Robb finished our Pinball project
Robb and I started this about a year back. The cabinet is a wide body 1970's game we bought broken for $200. The build consists of the following
- Nano Tech, Digital plunger and accelerometer.
- A real pinball DMD display with a PC interface
- 42" NEC LCD on its back for the main screen
- 32" no name TV for the back glass
- Core I7 PC with an 850 watt power supply and a Radeon 6970 video card. (gives us enough video heads)
- Buttons from Happ Controls
- Software if HyperSpin with Future Pinball and Visual Pinball along with PinMame.
- A set of speakers and a small amp i got out of a recycle bin.
Most of this was acquired for free out of the recycle bin at work. I think we have less then $500 into the whole setup.
Helping out my brother
My brother and his girlfriend decided it was time to refinish their main floor bathroom. As these things usually go opening a wall reveals a larger issue. In their case it seems as though water had entered the inside of the wall and caused the floor to heave. To rectify this we completely removed the drywall and sub-floor, while we were at it we went all the way to the front of the entrance way.
Tina (Brothers girlfriend) mentioned that she would like to tear down the wall between the entrance way and the kitchen and make a half wall. Best to take a project like that on while you have everything all ripped apart. What we didn't know was that all the electrical for the kitchen goes through that wall and worst of all went though the top of the wall into the roof. A few hours of rewiring later and 10 holes in the drywall around the kitchen and hallway and we had every line rerouted and a few 3 way switches added to make life a little easier. We managed to complete all of that without adding any junction boxes.
All in all a busy couple of weekends but its now tiled and drywall finished.
Gaming PC Upgrade
I picked up a pair of Geforce 780TI OC cards. These cards run in SLI mode and allow me to play games like Bioshock at 4K resolution on the new TV. One card has already failed and needed to be replaced. I am currently cranking these cards to 100% on folding at home and making a little over 200K points a day.
Everyone should buy a bike right before winter.
I have always wanted a bike however the stars had not aligned until recently. 12 years ago I took the motorcycle training course and passed. Back then the test was taken the same day as the course and took place entirely inside the parking lot. The test consisted of a few slow speed and high speed maneuvers where you were required to avoid and stop before a few obstacles. I passed that part of the test however I failed to hill start after stalling out the little 125CC bike as it tried to move my heavy ass up the hill. That was an automatic fail. Not sure why but I never went back to try again.
Fast forward 13 years and the process of obtaining your motorcycle license is now completely different. A 2 day course must now be completed and passed, followed by a separately booked test. The test no longer consists of skilled maneuvers but now takes place entirely on the road by driving around in traffic for a period of 45 minutes. Today i finished the course portion, tomorrow morning I book my driving test for later in the week. I am more then a little worried about the road test, I don't know many people that could pass a road test in a car again let alone while trying to control a motorcycle they are not familiar with.
I have already obtained the bike, it's a VTR 1000 that i bought a few weeks back from my coworker Hal. The bike is 13 years old but has fairly low Km and doesn't have a scratch on it. The VTR has a V-Twin engine that makes an AMAZING sound. It is a liter bike however it produces a little over half of the power of a modern day liter bike.
New Toy
I have always wanted an oscilloscope, mostly just to learn how to operate one. Last week I managed to get my hands on a Hitachi 1565 Oscilloscope. This is a 100mhz scope that
Features
- Dual channel 100MHz
- Delayed sweep
- Cursor Measurement
- CRT readout
- Frequency counter
- Sweep time
- Auto Ranging
- Trigger lock.
First up on the to-do list is to get Oscillofun working
Video of Oscillofun http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1ylMJwfLmM
Audio file can be found here http://web.mit.edu/sdmorr/Public/oscillofun.flac set your scope to X/Y mode, hook the probes to the left and right channels of your audio line out and it should produce the video feed above.
Bought a new TV this week.
This is my new addition, its a SMART Board 8084i that I picked up at a company auction this week. 
Specs
- 84" of UHD goodness
- 4K Resolution (3840 x 2160)
- 280Hz
- RS232 control
- Motion Sensors to turn the display on and off
- Touch sensitive with multi touch (requires no drivers)
A few unknown facts, SMART uses the 4K LG display for this set. The LG version has some features that have been removed to make the user experience easier for SMART users. There are a few of these features that I really want back.
The LG TV is capable of playing UHD media directly off a hard drive plugged into USB port on the screen. When this is tried on the 3 USB ports on the outside edge of the SMART display it never presents the option to play these videos. The trick is using the USB service port that's buried in the bottom beside the display port connector. Then use the input button on the remote to bring up the LG onscreen display. You will now see a USB stick picture on the input list that you can select to see the files on that HDD.
Many of the other features of the LG firmware can also be unlocked by pressing the Menu button on the remote, selecting the picture heading (don't go into it) and hit the 1 button on the remote 7 times. (might be 5 times, I cant remember). You will then be prompted for a 4 digit password. I cant tell you that password but if your determined you will figure it out eventually. Once into that menu you can change EVERYTHING about the display, including settings that will render your TV inoperable so be careful.
Using my gaming PC I set the resolution to 3840x2160 and loaded up Bioshock Infinite. IT LOOKS AMAZING. Unfortunately my Radeon 6970 cant keep up 30 frames/second at this resolution but it still looks amazing as it stutters though scenes. The oddest thing that I noticed is that portions of the loading screens are pre-rendered, I assume to load faster. These pre-rendered screens are only rendered at 1080P and don't look anywhere as good as the scenes rendered in real time.
After that I started looking for some 4K movies to watch, I was able to find 1o+ short videos of panning cityscapes along with 100+ UHD backgrounds that look amazing. There are also a lot of YouTube Videos in 4K. The only full length movie I was able to find was a documentary called TimeScapes. this documentary costs a whopping $89.96
Stepping up my Home Automation Game
After a lot of thought I have decided to change elements of my now archaic VB6 coded home automation backend. I needed a new system that could meet a set of requirements that I have tailored over the years of custom coding my own solution. Moving to an off the shelf solution has a number of advantages, the first of which is the fact that I don't have to code every solution from the ground up. Sometimes it's handy to implement something quickly even though it might not have every feature I want.
In comes the Vera3, a small router based platform based on OpenWRT, this unit has a light weight HTML interface with a LUA scripting back end. This device checks off all of the boxes above but those don't account for its strongest asset, it's user community. The Verde forums are full of users just like me that have created custom drivers via LUA script to support everything from thermostats to light switches and everything in between. The compatibility list is immense and due to the simple XML based scripting language it's easy to take one plugin and transform it into a custom plugin that supports new devices. The Vera3 interface is not targeted as an end user interface, it can best be described as middleware. Think of it as a Bus between physical or virtual devices.
4 New Raspberry PI Media Players
Over the years I have used many different types of devices to play digital movies on the TV. This started back in the late 90's with a Haupage TV out card with a wireless 2.4 Ghz transmitter over to my
rear projection TV, upgraded to a dedicated home theater PC, replaced with a Xbox mod running XBMC, replaced then with an apple TV running XBMC so I could handle 720P, replaced with a Pivos running Android to run 1080p, replaced again with a Pivos running XBMC on Linux. This has finally all been thrown out the window and I have landed on the solution that I should stick with for a while.
Features
- Runs 1080P content SMOOTH
- Serial adapter will map to a TCP/IP port. This will allow the automation system to send the TV serial commands over the network (one network cable to the PI runs video/control)
- Small and low power
- Updates to newer XBMC versions on each boot (Raspbmc feature)
- Renders 1080P 3D content on TV's that support 3D (I tested)
Problems
- The Odd Codec wont render, just get audio (still trying to get the pattern for this)
- No Remote (use Ipod/Iphone/Ipad app to control XBMC)
GET IN YOUR HOME BALL ENGINE!
Just before winter we removed the engine out of my friend Robbs 1973 Winnebago. Over the winter he rebuilt the engine and transmission in his heated garage. We are now installing the newly rebuilt engine to get ready for the May long weekend.
When removing the engine we destroyed the engine hoist, the problem comes from the graveled alley. Because of the motor-home height we cant get it in the garage. This means we have to pull the engine in the alley. The engine hoist rolls easy enough without the engine and transmission but after it barely rolls at all. It took hours to tug it up to the garage by hand.
When it came time to put the engine back in we switched strategies. This time we put a quad in behind the motor-home with the winch cable passed up under the chassis to the front. This was then hooked into the engine hoist. This allowed us to tug the engine in, problem is it lacked finesses as the engine and trans weighed more then the quad. Because of this we couldn't just run the winch, we had to back the quad up. None the less we finally got the engine mounts to line up and exhaust attached. End result is a 1973 Winnebago with new found reliability.
Great Home Automation Video
This has some really good examples of where I would like to take my home system. The celing based projector that shines on the counter is something that could very easily be done. I have a extra LED projector that would work perfect for this.