a n d r e a s . s c h u t z

…är oftast liten.

Jag firade en urtrevlig midsommar hos en kompis kompis och kan inte riktigt motstå att publicera lite bilder. Makrofotografering kan vara häpnadsväckande kul.

Svensk midsommar är inte helt utan dimmig älv-dans och trolsk mystik…
… om man lyssnar på tystnaden och ändrar rytmen på tiden.
Och tittar på det där man inte brukar titta på, eller förut hade tid att titta på.
Vårt öga fotar verkligheten med cirka tjugofem bilder per sekund. Det innebär att vi missar nästan allt av det som går att se, så det finns gott om utrymme för andra utan att vi har den minsta aning om deras existens…

STILL UNDER CONSTRUCTION – PLEASE BE PATIENT

I have always been interested in the low cost Android pads that you can buy from international webshops you find all over internet.

Yes, you have to be careful with you creditcard and you have to be careful with what you buy. I always have that “lump in my stomach” feeling until my stuff arrives and I can examine it. But so far I have ordered not less than 8 gizmos and NONE have failed to live up to my expectations. Not always high quality, but in those cases that have been expected and the money have been “peanuts”. If you ask me, no flops.

One thing you have to count in if you buy a pad from the low price
markets is no support what so ever. You have to be able to hack away on
your device all by yourself or use it as is with the often rather “quick and dirty” software it ships with. You should see at as “raw hardware” without the nice (but rigid) ecosystem that the big well known vendors offer you.

The latest little toy I ordered was an XPad from Pandawill and it arrived fast and sound and the hardware shot high over my expectations.

Anyway, I have now prepared the XPad to be my companion in every day life and here comes that story.

The XPad has a retina display, a quadcore cortex A9 Rockchip RK3188 processor and a MALI400 GPU. 10000 mAh battery and a well built aluminium/plastic chassis.

When it arrived it had a mediocre OS and performed worse than my old ASUS TF101. Reboots where frequent and the battery lasted maybe 4hours. It was unrooted and full of bloatware.

After a summer and some months it is now beginning to take over the older singlecore ASUS as my “workhorse”. To allow you to benefit from my work (maybe you don’t like the internet trenches as much as I do?) I will try to explain what and how I have done the transformation.

Step1 – Read up.
The easiest way to start is to widen the idea of what machine you have bought. The chance that your machine is sold by other companies under other brands is something you even should investigate BEFORE you consider buying the pad. Why so? Well, if you are like me you will want to team up with other souls that have bought a compatible machine and that want to develop and test as mouch as you do.
So from what I have gained after weeks on forums and with test is that the XPad is built from hardware that also exists in the following pads:

Yuandao VIDO N90FHDRK, Cube U9GT5, VISTURE V97HD, 97RQ and XPad

I am sure there are more, and please drop me a comment if you are sure you know more compatible pads. There also may be some hardware differences on the listed pads, but I havent found out what they are.

Step2 – Root
Now that you know compatible models, you attack via Google. Browse through forums and search for information and if you are lucky you will find people that have already made some of your job. Specifically you should try to find a rooted rom. So far it doesnt have to bee a good stable rom. Just the root in it self is the portal to your control. If you dont find a ready rooted rom you have to do it yourself. Then read up and try methods like TPSparky and motochopper, but theese things move fast and while writing this some of the tools may have become obsolete and some may have evolved to be the next killer tool.

Too start with you will have to use a computer. XP is easy and small but the latest root I made trough a linux (openSuSE) box and I think that was easier than my fiddlings with XP. Anyhow, the computer is used to get use of tools like RKFlash and XXX. With tools like this you can “unbrick” devices by putting them i a “Flash me please” mode and then download an image via USB. If you are lucky and have found a good stable rom you like, you can now jump to step3.

If not so lucky, your next step is to establish a connection with the Android Debug Bridge, ADB, to get into the OS as root and to be able to write to the system partition. With ADB you can manually root your device when you have knowledge enough. Until you have, you can use root-scripts like the ones I have mentioned above. Lately it feels like Googles attitude towards the open source attitude is getting colder. The last ADB was designed with a lot of mechanisms to prevent you from communicating with every device. And I don’t see the good in whitelists with pre included vendors, that smells like Microsoft.

Step3 – Custom recovery
On the way towards OS excellence you will have to re-invent your OS again and again. You will want to try new images and you will want to revert to where you where before trying the new.
That is why custom recoverys like CWM recovery and TWRP is like water in a desert. Unless you are one of the developers of a custom recovery you will silently praise the people that have made theese recoverys. They will literally save you a number of times if you poke around in you rom. If you ever have considered donating I think this is a good place.

Step4 – Apps
So now you have a cool powerful device that you have full control over and you can trim to your likage. I alway start with trimming away bloatware. Simple is beautiful and you can now go as far as you like or the OS crashes. If you are like me you can cut out Google and stop worrying about your paranoid side. With file browsers like ES you kan build your own “play” and store good to have apps on a micro sdhc card. Just remember that unless your apps have “in app uppdates” you will loose update popups.

I updated my xpad to android 4.4.2 (Oma’s version) yesterday and apart from the web browser everything works well. I will do more tests.

UPDATE
I have now flashed my xpad again, Oma’s team is amazing. Here you will find the 4.4.4 version of Android. My tip is to replace the kernel.img inside the download package with this kernel from DragonTouch before you flash it. It is the fastest kernel for this pad that I have seen. There is also a .zip file that you can use with CWM recovery to add some fixes to this model. Only problen I got was that the autorotate feature rotates the screen wrong (the autorotate can be shut off).

I just tried to look at “Jobs”. You know the movie about Steve Jobs, the apple guy.
My interest lasted for less than 20 minutes. It’s not that the movie is bad, to be honest I have to look at a movie for more than 20 minutes to know if it is bad or not, but the last fifteen american movies I have looked at is nothing more than drug propaganda. And it is sooooooo boring. Apparent, simple and booring.

No matter what the film is about, they have to stuff it full with narcotics. Why?

If the USA is so full with narcotics it sure does explain why the americans feel so flimsy and odd. So “out of the blue false” and shallow. The whole idea makes me shiver. If I am right, it won’t take long before the no. one leading country is really in the ditch. What do the film producers try to achieve? Are the whole of hollywood in marijuana haze or do they try to repeat the tobacco success only with heavier drugs?

Please, someone, explain this to me. Why and for whom are they doing this?

I had to deactivate the PIN on a SIM card that I used in a 4G modem on Linux to get the modem to work. This is the AT commands that I used from a serial console:

AT
OK
AT+CPIN?
+CPIN: SIM PIN
OK
AT+CPIN=”0123″
OK
AT+CLCK=”SC”,0,”0123″
OK

The 0123 PIN code is a dummy, use your own PIN of course.

So.. I got to be the proud owner of a Francis Francis X1.

For some time now I have been wondering about getting an espresso machine. This is how faith turned one in my direction. A blue one.

Within a simple phonecall I was offered one. Sure, it leaked a little. And he had tried to change the gaskets but it still leaked. If I was interested I could have it… else it would have to go.

I said yes. But it wasn’t the gaskets leaking.
This is how it looked when I opened it.

I don’t know wether it had frozen or simply blown up. A friend of mine had three… they all blew up. Maybe I understand why now.

After a fair bit of examination I had an idea of how it worked. Power, heat, pump and steam. Strange design. A bit stupid. Switching of the electric control to make steam. Why? Of course they blow up in the end. Well, here is what was broken.
uMust have made quite a bang.

Being such an time optimist I thought that maybe two afternoons would be suficcient to make the spare part. Well I can tell you it was not. In the end I did track a seller that could get the part for me. El & Digital Service on Ringvägen. Great attitude on the guy there. Will sure buy something from them in the end but this time I was far too deep into progression.

This is how my part looked after, say, ten hours.
And I haven’t even soldered the threads. The man at the shop said they where N8 threads by the way.

Lucky for me my father is a guru with metal. His skills in soldering comes from a life working with metal. And in the end I did come up with a part that fitted and didn’t leak.
While I was at it I changed the way the boiler heats up to make steam. Like I said in the beginning, the original attitude is to switch off the electronic regulator and let a mechanic thermostat control the heat for steam. Everyone knows that a bimetallic thermostat has a lifespan on say 30K to 100K on-offs. And they degrade before they die. So if the Francis Francis is left on in steam mode for a while… kaboom.

Lucky for me there is a very easy solution to work around that. Just add a resistor of 1.5K in series with the NTC resistor measuring the brew temperature. I disconnected the “steam cables” isolated them and tucked them away inside the FF. Then i routed some cables holding the 1.5K resistor and used the steam switch to shunt in and out that resistor. In that way the functionality of the sexy switches on the front is preserved (oh yeah… you have to turn the steam switch upside down) but when engaging the steam switch the NTC resistor will “lie” about 15 °C to the controller and keep the heat at about 110 °C instead of 93 °C. This is not yet done in the photo above.
To me it is a mystery why the engineers that designed the FF didn’t think of that in the first place.

Here she is with the hood back on. It is true what you can read on the internet about the Francis Francis X1. They make excellent coffee while they are alive. And they seem to leave us with a boom!

Hi!

It’s been a while since I gave myself time to experiment with electronics… Well, now I did some experimenting with Vellemans K8056.

When you have soldered all the components and the hardware is ready, it is easy to test the K8056 using the onboard “Test” button. When pressing the button the eight relays should step through 1 to 8.

After that comes the trickier part…

My idea is to attach this card to either an Android stick such as the CX01 or to a hacked router running OpenWrt. This does it hard to use the Linux and Windows programs written for it. If you want to run the K8056 from a Linux computer the code is accessible here. The implementation is supposed to be online 24-7 in my family summerhouse doing monitoring and automation.

The K8056 card does not reveal a life sign (apart from the power LED) until it receives the right command sequence and it took me some sincere research to find out those secrets.

The manual from Velleman describes the commands but is in this aspect not very clear. For me the confusion was total after a while. Read for your self:

Technical Description

• Port RS232 is configure with this setting: 2400/8/n/1
• To control the k8056 card, the correct sequence needs to be send like this:
  • Ascii code 13
  • card address (1..255)
  • Instruction (see below)
  • Address (1..255), relay #(‘1’..’9′) or 0 (for -E|-D|-F commands)
  • checkum, it is the 2-complement of the sum of the 4 previous bytes + 1.
• Instructions:
  • ‘E’: Emergency stop all cards.
  • ‘D’: Display address of all cards in a binary fashion (LD1:MSB, LD8:LSB)
  • ‘S’: Set a relay, followed by relay # (‘1’..’9′ in ASCII), 9 for all relay.
  • ‘C’: Clear a relay, followed by relay # (‘1’..’9′ in ASCII), 9 for all relay.
  • ‘T’: Toggle a relay, followed by relay # (‘1’..’8′ in ASCII).
  • ‘A’: Change the current address of a card, followed by the address (1..255)
  • ‘F’: Force all cards address to 1 (default)
  • ‘B’: Send a byte, Allows to control the 8 relays in 1 byte (LD1:MSB, LD8:LSB)

Imagine you want to send a command to set all relays on the card with address 1. That would give the following ASCII sequence:

13 1 83 57 102

The ASCII codes 13 & 1 does not have readable representations.

The last digits (102) is a calculated value and have to be the two’s complement sum of the rest. It works like a checksum for the RS232 transmission. First you have to know how to calculate the two’s complement sum. I did not! So if you are like me you’ll be glad to know that it is done like this:

(In decimal now)

checksum = 255-(13+1+83+57)+1

Finally you have to convert the sequence to hexadecimal before you send it. In hex that gives:

0D 01 53 39 66

I don’t know if I am on the right track, but I prepared some files containing raw hex data. In that way i can simply dump those files on the serial interface whenever I want to switch relays on or off thus saving me some scripting in the controlling hosts.

If you should have use of such files, please find them here. They are coded with a card address of one.

My site do not allow me to add .zip files so you have to rename the file to .zip after you have downloaded it. Then you simply unzip the archive.

Judging from the latest articles, Android is not alone of loosing tempo.

This can be really interesting. A whole new field is opening up for newcomers.

When android first showed up about five years ago I was thrilled. Finally the potential of linux was beginning to show. And at first things really looked like it was going to become mindblowing.

Now when looking at google play (what name is that?) you can litterally see the soap opera mentality spreading.

Why? What is the reason?

Bought? Hardly! Scared? Maybe!

But if I was pushed to pin point it… I think I would say bored.

Somehow the whole platform has overlived itself. The potential of evolution seemes to have eroded away. And it is the same smell about IOS. Staggered. Slowing. Boring. Turning into its own dinosaur, so to say. Sad!