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Facit 4070 paper tape punching with Arduino mega

A couple of months ago, I had a request from a friend to produce a paper tape as an RSVP to a wedding invitation that he’d received on floppy disk. I dug out my old Facit 4070 in my collection and set to seeing if I could interface it with something modern. This blog post chronicles the results.

Connection from Facit 4070 to Arduino Mega for code:

Facit 4070 D -> Arduino Mega Pin
1 -> A8
2 -> A9
3 -> A10
4 -> A11
5 -> A12
6 -> A13
7 -> A14
8 -> A15
9 -> D9
10 -> D10
11 -> D11
12 -> D12
25 -> GND

I didn’t actually use pin 12 (Punch Ready) in the end, as it was proving unreliable, so I just used timings – a quick and dirty solution was all that was needed, and eventually it proved robust enough with delays in sending the data.

The code was written to take commands from a menu system to set up the arduino and then punch data.  The menu is as below:

Facit 4070 printer arduino interface
====================================
? - show this information
a - punch message in ascii
b - punch message in EIA code
c - clear message
d - display message
e - punch message in ebcdic (no parity)
f - advance tape 10 spaces and punch feed holes
h - punch message human readable
m - enter message
o - toggle odd or even parity
p - turn on/off parity
s - advance tape 10 spaces
v - show version information

To use it, you send an ‘m’ followed by your message.  You then can select if you want parity or not, and odd or even parity if you’re using ascii.  Following that, you can send an ‘a’, ‘b’, ‘e’ or ‘h’ depending on what character encoding you want to use.

 

 

Photo gallery of Facit 4070 project

Github repository of Arduino code to drive Facit 4070

Video on Facebook of the punch working

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Self driving cars… and open source systems

So I just watched an interview with George Hotz, you can watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqdYbwY9vPU

For those that don’t have the time, George jailbroke the iPhone when he was quite young, and jailbroke the PS3, was threatened by Sony and is a proud proponent that once you’ve bought something that you should own it and be able to do what you want with it.

He’s taking it to the next step, and allowing you to add on a self-driving car system to any car (well, he’s aiming for 50% of the cars sold in the USA next year).  They obviously should have fly by wire controls so that his system uses the built in actuators, but as a sensor and processor platform he’s using the mobile phone.

What’s even more fun is that he’s making this completely open source, he’s crowd sourcing his data (download chffr for your phone) by offering a dashcam that then uploads driving data after it gets home.  All his software is available on github under an MIT license, and he thinks that we’ll have a critical mass of self driving cars in 5 years.

Now I’m looking forward to those days, not because I don’t like driving, but because I enjoy driving, but I don’t like repetitive day-to-day commuting driving, or driving to meetings when I’m thinking about the presentation I have to give and so on.  I would love to be able to have the choice to sit down and tell the car to take me home and have a nap on the way – hey, I’m getting old(er), I deserve a nap now and again.

Take a look at Comma Ai, maybe your next car won’t have to have self driving systems built-in, you’ll be able to buy it as an addon.

 

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Goodbye dear friend

For a number of years (more than I can remember, but between 15 and 20) I’ve had my web hosting on a box in my office beside my desk on a machine called pcbo.dcs.aber.ac.uk.  We’ve had our ups and downs over the years, but she became so long in the tooth, and a security scan last week prompted me to do something about it finally.  Today I pulled the plug on her (literally), and have switched over to my new rented server in a different country.

No longer will I hear the rattling of the hard drive when someone looks through a lot of my photos or web crawlers start indexing my site, and it’s just a silent beige box waiting to be thrown out.

All that remains are all the blog posts that I moved over onto this new server, and a CNAME record that redirects all traffic to the new box.  Some links from pcbo will still work, but most will change – this is a new machine with different operating system and web server software, much more modern and up-to-date, which should be able to cope with security patches much better.

It’s really something I should have done years ago, but now it’s less of a worry that I could be an attack vector on the university network.

So long, old girl.  You were old and noisy, and the office is quieter now.

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New Server

So I finally bit the bullet and started renting a hosted server.  Yes, this is long overdue and I can finally turn off the extremely old machine in my office.  What prompted this you ask, well it could have had something to do with the latest security scan on that old machine.  The OS and software was so old that upgrading it was going to be an absolute nightmare, and I really wanted something else up and running before I took the old one down.

Anyhow, I’m renting a server (not a vps) from www.online.net in Amsterdam an Dedibox SC SATA 2016 for €8.99 a month + Tax, which is not too bad a price for a dedicated box with 4G of RAM, 1T of disk space and a dual core processor, oh yes, and 2.5Gb/s network connectivity.

Anyhow, the migration from the old version of wordpress was slow, but apparently painless – I still need to check that everything came over safely, but on the surface it looks to be ok.  Of course, the new server has a letsencrypt.org certificate so it’s all https too.

There’s also a new gallery, I’m trying out piwigo after installing and then deleting zenphoto, which had issues with downloading the original sized images, which was a shame as it seemed like quite a nice system.

 

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SOPA and the Denmark historical perspective.

I just spotted this on Techdirt…

“What happened in Denmark.
Ole Husgaard, Dec 22nd, 2011 @ 11:17am

7 years ago we got a child pornography filter on the Internet in Denmark. Some people said that it was a bad idea, but others said these people were just paedophiles, or trying to help paedophiles. Some people said that it was against our constitution, which it was. So the censorship was implemented in a way so it was formally (but not in reality) voluntary, which ensured that it was not formally a violation of our constitution.

Some people warned that once the censorship infrastructure was in place, it would most likely be used to censor other things. But they were told “Never! This is ONLY to prevent this horrible crime, and will never be used for other censorship.”

Fast-forward a few years, and the Danish recording industry did not like allofmp3.com, so they went to court to get a court order against the Danish ISPs to start censoring allofmp3 off the Danish Internet. The judge basically said “ahh, you already have the infrastructure in place, so there will be no extra cost”, and issued the order to censor allofmp3.com. It was not a violation of our constitution because it was ordered by a judge.

Since then other “pirate” sites have been censored. Most notably The Pirate Bay, which found out that the court would not even allow them to speak their case in court, or even submit a written brief.

Then our politicians found out that they wanted to protect and expand income from taxes. In particular the high taxes gambling providers pay. The official excuse was to limit the horrible disease of ludomania. So they decided that foreign gambling providers had to pay the taxes in Denmark too if they were on the Internet and could be seen in Denmark. If they refused to pay taxes, they should be censored off the Danish internet. So they passed a law saying that if a foreign gambling provider refused to pay taxes in Denmark, a court would – on the request of our government – have to order ISPs to censor its sites off the net, and payment processors to block all payments to it. If an ISP does not censor, or a payment processor or bank does not block payment, hefty fines are issued.

Now our politicians worry that some foreign companies selling medicines on the net are not licensed to sell medicines in Denmark. So they are preparing new legislation that will censor these sites off the net, and block payments to them.

So our Internet censorship started a few years ago with a very limited purpose and good intentions. And it was solemnly promised that nothing else than child pornography would be censored.

But once the infrastructure for censorship was in place, the censorship started spreading to other areas. And the censorship is getting more and more widespread.”

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111221/03420017156/how-sopa-creates-architecture-much-more-widespread-censorship.shtml#c710

All these technical solutions that are put in place with the “best intentions” end up being able to be abused in many ways, even if the politicians that implement them promise us that they will “only be used for good”. Well I for one don’t trust them as far as I can throw them, and will keep objecting to censorship and “technical solutions” on the internet as they will be able to be used and will be used to silence certain parts of society.

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Spam filtering, and how not to do it.

Alun is not having a very fun time with secureserver.net and from the sounds of their technical support staff, they’re secure through a certain amount of incompetence.

I’m sure that you will enjoy reading the exploits of a sys-admin at a UK university, so here’s the link secureserver spam blog entry

Oh, and this counts as a little assistance in getting pushed up the google search rankings