add a little water. And prayer.

Rinse and repeat.

Now do a bit of cleanup.

There you go! Now you know all there is to feeding a rabbit. I hope you've found this useful. I've searched around on the net and haven't seen a similar approach, so I think I'm on to something pretty novel here.

What's that you say? This has nothing to do with feeding rabbits? Au contraire, mon ami! Take a look at the trees we planted last year. These trees used to have branches right down to the ground. Thar's good rabbit food, I must say.

Anyhoo, enough about rabbits. Faithful readers of my blog (if there is such a thing) might be relieved to know that I have a couple things in the works now that fall has finally arrived. I'll be putting in an order to Mouser Electronics tonight for another Davis Weather Station Hack, and I've been getting the odd batch of bread making in. Things might still be sparse for the next month or so until I can clear a logjam at work (don't get me started!), but hopefully I can get back to making this blog semi-interesting again.

This post has been brought to you by HARE: Help A Rabbit Eat.

Tartine Bread Tips and Tricks, Part 2

2011-04-24T20:57:00.001-06:00

It was over a month ago that I posted for the first time on Tartine Bread Tips and Tricks. I linked it from the Recipes from Tartine Bread Facebook group and got a pretty positive response. Well, I've been playing with my technique a little more since then and thought that you might find it interesting. If not, I'll give you your money back.

Last time I said:

One thing I'm finding is that my fridge is too cool to get much action going during the final rise. In other words, it really doesn't rise in there at all. Setting the fridge warmer to get more rise is a sure recipe for spoiling the rest of the food in there and killing me. Getting a second fridge just for this seems a little silly.

Yes, but there is a third option that I've thought of. I have a Sous Vide controller that I built myself that can hold a temperature very accurately. And it just so happens that winter is hanging on enough where I live that it still gets below freezing in the evenings. It occurred to me that I don't need a second fridge. What I need is something I can leave out in my unheated garage that will keep my dough warm enough, not cold enough. See where I'm going with this? Behold!

Baby, It's Cold Outside

On the bottom left corner, we have my Sous Vide controller. The power cord for the heater and the output of the wall wart power supply (more on this in a sec) are squeezed in past the lid of my Coleman beer cooler. The temperature probe is a little more fragile, so I threaded it through the cooler's drain spout on the lower right, and then closed off the remaining opening with Kleenex. It is all set up on a Black and Decker Workmate bench in my garage.

Rube Goldberg Would Be Proud

Here's what we've got inside. From left to right:

bread dough in a mixing bowl covered by a tea towel and plastic cap to keep drafts at bay
temperature sensor taped to a coffee mug to keep the sensor in place
light bulb for heat, clamped in a plastic vise, and controlled by my Sous Vide setup to keep an internal +46.5F (or +8C if you are metric inclined)
an old PC fan to circulate the air and keep things at an even temperature. This is powered by the wall wart power supply I mentioned above

Did this work well? No, it worked awesome. The controller kept this thing at a rock solid +8C as the temperatures dipped to around the freezing in the evening. And why this temperature? Well, I read someplace on the fantastic Sourdough Home website that suggested a temperature between 45F and 48F for a long cool rise like this. And being mathematically minded, I just took the average. Anyhoo, I left my dough in this rig from 10pm Saturday night until my bake the next morning at 9am. The only problem I've got now is that this setup isn't going to work in the summertime. Oh well. That is a problem for a later day.

Another thing that has been bugging me is that my bread is always darker on top than it is to the sides. I figured that this is because I don't have the Lodge combo cooker that is recommended in the book. All I've got is a KitchenAid dutch oven that I got for a steal at Canadian Tire this past fall. I figured that the tall sides of the DO were shielding the bread from the heat on the sides somewhat. I'd have to break down and get a combo cooker, or do the pizza stone / metal lid thing.

Or not. Here is a picture of my KitchenAid dutch oven. A combo cooker is really just an upside-down dutch oven. I noticed that the concave indentation below the handle would provide a stable surface for the dutch oven if the handle wasn't there. And it is just one screw on either side of the handle holding it on. I had that bad boy off in a minute.

Am I the First Person to Hack A Dutch Oven?

I first took my boule out of the cooler and turned it upside on top of a piece of parchment paper I had pre-cut to the shape of the lid. Then I made a deep X-shaped cut and used the parchment as a sling to set it on to my smoking hot dutch oven lid, blurrily seen below sitting on top of my stove. The stuff on top of the boule is wheat bran, which I use to prevent sticking instead of the wheat flour / rice flour combo recommended in the book (I think the wheat bran looks better and tastes better to boot).

Probably...

I had a bit of a screwup here. The bread was heavy enough that it wanted to spill over the sides of my parchment sling as I carried it from the countertop to the lid. That partly explains why the cut from top left to bottom right is so ridiculously open. But only partly. I was able to build up the tension very nicely after the final shaping, and the overnight rise in the cooler vs. what I normally get in the fridge surely helped as well.

Things were looking good. I put the big part of the dutch oven over top of the lid and put the whole thing in the 500F oven. I dropped the temperature to 450F, waited 20 minutes and went in to take the lid off. Here is what I got.

WOW!

You heard me. WOW! We are talking some good looking oven spring here. And I was pumped to see that a puff of steam escaped when I took the lid off. And in that moment, it all made sense. Inverted, the dutch oven is able to prevent the steam from escaping out the top. When sitting as it normally does, the steam rises and sneaks out the gap in the oven's lid.

Back into the oven it went. This is what I got 25 minutes later.

WOW WOW!

WOW WOW is right! A beautiful deep brown all the way around, and just burned a bit at the thin edges of the ears. Without a doubt, the best looking loaf I'd every pulled out of my oven. And this was Try #18 at making this bread. I set it on the cooling rack and was delighted to hear the song of the crackling crust as it cooled.

And no bread porn would be complete without a crumb shot.

Oh Baby

Nice and open. Notice the funny curve underneath the bread though. This is from sitting on the inverted concave surface of the oven's lid. It actually makes the bread easier to cut through because the knife cuts through the top arch of the bottom crust first and then goes down progressively, rather than hitting all of the tough crust at one time.

And the pluses just keep on coming. The KitchenAid lid actually has a bunch of dimples on the concave part of the lid, probably so that steam condensing on the lid collects on the dimples and drops back in to the stew, or whatever. For upside-down bread making, it creates a bit of a gap between the bottom crust and the heat coming up from below. This does a great job in preventing scorching of the loaf's bottom.

All this wouldn't mean much if the taste wasn't there. But the taste was great. The crust was crispier and more flavorful than I'd ever tasted. The crumb wasn't too far different from previous efforts, but perhaps it was a bit lighter than previous attempts because of the great rise I got.

All in all, I was ecstatic. I got more rise and oven spring than ever. I got a beautiful deep brown crust and a flavorful crumb. If you are making this bread and just putting your boule in the fridge overnight, you have got to try to find a way to do it in the range of 45F - 48F. And if you are using a regular dutch oven, take a close look and see if there isn't some way to use it upside down. Do both of these things, and then thank me later. If you are going to all the trouble of making Tartine bread, it is worth it to go the extra mile to make it the best you can with tricks like these.

Both of these tweaks to my technique easily added up to the best bread I'd ever made. I don't know if this is the best bread I can make, but I have the feeling I'm getting pretty close. And that feels good.

"No User Serviceable Parts Inside" Means Nothing To Me

2011-04-17T21:26:00.000-06:00

So two guys pass each other in midair. The guy going down says "Hey, do you know anything about parachutes?" The guy going up says "No. Do you know anything about gas stoves?"

I was reminded of this slightly paraphrased joke during this weekend's hack. Meet my nemesis.

I Hate You

This is the control panel on our gas stove. Lately it had decided to start fading out on us. Pressing on the left side of the panel would bring the display back, but only temporarily. Classic loose connection type of problem. Since this was happening more frequently, and since I depend on this display's clock to keep an eye on how long I brush my teeth in the morning, I decided it was high time to tear my gas stove apart.

And tear it apart I did. The burners came off first. It takes about an 1/8th of a turn, but they basically just spin right off (once you get past the years of burned on crud sealing the burner to the stovetop, of course) I left the wires for the igniters attached to the burners and just laid them on the stovetop. Taking the burners off uncovered six screws that needed removing. I took those out and then was able to slide the stovetop forward and then up to detach it from the rest of the appliance. Six more screws held the front panel of the stove on, and they were easy to get at once the top was off. The front cover on which the control panel was screwed to came off easily after removing the four knobs controlling the gas flow.

There are three connectors at the back of the control panel: two on the left and one on the right. I pulled those off and and then took off the four screws holding the control panel to the front panel. The control panel was now freed from its confines.

It turns out the control panel is actually a set of two circuit boards that were joined electrically by a couple flexible connectors, and mechanically by a couple of plastic clips that looked like they'd surely break if I tried to pry them open. Hmmmm.....

Then I gave the control panel a shake and heard a rattle. Not good:circuit boards don't rattle. The rattle was coming from behind the keypad. I pried away the six plastic clips holding the control panel to the keypad and was rewarded with a small piece of plastic dropping out. I saw right away that this piece of plastic transferred a press on the up arrow of the keypad to a switch on the control board below. Hmmmmm...

If I couldn't fix this, I was screwed. So I first tried to glue the piece on with a bit of Krazy Glue. They call it Krazy Glue because you must be batshit-crazy if you think that stuff will work on anything. It did nothing besides make a mess and give me a headache. Time to turn to Old Faithful.

Love This Stuff

Of course it wasn't quite this easy. It seems that some of the epoxy had mixed together near the tip of the applicator and it was almost impossible to get the cap off. But I prevailed. I mixed up a bit of epoxy and put it on the plastic thingie, let it dry a bit, and put the keypad back on. Seemed to work. So far, so good. Back to the problem at hand.

Like I mentioned, I didn't want to take a chance on breaking the plastic clips holding the two circuit boards together. I figured the intermittent operation was just a poor contact on one of the three connectors at the back of the control panel anyway. So I pushed them on and off a few times to clear the connectors of any crap, and pushed the pins off center a bit to ensure they'd make better contact when the connector was put back on. I applied power back to the stove, wiggled the connectors, and everything looked solid. Even my up arrow was working (thanks, LePage). I put the stove back together and everything worked great.

For a couple hours. FML.

So this morning, I took the damn thing apart again. This time I'd have to dive into the circuit board sandwich held together by those plastic clips. I held my breath, pryed the first one a bit, and it came off! Without breaking in half! Miracles can happen! What about the second clip? It came off cleanly too! Time to buy a lottery ticket: I am on a freakin' roll here!

To make a long story less long, I saw the cracks around the solder joint on several connector pins within seconds of prying the two circuit boards apart. It was just a few minutes work to rework these and the rest of the connector pins. I put everything back together and so far, so good: I have been basking in the stove's green vacuum flourescent display for over ten hours now. And I suspect it will be glowing just as brightly as I brush my teeth under its watchful eye tomorrow morning (I know you are having trouble wrapping your head around all this. It might have helped to explain that I brush my teeth for ten minutes in the morning at the dining room table while surfing around from my laptop. Don't you judge me.)

So what can we learn from all of this?

Taking something apart goes quicker the second time around.
You will always have to take something apart a second time because you won't find what was really wrong the first time.
In general, I am cursed. But sometimes I get lucky.

On the bright side, my spare time is pretty cheap. Had I failed to find the problem, I'd have had to have gone to someplace like this and be out of pocket for $168.40. Yay for ignoring those warning labels.

Crunching The Numbers

2011-04-11T21:25:00.000-06:00

In my last post, I showed how I had used my $50 logic analyzer to sniff the initialization sequence of the Davis VP2 weather console's CC1021 RF chip. This was an important step in figuring out how to build a compatible receiver. The one problem was that there were a lot of 1's and 0's in there but not a lot of real numbers. Figuring out the numbers requires digging into the datasheet, looking at the formulas, and seeing if what gets spit out makes sense. Generally, they do.

The values for the various registers are taken from my last post. The datasheet references for each formula used in the calculation are shown in the third column. Values in grey are important. Why? Because it is those values that you can plug into SmartRF Studio7 to get compatible register definitions for other chips, such as the CC1110F that lies at the heart of the Pretty Pink Pager.

But "hey", I hear you thinking. "What about that row in there colored yellow?" Good question. Glad you asked. If you look at the Davis FCC certification report for the Vantage Vue that I discussed here, you'll see a spectrum picture that looks like this.

Hmmmmm....

The center frequency of this carrier is supposed to (nominally) be 902.355 MHz. But if you look at the numbers I calculated during the initialization, I get 902.382375 MHz. That is a 27 kHz error, and that is quite a bit for a narrowband device. So I'm not exactly sure right now what is going on. I am speculating right now that this is just a test signal and doesn't have anything to do with the normal hop sequence, but I don't know that for sure. There will be one way to find out: write some code for the Pretty Pink Pager and see if I can see it.

Got time for one more picture? Great.

Hmmmmm... #2

Most people, yours truly included, thought that the separation between the frequency hops would be a nice even multiple of 500 kHz. Well, 914.9 MHz - 902.35 MHz is not an even multiple of 500 kHz. So it would seem that they jostle the spacing around somewhat. That is what I was seeing when I first uncovered the frequency hopping sequence, but I wasn't sure if that was really what was going on or if I was doing the calculations wrong. Looks to be the former.

Now here is a different issue. Winter is finally coming to a close. That means I have to get off my butt and get some work done outside on weekends before the snow flies once again. And that is going to mean a lot less time for weather station hacking. I'll try to get some work done now and then over the summer, but don't be too surprised to see the frequency of posts here drop off a bit. Such is life.

Having said all that, I'd be ecstatic is somebody were to jump in and pick this up. Progress would certainly be quicker with an extra set of hands helping out. I suspect I'll get there otherwise though, but it will just take a little longer.

Peeling Back The Layers of the Onion

2011-04-03T12:39:00.002-06:00

In my "past life", I worked with a guy who was designing a Phase Lock Loop (PLL) for a receiver that HAD to work if the company could possibly succeed (the company eventually failed, but for other reasons). The chip at the heart of the receiver would be critical to the design's success. The data rate that this thing operated at was insane, and that in turn drove the complexity of the chips he had to decide from. He had been in the business for long enough to know that the datasheet only told part of the story. Once the chip was decided on, he knew he was in for the long haul of peeling back the layers of the onion to get to the nitty-gritty of how the chip was designed. Only then could be built the rest of the support circuitry up around that chip.

I'm feeling a little that way as I dig into the wireless transmissions between the Davis weather station ISS and the VP2 console that receives its data. One of the things I really needed to know if I had any hope of building a compatible receiver was to understand how the console configures the key internal registers of the CC1021 chip. Regular readers will know that I recently picked up a $50 logic analyzer and have been using that to analyze the console's frequency hopping sequence (this was a lot easier than using a scope to figure out the chip configuration between hops). What I found during those exercises was that, quite sensibly, the console was only configuring the registers it needed to when it needed to. I wasn't seeing some important registers configured on a regular basis. It seemed reasonable to assume that these registers were configured as the console was coming out of reset.

Now the problem with buying a $50 logic analyzer is that you don't necessarily get the world's most powerful triggering capabilities. This unit's weak spot is serial triggering. The CC1021 is configured via an SPI serial interface. I knew the bit pattern I wanted to see because I knew which registers would be configured, but I couldn't teach my little analyzer to recognize the bit pattern. I tried powering on the console with the analyzer connected and hoping for the best, to no avail: I ran out of capture memory way before I got to any interesting activity on the SPI bus. I tried various trigger conditions but couldn't set up what I needed. There is enough crap going on during initial power-up that I couldn't find what I wanted. Things started to look a little grim.

But there was still hope. Anyone who has a VP2 knows that when you power it on, you get this:

BEEP
Pause
BEEP with associated LCD display test
Pause
"CONGRATULATIONS..." text thanking you for buying from Davis
"RECEIVING FROM..." text that starts the configuration

So what I tried doing was triggering my analyzer with a very simple setup that just waited for the MOSI data line to be low and the clock and chip select lines to be high (Note that Davis doesn't seem to use chip select when talking to the radio, but the line does toggle up and down with some valid SPI activity on it as the console boots up - not sure why yet). That looks like this on the analyzer's user interface:

Needle in a Haystack Time

Next, I started the capture at various times as the console was powering up. Doing so on initial powerup gave me nothing useful. Same with starting the capture between the first and second beeps. Starting it as the "CONGRATULATIONS..." text scrolls by is interesting, as that gives some data on how the console starts looking for an ISS (breaking that down will have to wait fo another day). I said "interesting", but I still wasn't getting the information I wanted. The key registers I needed to see still weren't showing up in the capture.

It wasn't until I triggered the capture right after the second beep during the LCD test. This is the capture I refer to as "The Holy Grail".

"I Seek the Grail."

The key thing to see here is the value "0x5" on the MOSI line. This is the console's processor writing to the CC1021's RESET register. I had never seen this before in previous captures. The next register it writes to ("0x7") is the SEQUENCING register. Another new one! It seems I had finally caught what I was looking for.

So let's make a long story less long. I had captured all of the data from reset to the console's calibration of its Phase Locked Loop (there's that word again). I put all the data into a spreadsheet and then went through the long and laborious process of documenting what all those register reads and writes actually mean. Here is what they mean:

Yes, it did take forever to type all of that in, thanks for asking.

But here's the thing: in the time it took to enter all that stuff, I was able to wrap my brain about what Davis is trying to do here, both in the configuration and in the sequencing. It also forced me to really dig in to the CC1021 datasheet. So much so, in fact, that I saw several things that Davis seems to do either unnecessarily or just plain incorrectly. Stuff like:

Setting the transmit PA power to zero every chance they get and then some. I understand common code in subroutines, but this stuck me as a little much.
They reset the CC1021 in Byte 4 and 5, and then do so pointlessly again in Byte 10 and 11
They write all 1's to a RESET register at Byte 16 that is self-clearing anyway. If you aren't writing some 0's to this register, ur doin' it wrong.
They write to register VGA4 in Byte 68 and then read it back in Byte 70. Why? These settings don't appear to be volatile. Did they think the chip was going to forget?

Davis engineers who are reading this (and I'm sure there are some): no hard feelings... right?

I do need to take another pass through this spreadsheet to catch any errors that I made first time around (the thought of pouring through it again right this second makes me violently ill). Let me know in the comments if you see anything I've screwed up.

A quick check against the datasheet will show that all the register information you need to build a compatible receiver around say, something like this, is here in this spreadsheet. There are a couple more things I still want to do yet, though:

verify the CC1021 oscillator frequency in the console
take the oscillator frequency and the register settings and run through the various frequency and bandwidth calculations in the datasheet to make sure I get the numbers I expect
take a closer look at the console's signal acquisition process from the ISS

Stay tuned...

The Relentless Pursuit of Perfection

2011-03-27T20:35:00.000-06:00

I have been accused in the past of being a perfectionist. I don't think the moniker fits, but I do try hard to do well in the tasks I take on. And I must say, baking a good loaf of bread is quite a challenge. As I detailed in an earlier post on the topic, making good bread is as much an art as it is a science. There are a lot of different things going on in sourdough, which is surprising given that it is as basic as a bread can be: flour, water, and salt. No instant yeast, no eggs, no extras.

The essence of the bread's flavor comes from the starter. The starter is a mix of flour and water that has had the good fortune of some wild yeast stopping by and taking root. There are two kinds of bacteria that are at work here, and the two contribute a different flavor to the bread depending on their proportion. I can't be assed to look up the details of what they're called, and which contributes to the sour flavor and which contributes to more rise. But I do know that I wanted a little more sour flavor than I got out of Try #12.

So for Try #14, I took the same approach as Try #12. To my half batch of Basic Country Bread from the Tartine Bread book, I did as before and built my leaven from only a half teaspoon of my starter that is now being fed twice a day (see here on why you want to use so little starter if you want more sour). The smell of that starter has only the slightest hint of sourness to it after letting it reach its peak and letting it come down a bit. But this time, I also added a half teaspoon of pretty powerful smelling starter from my discard container. My thought was that I'd get the good rise I did on Try #12 thanks to the vigorous starter, and some extra sour flavor from the discard. I also presumed that the discard wouldn't do much to change the rise time of the dough since it is pretty burned out by now. In a nutshell, the fresh starter would give me rise and the old starter would give me flavor.

I whipped up a batch yesterday and otherwise followed the same guidelines as Try #12 (Try #13 was the disaster I had trying to push a 40% rise during the bulk ferment: let us never speak of it again). My rise with this extra starter was actually a coupler hours longer this time than last time. Remember, I am going for a 30% rise and will wait as long as I need to to get it. Was the rise slowed somehow by the addition of the old starter? I don't think so. I think it is more likely that it was cooler in the house this weekend, so that just slowed everything down.

Let's cut to the chase, shall we? How did it turn out?


Try #14

I got my best rise yet this time around with a crumb that is nice and open. But did I get more of a sour flavor? Indeed! The 50-50 mix of the starters gave noticeably more tang to Try #14 than Try #12 without any old starter. The bread went great with some eggs done over easy and some turkey bacon on the side. It was stellar toasted in the toaster oven with some ham, old cheddar cheese, and grainy mustard on top. It will be interesting to see how the flavor develops as well: we've found that the sour flavor builds a day or two after baking.

I might try even more old starter next time around just for grins, but I now think I'm at the point where I can call this bread a job well done.

Davis Frequency Hopping Sequence Revealed!

2011-03-20T21:34:00.002-06:00

I finally got my Open Workbench Logic Sniffer (ie logic analyzer) and got a chance to try it out this weekend. It is a powerful little device for $50. There's also been some great work done on the VHDL code that gives it some powerful triggering capabilities equivalent to that of an HP unit not that many years gone by. I like it.

I could have walked to Hong Kong in the time it took to get this

First thing I did was hook it up to the Davis VP2 console and see if I could sniff the configurations between the processor and the RF chip. And whaddya know.

Purdy

Astute readers will see (click to embiggen) that the first two bytes decoded on the MOSI line (0x03, 0x02) sync with that in my earlier investigation using my scope. It works! Needless to say, using the logic sniffer goes much quicker.

One thing that was quite nice with the logic analyzer client is the built in protocol analyzers. You tell it what pins map to what signal lines for a given protocol (SPI in this case), and it comes up with a table much like my first post on the topic. It shows the time offset from the trigger for the start of each byte and the decoded value. You can then export the data to a CSV file. Nice.

The problem I had was that the analyzer's buffer is nowhere near long enough to capture the data across 51 frequency hops. About the most I was able to capture at this rate was a half second, and the station takes 51 * 2.5 seconds = 127.5 seconds to go through them all. The answer was to use the console's display of what frequency index it was on (Hold Temp and then press Humidity, then 2nd Chill). I'd just hit the trigger button on the analzyer between a transmission, analyze and save the data, rinse and repeat. The console goes faster than I can do this, so it took many passes through the sequence before I had all 51 entries. And here they are.

Here are what the columns mean:

Chan is the channel number as displayed on the console
FREQ_2A, FREQ_1A, and FREQ_0A are the three registers that need to be configured in the CC1021 RF chip to set its frequency
Index is the value in the range of 0 - 50, where 0 represents the lowest frequency of 902.5 MHz and 50 represents 927.5 MHz. The channels are spaced 500 kHz apart.
RF Frequency is the nominal RF frequency the station receives on.

This sequence is for Transmitter ID 1. Other transmitter IDs will have a different sequence, though I think they all share the same set of 51 frequencies. Note that I said "think" there. If you run the calculations based on the formulas in the CC1021 datasheet, you don't get the nice round nominal numbers shown above. There are some significant frequency offsets that show up. It is possible that the different transmitter IDs use a different set of frequencies. Davis would actually have room within the frequency band they use to do this. Though it might be possible, I don't think it is probable. I'm going to have to dig into this a little more.

The other thing I need to do is figure out how to capture the initial configuration of the radio as the chip comes out of reset. My half second capture length on the analyzer makes this kind of tricky. You can specify a trigger delay in the analyzer client, but it doesn't give the units for the delay and the documentation isn't great. There is also a serial trigger that is supposed to sort-of work that I'm going to give a try. I know the bit pattern of the registers I'm interested in, so I should be able to set a trigger based on that bit pattern and see the subsequent value written to that register.

One more thing: now that I know the register configurations and the frequency hopping sequence, I thought it would be trivial to find the spot in the ROM where this stuff is stored. No luck. I tried searching based on the register sequence, the frequency index, etc. If anyone wants to try their luck in poking around FLASH.BIN, give it a shot and let me know in the comments if you have any luck. This console is still managing to hang on to some of its secrets, at least for now.

Anyway, it is early days and there is more to come. It's gotta get done to have any chance of success at building an alternative ISS receiver from a Pretty Pink Pager.

Tartine Bread Tips and Tricks

2011-03-19T13:52:00.001-06:00

For reasons I don't understand, I started getting interested in being able to make really good food a year or two ago. Perhaps it is all the traveling I've done that has given me the opportunity to try all kinds of different things. Or perhaps it is just the idea of gastronomical hacking that appeals to me. Dunno.

It was about a year ago that I put together my Sous Vide rig, and My Lovely Wife and I had many fantastic meals from it since then. Going to restaurants doesn't hold that much appeal to me anymore, because after a meal I often feel that I could have cooked better at home. I don't consider myself a foodie, either. In my mind, a foodie is somebody who goes to some expensive restaurant to try wild and exotic things without lifting a finger themselves. That is not me. What appeals to me is using simple techniques to create something amazing. And that is why I like Sous Vide. It is almost foolproof. Anybody can do it.

But I also like bread. Real bread. I have been to places like France and Italy, where bread is a key part of the culture. The bread I had in Italy was easily my favorite. The crisp crust and the big holes on the inside (what I'd later learn is referred to as an "open crumb") hooked me and hooked me bad. Toast this stuff, brush on a little olive oil, rub a half a garlic clove over it, and then top it with fresh chopped tomatoes and a little kosher salt. Heaven on a plate.

Bread where I live is typical mass-market North American crap, suited for little more than making egg salad sandwiches. This just wasn't acceptable to me any longer, with the memories of the bread I had in Italy lingering in my brain. Thinking that I had the protein thing down with Sous Vide, I decided to take on another popular macro-nutrient: carbohydrates. I began a quest to make good bread.

I can do better. I know I can.

As always, it starts with research. I had always been under the impression that great bread required a wood-fired oven and other things out of the reach of mere mortals. But Google quickly brought me to sites like Northwest Sourdough (Free Ebook!), BreadTopia (Great Videos!), Sourdough Home (Clearest Explanations on the Net), and of course The Fresh Loaf (Amazing Forum!). I then bought myself a couple of books off of Amazon: Peter Reinhart's Bread Baker's Apprentice and Chad Robertson's Tartine Bread. I was taken by the bare-bones approach and beautiful pictures in Tartine Bread. This is where I would start - Tartine's Basic Country Bread. And, to make a long story short, this is where I would fail in eleven straight attempts to make a good artisan sourdough bread.

Where Sous Vide was pure science and easy to get right, I was finding that there was much more of an art to making bread. I was having a terrible time trying to get the right combination of rise, texture, and flavor. I would tweak this and tweak that trying to get a bread that lived up to the pictures in the book. Then I hit what I simply refer to as Try #12, where things started to come together and I felt I was getting a decent grip on the many variables involved. So I thought I would jot some things down that might help out other aspiring bakers trying this recipe. I'm not going to go into all the nitty gritty details of how to make this bread. If you want a rough idea of what is involved in baking the bread itself, you could start here. A great thread on the care and feeding of sourdough starter can be found here.

My biggest problem with Tartine Bread right from the start was the, erm... starter. We left it on top of the fridge and fed it once per day in a ratio of 1 part old starter to 1 part new flour to one part water, by volume. That was a recipe for failure. Before refreshing it, the starter always smelled very sour. This was a sign that it was burning itself out. We weren't feeding enough to maintain a healthy culture that is key to a good rise. This explains the many "bricks" that I made. So we still leave the starter out on the top of the fridge, but we feed it twice a day in a 1:1:1 ratio by weight. This ratio and frequency seems to be recommended by most successful bakers. We've been keeping a healthy starter with just 5 to 10 grams of each element to keep the amount of starter discard to a minimum. However, ever since we found this amazing pizza crust recipe, we have the opposite problem: how do we get more discard to keep up with our hunger for great pizza!?!? By the way, if you try that crust, you'll want this awesome sauce to go with it.

The second problem that I had was with the rise during the bulk fermentation. I had fallen into the trap of following Robertson's guidelines for time (three to four hours) and temperature (80F). I went to great lengths to try to duplicate this environment exactly. I used my oven as a proofing chamber with my Sous Vide temperature controller turning a light bulb on and off to keep 80F exactly. A small DC powered fan circulated the air within to ensure an even temperature throughout. My temperature probe was twist-tied to the oven grill to give enough thermal mass to ensure accurate readings. I did all of this, and I never got the 20%-30% rise he talked about in the book in that time frame. I thought it was just some peculiarity with my approach and would give up on the bulk fermentation rise when it looked like things weren't going anywhere.

This is just wrong, and he sort of says so but doesn't make it obvious. Here is probably the most important thing I figured out after 11 tries:

It isn't the time or the temperature that is critical. It is the percentage rise.

The big thing about Try #12 was that I figured I would wait for that 30% rise no matter what. It was just a bit of flour and water, after all. Try #12 just sat on the counter with some plastic wrap over the bowl to prevent the surface from drying out. I used a tip from the Recipes from Tartine Bread Facebook Group and did a S&F (Stretch and Fold) every half hour for the first two hours and then a more gentle S&F every hour after that. I would do this for as long as it would take. And it took five hours, but I finally got the 30% rise I wanted and, subsequently, the best bread I'd ever made.

Judging the rise isn't straightforward if you don't do the bulk fermentation in a steep sized container with graduated marks on it. All I have is a glass mixing bowl. So all I did was get a piece of masking tape along the side of my bowl, put it on a scale, and added water 100 grams at a time. 100 grams = 100 mL, so I was basically marking off a measuring cup.

You've got to work with what you've got

After the autolyse, I put the dough in my mixing bowl and use the backside of a wet spoon to flatten the dough out. That gives me the initial volume. Multiply that volume by 1.3 or whatever rise you are after, and you know when to stop. Simple.

Or not. I was having a bit of a problem with parallax errors. In other words, the level of the dough in the bowl changes if your eye isn't lined up properly with the surface of the dough. So what I do is measure the height of the final rise point on my bowl and measure that same height onto my dough blade (actually a plastic drywall knife).

Precision is a big deal with me

So as my dough starts to reach the point where it is getting to the end of its rise, I stick my dough blade at the back of the bowl and line up the tape with my final rise point on the front. That lines my eye up straight across. When the dough hits that line, I'm done my bulk fermentation.

Parallax be gone!

The next problem I stumbled with was the initial shaping. Robertson is terribly imprecise here, and there are no good pictures to give you a really good idea of what the right amount of tension during shaping is. It wasn't until I saw this video linked from TFL that made it all very clear. Watch this video. And then watch it again. It gets good around 1:20.

Other small tips that work very well for me:

Don't overwork the dough when you first mix it. Just work it enough to combine all the ingredients together well. Then stop.
Cover everything all the time. I cover my leaven after mixing it with a bit of cling wrap. I cover my bowl during the bulk ferment on the counter and the final rise in the fridge using one of those shower-cap like bowl covers like this. This prevents crusts from forming on the dough surface at any point in the process.
When adding the salt, don't just dump it on top of the dough and then dump in the extra bit of water. Mix the salt and water together first, dissolving as much of the salt as possible. Then dump that into the dough and mix. Speaking of salt, I find the bread a little salty for my tastes. Ever notice that you are kind of thirsty after a slice of bread? In the half batches I make, I cut back the salt to 8 grams instead of the 10 grams he calls up.
Try wheat bran instead of the 50-50 mix of wheat flour and rice flour that Robertson suggests in preventing the dough from sticking to the towel during the final rise. This is what Jim Lahey uses for his no-knead bread.
Scoring the loaf with an X instead of a square just seems to work better for me, for some reason. I use a razor blade with a bit of spray oil to minimize sticking, and I make deep cuts. I don't go for pronounced ears by making shallow angled cuts because these thin ears just turn into pure carbon when the bread is toasted. And we toast this bread a lot.

Throughout the book, Robertson writes about how you're supposed to be flexible as you go based on the signs the dough is giving you. And there's the rub. If you haven't made a good loaf of bread before, you don't have the instinct to know when the dough is ready to move on to the next stage or not. How do you know what is good and bad when you don't know what good and bad are? Hopefully some of the tips here will help people get on the road to good bread that much sooner. It is worth the effort.

My success lately has been good, but I'm still experimenting. One thing I'm finding is that my fridge is too cool to get much action going during the final rise. In other words, it really doesn't rise in there at all. Setting the fridge warmer to get more rise is a sure recipe for spoiling the rest of the food in there and killing me. Getting a second fridge just for this seems a little silly. So what I'm trying this weekend is pushing the rise during the bulk ferment to 40% from 30% and seeing what happens. I might also try sticking with a 30% rise and just leaving it in the fridge for several days. That would likely help develop more sour flavor in the final product that I'd like to have. I have already pulled a few tricks like using the starter after it has peaked and started to fall back a bit, and by using a mere half teaspoon of starter in my half batch of leaven to add time to the process to try to bump the sourness a bit. But I'd still like more. Adding a higher percentage of whole wheat flour or maybe adding in some rye flour are other possibilities.

I'll leave you with one final picture: my friend, Try #12

Success At Last

Update: I mentioned above that I was pushing for a 40% rise this time. FAIL. The dough seems to hit equilibrium at around 30% with this hydration and doesn't go any higher. Now I know why Robertson recommends what he does. The moral of the story when working at this hydration is to wait it out until you get a rise from 20 - 30%, but don't get greedy and expect more.

My Surreal Life

2011-03-17T07:34:00.000-06:00

I'm typing this at around 35,000 feet, on the second of two flights home and will paste it into my blog when I get back. It is always a good feeling coming back. And this was an interesting trip.

I picked up a Nook Color e-Reader at Barnes and Noble. We don't have B&N where I'm from and I took the opportunity on this state-side trip to pick one up. I was thinking that the chances were pretty good of picking one up when I walked into the store based on the reviews I'd read. It was a little bigger than I thought it would be, but the screen on this thing is fantastic and the capacitive touch screen is excellent. The decision to plunk down the cash was surprisingly easy. And I consider myself a pretty frugal guy.

There has been some pretty cool stuff happening on the hacking front with the NC (Nook Color) that turns this $250 device into almost a mini-iPad. Just this past weekend, an intrepid group of hackers seems to have gotten Bluetooth going on it as icing on the cake (Hello GPS). Now I need to pick up a decently fast microSD card (Class 2 just won't do it) and make it dance. Android Honeycomb is sounding a bit shakey on it right now, so trying that is likely going to wait a few weeks until the official source code drops from Google. In the meantime, I'll probably play with Froyo. The great thing about the NC is that it treats whatever is on the microSD slot as the primary boot device. So if you've got a custom ROM properly configured on the SD card, it preferentially boots to that rather than its internal ROM. No JailBreaking required.

Another thing I did was max out my liquor exemption again. This time around I picked up 750ml of Godiva Chocolate Liquor and 375ml of Peach Brandy for My Lovely Wife. Booze is a relative steal in the US, so I try to bring something back whenever I get the chance.

But on to the events of today. First thing this morning, I found myself in an industry roundtable listening to some major CEO's of the business talk about where they are at and where they are headed. I was pretty amused by some of the subtle and not so subtle shots they were taking at each other. After the roundtable, we talked to some vendors, got taken out to lunch by another vendor, and then went on to talk to yet more vendors. It was a good change for me since I'm usually doing stuff more technically focused than this.

Mid-afternoon came and it was time to grab a cab to the airport. The ride itself was pretty exciting. Driven by a middle-Eastern Mario Andretti, we got through downtown and to the airport in record time. There was a bit of a lull in the excitement during check-in and security. That is always a good thing though. Got to the gate with time to spare, just in time to see that my flight was delayed. The delay was 20 minutes, cutting in to the two hour gap to the follow-on flight. Still lots of time, or so one would think.

We got off the plane and got down to the immigration area where a huge mass of humanity was gathered. I had never seen so many people packed into immigration there, and I've been through there a lot. My heart started to beat a little quicker as I worried about missing my flight. Whether I was supposed to or not, I went into a separate, smaller lineup where another small commotion was just sorting itself out. A worker in the floor above must have somehow slipped and he came crashing down through the suspended ceiling right into the immigation area. I got there just after he had dusted himself and got back to work. It was a little surreal to watch the security people cordoning off the area with big cardboard Inukshuks.

I breezed through customs and got down to Baggage Carousel 10 to get my checked bag. I waited. And waited. And waited. My heart was starting to beat a little faster again as I was eating into the time I had to make my connecting flight. I could tell the guy waiting next to me was getting a little worried too. So he wanders over to the next carousel and ends up finding his bag there! Sure enough, I go over there and mine shows up on the "wrong" carousel after a minute as well! Better lucky than good, so I grab my bag, get out of customs, and get through security and into the Business Class lounge in time for a bowl of minestrone soup and a plate of vegetables. Sweet.

The weekend coming up looks to be action packed. As always, I'll get in my workouts. I also want to make another loaf of bread as I seem to be getting my technique down after eleven mediocre attempts. And my logic analyzer finally got through customs and is sitting at home waiting for me. This is going to let me get a real close look at the way my weather station console is configuring the radio receiver chip. From there I'll see if I can get my Pretty Pink Pager implementation going. Should be interesting. However, I also think I need to do some work work this weekend to catch up on stuff I should have been doing during this trip. So much to do, so little time.

But that is a couple days ahead. Within the next couple hours, I'll land, drive the long dark road home, kiss my wife, play with my dog, and just be happy to be back home.

More Davis Weather Station FCC Information

2011-03-12T11:48:00.000-06:00

A few posts ago, I gave a link to the FCC test results for the Vantage Vue and mentioned how they contained some interesting information on spectrum displays, occupied bandwidth, and the like. Unfortunately I wasn't able to track this information down for the other Davis products. That was a temporary situation, fortunately. I got a PM via wxforum.net that answered all. I won't reveal the tipster in case he prefers to remain nameless.

All the Davis FCC reports can be found using their FCC ID of IR2 (that's a letter I not a one) and hitting the search button on this page https://apps.fcc.gov/oetcf/eas/reports/GenericSearch.cfm

There are a lot but I believe the VP2 ISS is IR2DWW6328, final action date 9/30/2004.

Nice find! Just be sure that once you've done the search, you click on "Detail" rather than summary. Otherwise you get a list of documents but no hyperlinks to them. Interested to see how long the ISS transmits on each frequency? This long:

You Better Be Quick About It

In other news, it turns out that today is pretty cold and a good day to be inside. A perfect time to bust out the logic analyzer and start sniffing how the Davis console configures the wireless chip. If only.

If You Only Knew How Sick I Was Of Seeing This Message

So what to do? Bake some bread, get in a couple workouts, and do some work that I brought home. The deep dive is going to have to wait another week.

DIY Wireless Davis Console Interface? Why the Hell Not?

2011-03-07T20:40:00.000-06:00

Every now and then I like to go to the Google Dashboard you get when you have a blog on Blogger. The stats tab shows some pretty cool stuff, like page hits per day, which entries are popular, and where the hits are coming from. I saw I was getting some hits from a forum in Holland that I couldn't even read. And apparently, I'm big in Australia. G'day, mates.

But now that word is spreading on the wonderfullness of hooking up a Davis Weather Station console to a PC for around $15, people are taking the idea and running with it. One of these is a ham radio guy who goes by af4ex on the wxforum site. af4ex took my idea and did me one better, by using a couple XBee modules to get a connection from his wireless console to his PC... erm, wirelessly.

Look Ma, No Wires (Except for the Four Wires)

Now I'm obviously goofing a bit there. The XBees are an elegant fit to this design. The one hooked to the console sports a LVTTL serial port that can connect directly to the Davis expansion port via a breakout board. The other end has another XBee that is plugged into something called a USB Explorer board, which is just a breakout board with an FTDI based converter like that on the Sparkfun board I discussed way back when. That gives you a USB interface to your PC. After programming the XBees from their default 9600 baud to the 19,200 baud used by default on the Davis console, the whole thing just worked. How cool is that?

af4ex did a great writeup of the design, and you should hit that link ASAP if you are at all interested. He's put this whole thing together for less than $100, which is a steal compared to what you'd pay for the Davis offering. But I know what you are thinking: if the PC collecting data goes down for a while, this solution isn't logging the data in the interim. Would I care, personally? Not for a second. Others do, so maybe the Davis logger is a better fit. But anyone going that route should know that the Davis solution isn't a panacea either.

af4ex has a great design here, but cooler yet would be to get the PC out of the equation totally and hook up to a wireless router like a LinkSys WRT54-G or (better yet) the mighty Asus RT-N16. Both of these routers have been hacked to death. Each has a LVTTL serial port available with no extra hardware required. And each of them runs or can run custom firmware like dd-wrt. Some custom code on the router and suddenly it is able to serve up web pages with your weather station information on it. This would rock hard.

Anyhoo, enough rambling. But before signing off, just a mention that my logic analyzer continues to rot in Customs. I hope to see it this week sometime, and then it will be time to really dig into the depths of my console once again.

Fix for IM-ME SpecAn Frequency Offset

2011-03-06T11:04:00.001-06:00

Twitter never used to do much for me until I started playing around with the IM-ME. I didn't set up an account until I ran into a problem with the Bus Ninja code not being available from the author's site. I saw that he had a Twitter account, so I set one up for myself and tweeted him. I got an answer back in the matter of a few minutes that he'd fixed the problem. Wow.

So when I found that my IM-ME spectrum analyzer had a frequency offset, I sent a tweet to the author wondering if he had a clue what was going on. Turns out that he did.

Well, There's Your Problem

The spectrum analyzer was designed based on the author's IM-ME and its 26 MHz crystal oscillator. Michael thought that my IM-ME might have a 27 MHz crystal, and he was bang on as the blurry picture above shows. It is unlikely that the oscillator frequency can be determined at runtime, so you've just got to be aware of it. You've got to tear the thing apart to get this code on the pager in the first place, so it would be a good idea to take note of the crystal frequency while you are in there.

Michael pointed me to where the code can be fixed. Here are a few lines out of specan.c

/* the frequency setting is in units of 396.728515625 Hz */
u32 setting = (u32) (freq * .0025206154);

So it should be just a matter of scaling the constant above by the ratio of the frequency difference to fix the problem. Like so:

u32 setting = (u32) (freq * .0025206154 * 26.0 / 27.0);

No real idea why my IM-ME has a 27 MHz oscillator where others have 26 MHz. It might be a difference in the US vs UK models, or it might be a design change they made in a rev of the hardware.

I'm just psyched that my IM-ME is pimping a 4% overclock. Boo-ya.

Maybe I Should Have Paid More for a SpecAn?

2011-03-03T21:12:00.002-06:00

So in my last post, I showed my new IM-ME based spectrum analyzer in front of my Davis VP2 wireless receiver. I speculated that what I was seeing was the ISS frequency transmissions. But it didn't look right: the frequencies were popping up below the 902.5 - 927.5 MHz range that Davis uses. How to know for sure?

As I think I've alluded to before, I do RF stuff at work and have access to a few nice toys that let me check stuff like this out.

A Good Old-Fashioned RF Throwdown

In the background, we have our champion: a Hewlett Packard 83620A synthesized signal generator good from 10 MHz to 20 GHz. It was worth around $60,000 when bought new some years ago. Locked to GPS, it would be frequency accurate to < 1 Hz. I didn't bother to lock it up because its internal ovenized oscillator is also very accurate. I'd be surprised if it was more than 100 Hz out.

In the foreground, we have our challenger: a Pretty Pink Pager flashed to work as a spectrum analyzer up to about 1 GHz. I paid £17.00 GBP on EBay. Plus £5.00 GBP for shipping. Pricey, I know, but it isn't easy to get these things North of the 49th parallel.

Let's zoom in on the displays:

Not Looking Good for the Challenger

The IM-ME should show a nice sharp spike at the generator frequency of 950 MHz. Instead, we have that area of the spectrum blank, and the spike shows up around 915 MHz. So I think I can pretty conclusively argue that my IM-ME spectrum analyzer is reading 35 MHz too low. I haven't looked at the code yet to try and figure out WHY this is. I only know that it is. 35 MHz is a kind of interesting number in the RF world though: it is half of the 70 MHz that is the IF (Intermediate Frequency) in many RF designs.

Anyway, I plan to ping the software's author and see if we can't sort this out.

One Small Step For Man...

2011-02-27T12:42:00.000-06:00

One Giant Leap for Weather Station Hacking...

I got my GoodFET circuit board in the mail on Friday. This was perfect timing: I had all the rest of the parts in-house and my weekend was free. Time to dig in.

The pin pitch of the processor and USB to serial chip are 0.5mm (i.e. very fine). Also, the resistors, capacitors, and LEDs are in an 0603 packages. That mean .06" x .03" in size. Small stuff. I remember years ago when electronics started moving to surface mount technology, and how I thought that would spell the end of the people trying to do this stuff at home. How wrong I was. Surface mount actually simplifies things in a lot of ways.

Having a pre-fabbed PCB helps a lot, of course. But you've still got to get the parts soldered on to it. A lot of people who do this use a technique where parts are placed on the board with solder paste, and then a skillet or a toaster oven is used to "reflow" the solder and make the connection permanent. I don't have one of those yet, though it is on my list of things to do. So what to do?

There is a great tutorial on constructing the board by hand at the GoodFET site. I thought about this technique, but changed it up a bit and went with that described by CuriousInventor instead. The drag solder method he described sounded easy to do. So how did I do my first time ever with this technique?

First Time for Everything

I had a board a couple hours later. Not a great job, but good enough. The sharp-eyed amongst you will notice my crooked decoupling capacitor above the processor. Wore yet (you'd think), there is a solder bridge on the bottom right corner of the FTDI chip. That one is actually there on purpose. When I was inspecting the board before putting any parts on it, I noticed a small solder bridge between these two pads. So I got my little scraper thingy and tried to clean it up. That just took one of the pads right off. It was at that time that I had a funny feeling in my stomach so I went to check the actual layout. Sure enough, those two pins were supposed to be connected. With the one pad now scraped off, the easiest way to do this was just to bridge the pins.

Once that was done, I hooked up the IM-ME to the GoodFET. I tripped across a couple things before things started working smoothly for me.

I was doing this in Arch Linux, and "python" in Arch is actually Python 3. The two aren't 100% compatible, so I was getting syntax errors. This meant editing any of the goodfet Python scripts I was going to run, changing the first line from '#!/usr/bin/env python' to '#!/usr/bin/env python2'
Any script I was going to run needed a little 'chmod +x ' done to them first.

After that, it was a simple matter of following Travis' instructions to wire up the IM-ME to the GoodFET, erase the memory of the IM-ME, and then put on something else. The obvious choice was, of course, Michael Ossman's spectrum analyzer code. The awesomeness of this piece of software cannot be overstated.

Awesomeness

Note a couple things in the picture above. The first is a chunk of ribbon cable wired into the IM-ME debug connections that terminates in a 14 pin IDC connector on the other end. This gives me a connection to the GoodFET in just a couple seconds, and it also hints that this Pretty Pink Pager is a force to be reckoned with.

Second thing to notice is the actual spectrum analzyer display. See the slight rise in signal level on the left? That is, I believe, the transmissions from the Davis Integrated Sensor Suite! The picture shows a flat line now, but that is because the IM-ME is in max hold mode. When first fired up, you see little blips coming up in scattered spots across the left side of the display. These, I believe, are individual transmissions. Leave the thing run for long enough, and you get a flat line as all the transmissions join together.

The one thing that is bugging me is that if this is indeed the Davis ISS transmissions, then the frequency shown on the analyzer is incorrect. The Davis ISS (if I understand things correctly) transmits between 902.5 and 927.5 MHz. I'm going to take the IM-ME to work tomorrow, generate a carrier at a known frequency, and see if it shows up accurately. That, and impress the hell out of my friends.

It was really great to get this going. In a few minutes with the GoodFET, I was further ahead than a couple weekends spent trying to get the Bus Pirate to program the IM-ME. But besides that, I now have a development platform that I can start trying my own stuff out on. I plan to start with the spectrum analyzer code and do my own little "Hello World" kind of thing on it. Then I can work toward something that starts picking up the transmissions from the ISS. To do this, I am going to need a better look at how the Davis console configures the radio chip's registers, and that is going to need the Open Logic Sniffer that just shipped from Hong Kong yesterday.

To wrap this up, I wanted to mention just how one Deity or another is trying to slow me down. I need to be able to run SmartRF Studio to help me sort out the register configurations on the Davis console and figure out the equivalents on the IM-ME. I already knew that the latest version, SmartRF Studio 7, didn't include support for older chips like the CC1021 in the console. At Travis' suggestion, I went to try out SmartRF Studio 6 which does have support for this chip. Unluckily for me, this crashes almost immediately in the 64 bit Windows I have on my laptop. Sigh. TI does make the code available for Studio 6, and I could try recompiling it, but I think I'll just set up a VM with XP and run it that way. Seems a simpler way to go, and I won't have to switch back and forth between Linux and Windows all the time

Things are starting to get interesting...

Circuit Board pr0n

2011-02-23T21:08:00.000-06:00

Just a quick post tonight for someone who asked how hard it would be to rework the expansion connector on the Davis VP2 console to match an XBee module pinout.

We're talking that 2x10 Through Hole Bad Boy to the Left...

Answer: Hard.

Davis Weather Station Wireless Sniffing: A Start

2011-02-21T12:24:00.000-06:00

My last post discussed my dismal failure to get my Bus Pirate to take control of my IM-ME pretty pink pager. That battle has been lost, but the war is only beginning. I have a box of newly arrived electronic components sitting on my kitchen counter. Once I get my GoodFET circuit board in the mail (hopefully this week), the battle will begin anew. Reinforcements are en-route in the form of the Open Workbench Logic Sniffer that I have on the way. This is a $50 logic analyzer that is extremely capable, thanks to some recent updates to its firmware and GUI client. Unfortunately, I am once again at the mercy of the glacial shipping out of Hong Kong. I hope to see this in my lifetime.

A Can of Electronic Whoop-Ass

Why do I need a logic analyzer? First, I'm firmly convinced that everyone needs a logic analyzer. Second, I need to understand how the Davis firmware is configuring the CC1021 RF chip in the console. That way I can replicate the configuration in the Pretty Pink Pager and hopefully grab the wireless transmissions from the ISS.

My initial understanding is that the Davis firmware does an initial full-blown configuration of the RF chip on reset, and then does a smaller configuration each time it goes to read the ISS every 2.5 seconds. Why would I suspect this? I dunno. Just a hunch.

More Interesting Than You Think - Keep Reading

The CC1021 configuration is done via a conventional SPI interface. I thought I could just use my Bus Pirate to sniff the SPI interface, but that doesn't seem to work. SPI sniffing from its interactive GUI gave me data that didn't make sense, and the binary SPI sniffing utility doesn't work at all. Drat.

So with some time on my hands (and it being -37C the morning I did this), I hooked up my scope to the expansion connector on the console and took a look. I put one channel on SCK and the other on MOSI (go here to find out what I'm talking about). As one would expect, the timing between each command per 2.5 second interval was very regular: it has to be if it wants to stay synced with the ISS transmission. I was able to use my scope's trigger delay to look at each config command and associated data byte as explained in the datasheet.

Before getting too far, I should note that the CC1021 register configuration (gain control, frequency settings, etc) are controlled over a different interface from the actual data that goes back and forth. I forgot that once and felt pretty dumb about it. The data interface isn't available at the expansion connector, but the SPI interface is. Of course I can use the STRMON command to the console to see the data coming back (or at least some of it - not sure about that yet).

After hooking up to the console, I waited for the asterisk on the LCD (indicating reception) to go away, and then triggered the scope. This way I knew I was triggering in the dead-time between ISS transmissions and I'd get the start of an ISS transmission every time. The scope display gave me SPI clock and data, and it was easy to read the binary 1's and 0's to the CC1021 and turn that into hex. After I got one command figured out, I adjusted the trigger holdoff until the next command showed up. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. Here is what I got:

Some things to note:

the values for FREQ_2A, 1A, and 0A change each round because this system does the Frequency Hopped Spread Spectrum thing that scares so many people off. There are 51 frequencies (see below) that it hops between. You can bring up a debugging screen on the console (described in the manual) that shows the index of the hop. Neat.
timing gets a little variable at the end so that last AFC command might be a duplicate. When my real logic analyzer shows up, I'll know for sure.

What is bugging me right now is that I haven't been able to find the hopping sequence in the firmware. I sniffed consecutive writes of one of the FREQ registers, as well as consecutive writes of FREQ_2A, 1A, and 0A. I had suspected these to be in an array in the firmware in one form or another, but no luck so far. I'll poke around a little more, or use brute force once the logic analyzer arrives. Either way, this is something I'll need to know if I'm going to try to attempt to build a compatible receiver.

Another items of interest. TheVantage Vue Test Results are a great find. Click on the Test Report link and look on Page 28 if you want to see the frequencies this thing hops across. Lots of other good spectrum displays for things like occupied bandwidth and the like.

Now lets bring things full circle. Near the start of this blog post, I showed a screenshot out of a hex editor in the Davis FLASH.BIN firmware that runs the console. See the first four words there? If I type "main interface reset sequencing" into Google, I get a very interesting link to a guy who coded up some stuff for an amateur satellite link that used a minor variant of the CC1021 chip used in the Davis console. Also interesting is that his work is labelled as being under the GNU General Public License, which means that the source code has to be made available upon request if copied and distributed. Now I'm certainly not accusing Davis of violating the GPL. It is much more likely that there is a common source to a recommended configuration of this chip that I need to track down yet. Gotta keep digging.

Fail Blog

2011-02-13T18:25:00.001-06:00

I threw in the towel today. I've spent the last couple of weekends trying to get my Bus Pirate to interface to the IM-ME. I got no further this week than I did last week. After a reset, the first command to Get Chip ID always works. After that, nothing works until I reset it again. I know that the lock bits are erased, or Get Chip ID wouldn't work in the first place. I've used my scope to stare at the data going back and forth. I've rewritten the code three times to send and receive the data in different ways. I've driven the IM-ME via a resistor divider network and Vcc instead of the Bus Pirate's Vpu. I've scoured the GoodFET source code (more about this in a second) to try and find something I'm doing differently. And the result is always the same. Unfortunately I am not the first to have problems with this combination, and I doubt I'll be the last. But if anyone ever does get this working, I'd love to hear about it. Drop me a comment if you want the code I've worked up so far. It is written in Python and uses PyBusPirateLite and PySerial.

There must be a way. And indeed there is. It seems all the folks into IM-ME hacking have got themselves a GoodFET.

IM-ME Hacking Done Right

This thing is like a hacker Swiss Army knife. Lots of capabilities and under active development. And Travis Goodspeed, the neighborly fellow who designed this thing, sells a bare PCB for a song. So I'm going to put the IM-ME hacking on hold for a bit while I gather up the parts to build one of these things. In the meantime, I can always try to sniff the comms between the processor in the Davis console and the radio chip, or finish reverse engineering the Davis Talk protocol. I just hope my wife's patience continues to hold.

When people ask me on Mondays what I did all weekend, I just say "I took it pretty easy." It is less complicated that way.

We Are Experiencing Technical Difficulties Beyond Our Control...

2011-02-08T19:55:00.000-06:00

Please Stand By. These are the words I'd hear when my local TV station would lose the feed of Starsky and Hutch, or whatever it was they were supposed to be showing, and show the logo of the TV station instead.

I'm going through a bit of that right now myself. I spent the weekend trying to get my Bus Pirate talking to the IM-ME. I wrote a schwack of Python code, studied the docs at Dangerous Prototypes, and thought I was there. But I found I had a problem.

After a reset, the first command to Get Status always works. After that, nothing works. I look on the scope and the command is going out properly, but the response is (usually) always high, or 0xFF. I tried just about everything I could think of, and now I am starting to suspect the Bus Pirate itself. I'm finding that some of the commands to set a control line high or low stop working after I read back a byte. It is like they are stuck. I need to make sure I can reproduce this, file a bug, and see if I can get a fix.

Stay tuned.

Busy weekend coming up

2011-02-04T22:13:00.000-06:00

The good news is that I didn't have to bring home any work to get through this weekend so that should leave me with a decent amount of time to hack the IM-ME. Before getting into that, here is a little tidbit that has pretty much nothing to do with the hacking of the console. Compare this:

Console Temperature & Humidity Sensor

with this:

Sensirion SHT 11

I'd say we have a match. AJP & A5Z are just lot codes according to the datasheet. Follow this link to find the details of the Sensirion SHT11 sensor used in the console, and this link to the datasheet. I have a sneaking suspicion that the ISS uses the same sensor, but I'm not about to tear it apart to find out. It would make sense though. The measly -40C bottom end of the outdoor unit matches the lower limit of this chip. Grrxyn left a comment on an earlier post noting that the Davis design doesn't follow the datasheets recommendation of thermally isolating the sensor from the main circuit board. So if your console seems to be reading a bit hot, now you know why.

IM-ME Hacking Progress - A Quick Update

2011-01-30T22:10:00.000-06:00

As I figured, I spent less time on this on the weekend than I had hoped I would. But progress has started to come quickly. I have a ribbon cable and 2x5 pin connector hanging out of my IM-ME like the tongue of a cat. It is connected to four of the five debug points at the back of the unit, while a fifth wire is hanging off 2.5V found off some capacitor in back of the LCD. This connector plugs directly into the Bus Pirate, and I've got a Python script putting the IM-ME into debug mode and reading a few registers. I could post some picture, but the ones at Dave's Hacks are much better than I could be arsed to come up with right now.

That makes it all sound easy, and it should have been. But I made more than my share of stupid mistakes along the way. Like getting the cable on to the back of the IM-ME wrong not once, but twice. And like trying to put the IM-ME into debug mode by strobing the Clock line instead of the Data line. And like thinking I was talking to the IM-ME when really I wasn't getting any further than the Bus Pirate. That's why I don't do this stuff in my real line of work. I'd starve to death if I did.

Next I've got to finish off the routines to re-flash the IM-ME, though I'm most of the way there. Once the building blocks are in place, the IM-ME code will get mass-erased and it will begin its life as the flexible radio receiver this little purple and pink piece of plastic always wanted to be.

But I swear, as I was digging around in its internals last night with a soldering iron and screwdriver, I could swear I heard it sobbing. Ever so softly...

Earlier Work Sniffing Vantage Wireless Signals

2011-01-29T09:37:00.001-06:00

There is a dearth of information out there on hacking the Davis weather station and I'm not sure why. It is a higher end product that appeals to people who like performance and accuracy in a device. Those same types of people often have a technical background where taking things apart to see how they tick comes naturally. I thought I was the first person who tried to figure out the wireless transmission aspect of these things. It appears that I am actually the second.

Back in 2008, a fellow by the name of Jack Smith at Clifton Laboratories published this post on his blog. He got curious about the wireless transmission from a Weather Envoy remote wireless transceiver. So what did he do? He hauled out his Watkins-Johnson 8617B radio receiver and his Advantech R3463 spectrum analyzer (in both frequency domain and in zero span mode, rather than digging out his Tektronix TDS430 digital scope) and got busy. Now that's what I'm talking about.

Weather Station Hacking Equivalent of "First Post"

His blog post has some really good information that is worth a read, if only to get a good appreciation for how somebody can dig into this stuff with only a few scant bits of information to go on. Unfortunately, it looks like he didn't take his investigation much further than this one post. He also realized that the sun was setting on this data transmission scheme: it ended with the Vantage Pro wireless. He wrote "However, the current production Vantage Pro II uses frequency hopping transmission, which means that you will also have to build a frequency agile receiver and program it to track the hopping transmission". You could, or you could just wait for technology to get to the point where someone comes out with a Pretty Pink Pager that does the hardware design for you.

And speaking of Pretty Pink Pagers, mine is sitting at the Post Office and will be picked up today. Unfortunately I have some other stuff to work on today that will cut into the time I have to play with it this weekend. But I'm crossing my fingers that I can get enough software written this weekend to get my Bus Pirate talking to the IM-ME so that I can at least load Pink OS. Things should get interesting after that, with sniffing some register configurations on the Davis console and hacking some C code to configure the IM-ME in a compatible fashion.

By the way, for whatever reason, Google doesn't give Jack's work the ranking that it should. I had searched around without success for some time to find some information like this. Nothing ever popped up until I came up with some now forgotten magical set of search terms. At least if I blog it here, it will hopefully make this work a little easier to find.

Davis Weatherlink Software Not Required!!!!

2011-01-23T21:16:00.000-06:00

Better start this post off with an admission. I'm a bonehead. Last night I was sniffing the SPI traffic on my Davis Vantage Pro 2 Wireless weather station console. I was seeing traffic back and forth but couldn't figure out any rhyme or reason behind the data. That is because it isn't there.

The CC1021 chip in this thing talks over two interfaces to the processor. The SPI interface is used to configure the chip, but the data in and out is over a separate digital interface. And that interface doesn't seem to be brought out to the expansion connector at the back of the unit. Oh, bother. So if I want to sniff the data back and forth between the CPU and the wireless chip, I can't do it from the expansion connector. And if it takes hacking the hell out of this thing to get that data, then it isn't something I want to do. So I can spend some time deciphering the register configuration while I wait for my IM-ME to arrive and pick the data up without using the console at all.

But there is more than one way to skin a cat. I had a suspicion that the Weatherlink Module you can buy from Davis for $100 simply passes the commands from the host PC to the processor in the VP2. I mentioned a while back that two serial ports are brought out on the expansion port. Here is a diagram of that port, by the way.

I used my new scope to see if any data was spewing out on either serial port or on PB4, PE2, PE3, or PC4. Nothing. But that didn't mean much. Nothing was asking for data, so nothing was coming out. And this thing tries to conserve power whenever it can. So just for grins, let's open up the VP2 firmware that Davis makes available on their web site in a hex editor.

Hmmmm....

This is the firmware for the base station. Yet it has the commands that correspond to that of the expansion module that plugs into the back of the VP2 (see this document). It suggests that if I were to hang a serial port off this thing, I might be able to get some data out of it. But not just any serial port will do. The lines on the back of the expansion connector are 0 to 3.3V, whereas a normal serial port might be something like -12V to +12V. And not a lot of PCs have serial ports anymore.

This, of course, is an easy problem to solve, as most people who have played with an Arduino could tell you. I have one of these, strapped to work at 3.3V instead of the +5V it comes configured to by default. If you don't have one already, you can buy this one instead. It is already set up for 3.3V I/O.

From the Good Guys at Sparkfun

Next, I had to wire it up to one of the serial ports exposed on the expansion connector, but which one? Who knows? I guessed and started off with Serial Port 0. Here's the hookup.

WARNING: IF YOU SCREW THIS UP BY WIRING IT WRONG, FORGETTING TO SET 3.3V I/O ON THE FTDI ADAPTER, ZAPPING IT WITH STATIC, OR SOMETHING ELSE BONEHEADED, DON'T COME CRYING TO ME.

So that covers the hardware. Now what about software? All you need is a terminal program. If you are on Windows (sucka!), something like Hyperterm will work. On Linux, I used minicom, crap software that it is. I guessed that the settings I would need would be the same as that they recommend for the Weatherlink adapter: 19.2 kbaud and 8N1. Start googling now if you use minicom, because it is so stinking user unfriendly. Specifically, you'll want to know how to set the port it communicates out of (minicom -s as root, if I remember right). Remember, dmesg is your friend. There are two other things you want to do.

Turn on your Caps Lock key. Commands to the Weatherlink dongle are all upper case, and it doesn't seem like it wants to make your life easy and convert for you.
Turn on Local Echo in your terminal program, or whatever option it is that echos back the characters that you type. The Weatherlink dongle doesn't do this, so you'll be typing blind otherwise.

Still with me? Good, cause we are nearly there. Type TEST. You may or may not get a response because the console might have gone to sleep on you to conserve power. If you don't get anything the first time, try again. If today is your luck day, it will answer back with TEST.

You are now in complete control of this thing.

Try a few other simple commands. VER prints a version date code, NVER is the version string. Again, refer to this document for more coolness. I'm a big fan of STRMON. Just follow it up at some point with STRMOFF or it will print this stuff forever.

This is the raw data coming from the outdoor unit, and it shows up every two seconds. The "7" on Row 1 is the wind speed in miles per hour (it is hex, so a windspeed of 'a' is 10 mph). Haven't figured out the rest of it yet, but it hardly matters. The serial protocol document linked just above the picture tells you how to get all the processed data out of the thing you could ever want. And today I just tripped over these Perl scripts that should do all the lifting for you. They are written to talk to the Weatherlink dongle, but most if not all of that script should work talking to the unit directly. Come to think of it, there's a lot of weather station software out there written by enthusiasts that should "just work" with this. If you try this out, drop a note in the comments.

So there we have it. No longer do you need to spend $100 on some Weatherlink software that you don't want to get the dongle you do. All you need is a cheap USB to serial converter, and the rest is up to you. I still intend to get wireless reception directly from the remote going once my IM-ME shows up in the mail, but that is probably going to take a little time. Enjoy this for now.

Davis SPI Traffic

2011-01-22T16:43:00.000-06:00

I've been a bit quiet lately thanks to some work-related travel and some lack of hardware. But the traveling is done for the time being and some of the much-awaited hardware has arrived. It is time to get back to hacking my Davis VP2 Weather Station.

This is a measurement of the SPI traffic, courtesy of my new Rigol 1052E scope (and no, I have not hacked it yet, but I fully intend to). Yellow is MISO data and blue is SCK. This shows that the I2C clock is a pretty manageable 920 kHz, which just happens to be half the CPU frequency. Second, measurements on a wider timescale shows very little traffic. This is to be expected: the outdoor unit is essentially solar powered and you want to conserve that power as much as possible.

The SPI Equivalent of "First Post"

The next thing to do is hook up my newly arrived Bus Pirate and see if I can make sense of the data going back and forth. Cool.

Dear Sony

2011-01-16T09:27:00.000-06:00

Please use responsibly. That is all.

Bus Ninja!

2011-01-09T18:45:00.000-06:00

Why have I not heard of this before? Bus Ninja is a clone of the Bus Pirate that runs on Arduino and Teensy! If this works, it should let me snoop on the SPI traffic on my Davis VP2 console while I wait for my Bus Pirate to arrive.

After letting the author know that the download link to his software wasn't working, I dove in. The homepage for this project lets you know that there is some makefile tweaking involved. First thing I had to sort out was that I have a Boarduino equipped with an Atmega 328P and not an Arduino with an Atmega 168. The file config-arduino.mk has a line with

MCU=atmega168

but I figured that would just affect the compilation and I'd be OK to leave this as is. The difference between the two is just memory size: the pinouts are the same. So then I did

make BOARD=ARDUINO clean

which went fine, but

make BOARD=ARDUINO

died with

cc1: error: invalid parameter 'inline-call-cost'

Hmmmm. Looks like the version of avr-gcc in arch linux doesn't have this parameter so I had to comment that CFLAG out of Makefile. Everything compiled nicely after that.

Next, I didn't want to load up the Arduino IDE, preferring instead to program the chip from the command line. I have a Sparkfun FTDI breakout board, so I needed to get Linux talking to this thing. Let's plug it in and see if Linux sees it?

# dmesg
usb 3-1: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 2
usbcore: registered new interface driver usbserial
USB Serial support registered for generic
usbcore: registered new interface driver usbserial_generic
usbserial: USB Serial Driver core
USB Serial support registered for FTDI USB Serial Device
ftdi_sio 3-1:1.0: FTDI USB Serial Device converter detected
usb 3-1: Detected FT232RL
usb 3-1: Number of endpoints 2
usb 3-1: Endpoint 1 MaxPacketSize 64
usb 3-1: Endpoint 2 MaxPacketSize 64
usb 3-1: Setting MaxPacketSize 64
usb 3-1: FTDI USB Serial Device converter now attached to ttyUSB0
usbcore: registered new interface driver ftdi_sio
ftdi_sio: v1.6.0:USB FTDI Serial Converters Driver

So far, so good. But I went down many blind alleys after this. First, because I am using this FTDI serial converter, I thought I needed to install the Arch Linux libftdi package. Turns out I don't. Second, a lot of stuff I read seemed to indicate that if I wanted to do this from the command line, I needed a patched version of avrdude (see here). Turns out I don't. Basically, with the Sparkfun FTDI board, you can tell avrdude that you are using the stk500v1 programmer. But, the Sparkfun board adds some special sauce: it brings out DTR on Pin 6 of the header to reset the board. We need to tell this to avrdude. So the config file for the stk500v1 programmer ends up looking like this in /etc/avrdude.conf (note the last line)

programmer
id = "stk500v1";

  desc  = "Atmel STK500 Version 1.x firmware";
    type  = stk500;
    reset = 6;

Now let's see if this works. As root, do

# avrdude -C /etc/avrdude.conf -c stk500v1 -p m328p -P /dev/ttyUSB0 -U hfuse:r:-:h -b 57600

This harmless command tells avrdude to read the setting of the hfuse on the micro. Note some very important things here:

I am using -p m328p here because my Boarduino has an Atmega 328P rather than the 168 in many Arduinos.
I am using -P /dev/ttyUSB0 because that is what dmesg told me was being used.
I am using -b 57600 to lower the baud rate from the default. I WASTED SEVERAL FRUSTRATING HOURS ON THIS. Go too fast and avrdude comes back with the very unhelpful 'avrdude: stk500_recv(): programmer is not responding'. Your mileage wil vary depending on the speed of your processor. If you get this dreaded message, try slowing things down even further.

So at this point, I've got avrdude talking to my boarduino. I can now see if I can load the Bus Ninja code. This is going to take a tweak of the config-arduino.mk file based on what was figured out above. Edit this file in the src directory so that the PROGRAM_CMD line reads:

PROGRAM_CMD=avrdude -C /etc/avrdude.conf -pm328p -cstk500v1 -P/dev/ttyUSB0 -b57600 -D -Uflash:w:$(TARGET).hex

I've taken the spaces out between the command line arguments as avrdude doesn't seem to care either way. Now, all it takes as root is

# make BOARD=ARDUINO program

to load the Bus Ninja code into the Arduino. YES! Stay tuned for next time when I'll try messing with the Bus Ninja program itself.

An alternative Davis VP2 Console???

2011-01-07T23:29:00.001-06:00

It's so crazy, it just might work.

Love The Color

I was mindless surfing the Makezine blog when I came across a list of their top ten hacks for 2010. Somewhere in the middle was a $16 spectrum analyzer. Cool. I start reading it over and notice that this baby is based on a Texas Instruments CC1110f32 chip. Upon first read, this appeared to bear some similarities to the CC1021 in the VP2 console. The CC1110 is actually a CC1101 with an embedded 8051 microcontroller on chip. The next question then becomes, is the CC1101 compatible with the CC1021. Well yes, yes it is. So in theory, you could use this cheap pink instant messaging terminal as a Davis Wireless Weather Station receiver, with an included USB receiver to facilitate connection to a PC.

How awesome would this be???

A Davis VP2 Update

2011-01-03T20:54:00.000-06:00

I took apart my Davis VP2 wireless weather station console again today over the protests of my lovely wife. It was a pretty productive exercise and I learned several things.

First, I've traced out the connections between the front panel buttons and the processor. The sixteen keys are wired in a 4 row x 4 column matrix (shocking, I know). The eight lines are connected to PC0-PC3 and PE4-PE7 on the processor. Still to do is figure out is which pins are configured as outputs and which as inputs.

That might not be so important now that I've also figured out the wiring to the expansion connector on the back of the unit. Here's how it breaks down:

Four pins are connected to the SPI port on the Atmega 128: SS*, SCK, MOSI, and MISO.
Two pins are connected to TXD0, RXD0. Another two pins are connected to TXD1, RXD1.
There are a couple seemingly miscellaneous connections to PB4, PC4, PE2, and PE3. Not sure what these would do. Might the processor use these to sense the presence of the expansion module?
There are two connections to VCC, two to GND, and one to the wall-wart DC IN via a diode.
There is a connection to RESET*
There are two pins that are not connected.

What looks promising are the SPI connections. The CC1021 chip responsible for managing the wireless connection is read and written via SPI unless I am sadly mistaken. That should mean that the traffic on that chip should be visible without even opening the case. That would make life pretty simple. Still to figure out are why there are two sets of serial lines connected up here. And why the four miscellaneous I/Os? Inquiring minds want to know.

So I have a number of things on my TODO list.

Figure out how to use EAGLE and make a schematic of the circuit as I understand it so far.
See if I can figure out how the various ports are programmed on the Atmega. I should be able to use simavr for this. Some playing around earlier this week showed me how to load a piece of firmware into a simulated Atmega and have it run in single step mode.
See if I can snoop the SPI traffic. That will likely have to wait until my Bus Pirate shows up. Learning how SPI works in the first place wouldn't hurt.

Bus Pirate

2010-12-31T18:53:00.002-06:00

I have a tracking number now for my Rigol scope, and it is just a matter of time before that bad boy shows up on my doorstep. To beef up my arsenal, I also have a Bus Pirate on the way.

Another Tool in the Toolbox

This is a neat little board that can be used to spy on serial interfaces like SPI, I2C, etc. The price is right at $28 plus another $5 or so for the probes. Shipping is cheap as dirt, but it is out of somewhere in China, so I am looking at anywhere from 10-30 days on delivery. Hopefully it is less than that. Once I've got this, I can listen in on what the Atmega in the Davis Weather Station is telling the CC1021 RF chip to do. Should be interesting to dig into.

I had also wanted to order myself up an Open Workbench Logic Sniffer (OLS), but the boys at Dangerous Prototypes are sold out. Sparkfun bought up all their stock, and are asking another $20 for it. While not a ton of cash, it is the principal of the thing. Think I'll just wait until DP replenishes their stock, which won't be long.

In the meantime, I'm reading Atmel data sheets and looking at CPU emulators, when I'm not researching a replacement for my ancient Radio Shack analog multimeter. Right now I'm like the Uni-Trend UT71A. It is 40,000 count resolution, a USB interface, and temperature measurement capability. I like. The data logging capability is neutered, but who cares when you have a USB interface?

Scope En-Route!

2010-12-29T10:10:00.000-06:00

I'm a little embarrassed to say, but I don't own an oscilloscope. That changed last night when I pulled the trigger on a Rigol DS1052E from DealExcel. This scope is a dual channel unit with a 1 GS/sec sample rate, 1 MS of memory, and 50 MHz of analog bandwidth.

But it gets better.

As you can see on this video on Dave Jone's excellent video blog, this scope can be hacked in software to bump its analog bandwidth to 100 MHz. Since then, there has been a cat and mouse game between Rigol and the hackers to shut this hack down. The release of Rigol's 2.05 firmware held up for a while, but hackers got the best of it again yesterday. That, combined with a price of $349 and free EMS shipping, made this an opportunity I couldn't pass up.

I did go back and forth between DealExcel and DealExtreme.What swayed me to DealExcel was:

they are an authorized Rigol dealer. Whether this means anything or not if the unit should fail, I don't know. But it can't hurt.
they actually have stock. With DX, you never know whether something is in stock or not, and delays can be very lengthy.

I did read on the eevblog forum that some people were less than thrilled with DealExcel's customer service. Hopefully I won't need it. What I am pleased with is that I just ordered the scope last night, and I have a tracking number already this morning. So I am probably looking at around ten days or so before I get my new toy.

It is about time.

Davis Weather Station Hacking

2010-12-27T20:31:00.001-06:00

It is now the Christmas break and I've got a bit of time on my hands. I have been bugged for some time by the fact that my Davis Vantage Pro 2 Wireless weather station is not very hacker friendly. Maybe it is time to change that. It is out of warranty now and I decided to open it up to see what makes this thing tick.

This is the guts of the VP2 Wireless Console. The controller board is on the left and the display to the right. The controller board PCB is just double-sided, and contains contact pads for the buttons on the other side. The bottom part of the unit is where the batteries normally go. There are just three screws holding the back on and it comes off pretty easily. One thing you'll want to do before trying this is to put the console into config mode by hitting the Done button and then Down Arrow. According to the manual, this ensures that the unit isn't trying to write to flash before it loses power. And it will lose power. The AC adapter has to be pulled before the back can come off, and the batteries make connection to the main board with just a couple of clips rather than a set of wires. Losing power is no big deal though: the unit remembers its settings once power is restored again. Nice.

And no "Warranty Void if Sticker Removed" nonsense either

The first thing I noticed is that the CPU is an Atmel ATMEGA 128L running at 1.8432 MHz. I was afraid it might have some kind of a custom processor or something to keep power consumption low. But you don't get more common than an ATMEGA chip, and there are a lot of freely available tools out there that should simplify digging into this.

Oh, you and I are going to get to know each other a lot better soon.

The second thing I noticed was the radio transceiver chip. Again, I feared something custom here. But it turns out that this is a CC1021 from Texas Instruments (data sheet). TI describes it as a "true single-chip UHF transceiver designed for very low power and very low voltage wireless applications." Sounds about right. Hanging off of it is a 833 MHz crystal. Anywhere I've read about people trying to decode the transmissions from the station were always put off by Davis' "frequency hopping spread spectrum" advertising. This is much more advanced than the old FSK method they used. But hey, if you know the transceiver and you know how it is set up, then that opens up some interesting possibilities.

You don't scare me. I do RF all day at work.

The one thing I don't care about much is the LCD. It is apparently a custom unit built by Ocular LCD labeled A4144PCB-2. It doesn't appear on their website (that I could find after 20 seconds of looking anyway).

So the next thing I'm planning to do is order up a Bus Pirate. This will let me sniff the SPI interface between the Atmega and the transceiver to see how they are configuring it. While that is in transit, I want to beep out the connection between these two chips, and the connection between the CPU and the expansion interface. Davis also makes the CPU firmware available, and I might take a shot at building up an emulator so I could figure out how the raw data from the radio gets processed and put out to the interface. One day it might be possible to

interface to the VP2 console without buying Davis' crappy Weatherlink software
build a standalone receiver around a CC1021 and something like an Arduino. This would give me a low cost receiver with a proper computer interface.

Some pretty cool possibilities here.

PS. If anybody knows what this is, please leave a comment.

Long time, no blog. But I'm back, and baking.

2010-12-05T18:34:00.000-06:00

Like everyone who writes a blog, I have been deficient in keeping it going. Hopefully I can do a little better going forward. It is winter now so that has ground the great landscape redesign of 2010 to a halt. I ended up getting a lot of work done in preparation for next year. I dug a bunch of holes in some very rocky soil that will give the trees I plan in 2011 a fighting chance.

So I need something to keep busy with and decided that I'd like to try and bake some really good bread. I ordered 'Tartine Bread' and 'The Bread Baker's Apprentice' from Amazon. Both books are excellent. The sourdough bread on top is from the former, the bagel on the bottom is from the latter.

Basic Country Bread from "Tartine Bread"


Bagel from "The Bread Baker's Apprentice"

Both attempts really turned out well and I was very pleased. I am not a baker at all but I can follow directions. Hopefully I'll develop more of a feel for it as I do this more. I'd also like to give a rye bread a try one of these days soon.

Counting Crows

2010-08-13T19:53:00.000-06:00

It is a Friday evening and the rain is falling intermittently outside. That's a nice excuse to take the evening off from the Great Landscape Redesign of 2010 and chill a little.

For reasons unbeknownst to me, there are a murder (yes, a murder) of crows that are dive-bombing each other just behind the house. It is pretty cool to watch them swoop around at the riverbank edge, dogfight a little, and then do it all over again. If I could fly, I'd goof like that too.

But I haven't been totally lazy this evening. My Sous Vide setup has got a cheap beef roast cooking at 59C that is going to taste like beef tenderloin by supper tomorrow night. It is simply seasoned with salt, pepper, garlic powder, and a little thyme. Can't wait.

The Great Landscape Redesign - Now Underway

2010-07-25T08:59:00.000-06:00

I am on a break from work for a couple of weeks so I've been able to put some time into the landscaping redesign I've talked about. Part of this involves a ring of willows that will serve as a windbreak around part of our property. Unfortunately, we have some very poor soil in areas around our yard. So the first task was to give the future trees a better chance at a good start. I dug twenty-four holes spaced fifteen feet apart. Each hole is 24" across and 18" deep. They will be re-filled with good topsoil, plus some organic material to enrich the soil.

The hard part in all of this was that about half were in soil with a lot of rock in it. I had to use a five foot pry bar in a lot of spots to dislodge the rocks and lever them out. Some of these holes took two hours to dig because of that. But after four days of work, the holes are dug. It gets easier from here.

Next up: I'm thinking of digging a trench that would be roughly 90 feet long, 3 feet wide, and 1 foot deep. This would be serving a similar purpose as the holes above, but this time for a hedge of red osier dogwoods. They are hardy around here, and they've got a really nice red color that would look great against the winter snow. That's the plan, anyway.

But the morning will start with a trip to the nursery for a Kerr Crabapple. This apple is supposed to be very good eaten fresh, and it also is an excellent keeper (I've heard as much as 27 weeks). Best of all, it is extremely hardy. With this, I should be able to get some production out of our Rescue Crabapple. This tree has bloomed nicely for us for the last couple of years, but produced little or no fruit. How was I supposed to know that it required a different species for cross-pollination? D'oh!

2010-07-17T07:18:00.000-06:00

I got this in the mail yesterday. It is pretty sweet. A tongue in cheek review done in the style of a real lens review can be found here. Thank you canonmugs.com.

I'd love to have this lens for my 40D, but it is pretty tough for me to justify the $2800. I like photography, but don't spend near as much time doing it as I should. I have done some Strobist type stuff that has turned out pretty well. Maybe I'll get to doing a little more of it now that I'm on holidays for two weeks. But the priority right now is on landscaping: the scope of my plans seems to be growing. Not sure if that is a good thing or bad.

More on propagation

2010-07-14T20:21:00.000-06:00

My experiments with propagation continue. I've tried willows, blue honeysuckle, and shubert chokecherry so far. All the leaves on my willow shoots turned black and fell off. But closer examination of the shoots did show signs of rooting. Even if the willows do root, they are off to a poor start. Not so good, actually.

So I turned to the internet and read that willows will do well if you just cut a 9" to 12" long stalk about as thick as your thumb and stick it in water. I tried this and am seeing signs of rooting in less than a week. Score! So I've expanded the program now for some red osier dogwoods that are also supposed to support this method. Popplers work this way too, and I know where there are some great looking monster popplers to try. These three types of tree apparently have some kind of hormone in their bark that allows them to root readily when stuck in water. Let's give it a go, shall we?

Meanwhile, I'm thinking of the overall landscape plan. I need some kind of hedge on one side of the property. I'm thinking now of a kind of an S-shape that flows with the existing plantings and the driveway. I've laid out a piece of garden hose as a prototype and will let that shape percolate for a bit.

Visitors

2010-07-10T23:27:00.000-06:00

Now I like to think that I pull off something interesting every now and then: a little hack here, a cool little design there. But I am getting a visit tomorrow from an uncle of mine that pretty much pwns me. Let's put it this way: the guy built his own garden tractor. From scratch. And the rototiller attachment to boot. I am not worthy.

So I hope he's going to like the Sous Vide pulled pork I'm working right now. After my pork butt sat 12 hours in a brine made of 1 liter of water, 70g of salt, and 30g of sugar, I tossed it into a 68C (155F) water bath (see my Food Lab page). The roast has got a pepper / sugar rub on it that is on pretty heavy. I'm expecting it to melt in our mouths after a 24 cook. We shall see.

Ups and Downs

2010-07-04T15:41:00.001-06:00

Life is full of them.

On the downside, I'm having my doubts about the willows I've been trying to propagate. A lot of them have leaves that are turning yellow and many of them have been in there for less than a week. Further research on the web suggests my method is less than optimal. I am cutting small shoots and leaving some leaves attached. The cut end has rooting compound applied. Then I put the shoots into a small bit of potting soil and either keep misting them or keep a plastic sheet over top to keep the humidity up. Other people seem to have a great deal of luck by cutting one foot branches and simply sticking them in the dirt. Apparently willows have some property, much like poplars, that they will readily propagate this way. Argh. I'll stick with my current approach for now and use that as a Plan B. Interestingly enough, the blue honeysuckle looks to be doing well so far.

On the upside, I've stumbled across the Franken-Weber. The Franken-Weber uses a Weber charcoal BBQ bottom plus a custom lid that allows internal temperatures to get up to 800 - 900F. This is what you need to make great pizza. Unfortunately, the video is short on details (probably deliberately so) on how he made this thing. The key is in the lid, which he mentions is a mixture of cement and perlite (yup, the stuff in potting soil). A bit of digging around and it is apparent that the cement is really refractory cement, used for high temperature stuff like fireplaces and the like. More digging and you find that this stuff is also called Furnace Cement. And it just so happens that you can get Furnace Cement at your friendly local Canadian Tire. Oh, and it also seems like you can get fire brick there too. These are the bricks that the pizza is sitting on in the video linked above. Oh yeah.

So right now I'm seriously considering making my own Franken-Weber. It would be a fun project for my upcoming two week holiday break. And I miss the awesome thin crust pizza that I had during the many months I spent in Italy years ago. Hmmmm.......

Body Lab page is up

2010-07-01T11:42:00.000-06:00

Been meaning to do this for a while, but I've finally started a Body Lab page. Check it out. I'll add more to it one of these days, but this is a start.

Canada Day, Eh?

2010-07-01T07:43:00.000-06:00

It is Canada Day. Which is nice if you are a Canadian. Like me. I will be taking Friday off as a vacation day, so that gives me a sweet four day weekend away from work. Best of all, I really don't have anything from work I need to get done over this long weekend. That will let me get a bunch of stuff done around the house and yard.

And there are many things to do. More trees to propagate, lawn to cut, landscapes to plan, etc. I also want to try getting in a few fasted training sessions. My last couple of cracks at this have worked out pretty well, but given that I work a regular day job, is only really practical to do on a day off. My workouts in general have gone very well lately. Military press, deadlifts, and squats have all been good this week. I consider bench press to be lagging somewhat, so I've been reading a bit to see if I can improve my technique here a little and get my poundage up. One of these days I will put together a Body Lab page that talks a lot more about this stuff.

Propagation Nation

2010-06-29T19:50:00.000-06:00

The willows I propagated a couple of days ago seem to be off to a good start. The leaves aren't all shriveling up, so that would seem to say that the shoots aren't drying up. Emboldened, I grabbed my trusty Felco pruners after work today and collected a few more samples from the trees around work. I grabbed a few from a gorgeous, monstrous willow near the entrance to our parking lot. This baby is probably 45' in diameter, and it is the tree that I'm targeting to be the feature tree in our front yard. Then I collected some samples from a blue honeysuckle near where I park my vehicle. This good sized shrub features fruit that ripen in June that taste a bit like a sour blueberry. The fruit sort of looks like a blueberry as well, only it is more oval shaped. I'm not sure how well the blue honeysuckle will propagate: the stem is more woody than the willows. I guess I'll soon find out. Roots are supposed to establish themselves after two to six weeks.

I've constructed a kind of mini-greenhouse to keep the humidity up around the shoots. A planting tray sits in a box lined with a garbage bag to keep the cardboard dry. A bunch of sticks about a foot long are taped all along the outside of the box, and a clear plastic drop-cloth used to keep paint off your carpet is draped over the whole thing. It is working nicely. Just hope it holds up over the next couple months.

A long weekend is coming up and the plan will be to propagate more of the acute willows I will use as my shelter belt. My little planting tray will hold something like 171 shoots, so I have a long way to go before I fill it up. But fill it up, I shall.

The Great Landscape Redesign - 2010 Edition

2010-06-27T13:22:00.000-06:00

We had a professional come in some years ago to design a landscape for our acreage. That was a mistake. This person did not appreciate the issues when planning a landscape in the country. Trees were selected that were borderline hardy for our zone (Zone 2). Some plants happened to be a deer's most favorite food in the whole wide world. But the biggest problem was the importance of a windbreak was totally ignored. So I've got to fix this.

Today I tried propagating some acute willows based on this technique. They are a beautiful tree, very hardy, and work well as a windbreak. I've started off with about a dozen and I'll watch them over the next few days. If it seems like they are taking, I'll go into production and do about 50 more. I've also got my eye on a bunch of other trees in the area around where I work.

The idea is to eventually fill in the yard with all kinds of trees and flowerbeds. It is way too open right now. The wind gets in and whips around and tears stuff up. If I can get enough stuff planted, I should be able to create my own micro-climate and do some interesting things out here. At the same time, that will cut down on the amount of grass / weeds around this place that I need to mow.

I've started a layout using Google Sketchup to help visualize how this will all look in the end. Naturally.

Sous Vide Ultimate Challenge

2010-06-26T12:24:00.000-06:00

It is time to really test my Sous Vide setup. My lovely wife was talking about cooking an outside round roast the way we had usually done it before: in the slow cooker. Now the thing about a roast like this is that it is very lean. While healthy, this translates into a meat that often ends up on the plate as tough and dry.

I would have none of this. I have the technology, and I'm going to make use of it. So we began by taking the roast and cutting the fat away from it. After that we sliced it in half to give us a couple of very thick 2" steaks. Those were patted down with a paper towel and then coated with just a sheen of vegetable oil. To each we applied a different rub. One was a fabulous homemade rub that you can get here. The other was a "Tuscan" style rub given to me by my mom on a recent trip she made. It is mostly fennel, salt, pepper, and garlic powder.

The two steaks were each put into a quart-sized zip-loc bag. I sucked the air out of them with a straw and dropped them into my rig set to 56.5C. They'll cook at this temperature for over 24 hours, after which I'll bump up the temperature a bit to 61C for a perfect medium. I'm expecting this to turn out pretty good. We'll see...

Home time.

2010-06-25T23:46:00.000-06:00

As I write this, I'm somewhere around 30,000 feet and heading home. It is about 9:00 pm local time and we're heading west. The setting sun lights up the clouds I look down upon in oranges and reds. The green of the land below comes up at me through the haze. It is a spectacular view.

Today has been a pretty good day. The course I was giving wrapped up early so we went out for a long lunch at a noisy but tasty Mexican place. They paid. I got out of there and hit the airport with tons of time to spare. As I was waiting in a long line in security, a new scanner opened up right in front of me and I was in and through in no time. After that I was hungry so I stopped off in Terminal A for a Five Guys burger: I was pleased to learn that they have a well deserved reputation for making a mean set of patties. Flew in to my first stop with a business lounge pass in hand, so I could hang out until the next flight in comfort. On the flight home, I scan through the list of movies on the screen in front of me and Fight Club is on. I had forgotten just how excellent this movie is. I really enjoyed it the first time, but it is even better the second time. If you haven't watched it twice, do yourself the favor.

My checked bag contains a razor sharp knife, a blowtorch, three bottles of booze, and $20 dollars worth of squeaky toys for the dog. I'll land while it is still light outside. Tomorrow the weekend starts. Life is good.

Bad food is bad.

2010-06-25T23:43:00.000-06:00

I like food.

And I travel now and then for work. Like right now. That usually means having to eat out. But on my last couple of trips, I've been traveling solo. So the first order of business after arriving has been to hit a local grocery store and get a bit of food. This time round I got myself a BBQ chicken, some cottage cheese, and some fruit and vegetables. All that went into the fridge in my room, and I was a happy camper.

As often as not, I'll eat out someplace and be pretty disappointed by the quality of the food. A couple nights ago I went to a mall to hit up a Williams Sonoma (don't have one back home) to pick up two things: a blowtorch for my Sous Vide cooking and a Global boning knife for, well, its general awesomeness. I was starving by the time I got my gear so I hit a restaurant in the mall. My spidey senses were tingling, trying to tell me that this place didn't hold a lot of promise. But I needed to eat. I ordered up a sirloin steak. They were out, so I went with the New York Strip instead.

Bad move. The steak I got was a mass of gristle. There didn't seem to be a single spot on it that didn't have the consistency of silicone rubber. I couldn't even cut through the garbage in front of me. I called the waiter over and asked for another steak. The manager came by a few minutes later and at least apologized, saying they had never seen such a bad steak come out of their kitchen.

The next one came out. It had a big clump of fat on either end that I cut away. It was also cut unevenly and overcooked in the thin part. I paid $22 for this? I was beyond caring at this point and ate it anyway. It was a 12oz steak and I was still hungry after finishing it. I was signing my bill when one guy comes along and asks if they can offer me a free desert.

Boy, let me think. I didn't want a desert. In fact, I rarely eat desert. I wanted a decent steak. And what were the odds that their crappy kitchen would have the capacity to put out an awesome desert worth pounding back 500 calories and making up for a shitty meal? About zero, so no thanks. I left, yearning for that hour of my life back.

So: Norton's American Grill and Pub in Tyson Center Mall: Piss On You.

Food page up

2010-06-21T11:48:00.000-06:00

I've started a food page to collect some Sous Vide stuff I've been playing with. This is a method of cooking where you put food in a plastic bag, suck the air out, and cook it in a carefully regulated temperature bath. I've had a few phenomenal meals out of the rig I built so far, with the best by far being a batch of ribs I cooked for 72 (!) hours.

A lot of people consider cooking to be an art. I disagree: it is a science. Guys like Alton Brown and Heston Blumenthal have got it right. If you know how food works and you've got the right gear, you're golden. The interesting thing is that you usually don't need to spend big bucks on the gear. A few years ago, a proper Sous Vide setup ran you into the thousands. Now you can buy a controller that runs a slow cooker or rice cooker for less than a couple hundred. My DIY box was maybe $60 or $70.

Expect me to beef up (HA!) the food page in the near future with more on the design, useful links, etc.

First Post!

2010-06-21T11:14:00.000-06:00

The title of my first blog post is in honor of /.