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TomTom as a Bluetooth GPS

I was chatting with Steve Kingston earlier today, and it came up that he had managed to hack his TomTom Go to deliver NMEA GPS data through bluetooth to his Mac laptop. I’ve currently got 2 GPS receivers in the car – one in the TomTom for directions, and the second wired to a serial port on the laptop for when I’m wardriving and doing other GPS related stuff on the laptop.

I was only thinking the other day how much nicer it would be to be able to connect to the TomTom through bluetooth, 1. it would get rid of a gadget in the car, and 2. it would get rid of the cable connection to the laptop.

So I took a look at Steve’s post and Roberto Piola’s site and managed to get it working. The only gripe I have is that when you use the TomTom in Bluetooth GPS mode, you lose all the route finding functionality – basically you just get a black screen with a few status lines. You can’t have everything at once, and I’ll take a look at some of the scripts and see if it’s possible to run this in the background while the navigation continues. Oh, and the fact that you have to hard-reset to get out of the application – just leaves a little to be desired.

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Free router firmware

I finally got around to upgrading the firmware on my Linksys WRT-54G wireless router. I debated a year or two ago about installing the SVEAsoft firmware, but as that cost money, I decided aginst it.

Whilst there’s nothing hugely wrong with the original firmware, the new dd-wrt.com firmware is just so much more flexible, and allows QoS, WDS and a few other funky options.

The thing that got me started on this one again was the article on lifehacker linked from the makezine which made me seem so very easy.

A couple of things caught me out on the way, and I had to do a hard reset after installing the initial minimal firmware, and as I was using the v23 SP2 version it messed up the passwords and needed the hard reset to allow me to log in, as password files changed, but apart from that it was pretty plain sailing.

I now have a nice Version 2.0 WRT54G running DD-WRT V23 SP2 and it all works fine.

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LED Badges

I just bought a little LED badge off ebay, that displays programmable messages scrolling across it. It was relavitely cheap as an output device that could be attached to a server, and might provide some fun on visit days.

Of course I knew that the software that came with it would be only for Microsoft windows, and although it is possible to use the surface mounted buttons on the back to reprogram the messages, it would be rather long-winded.

So when it arrived today, the first thing that I did with it was load the software onto a windows machine and play with it to find out what the communications requirements were.

A quick test with the software determined that even with no device plugged in, the software worked – indicating that it was just “fire and forget”, there was no hand shaking going on – would make life a lot easier.

Out came the data analyzer, and after a couple of false starts, the baud rate was found to be 1200, 8 data bits, 1 stop bit, and no parity. Nice and straight forward.

Fire up the mac laptop, with a null modem cable to the keyspan USB to serial adapter, and quick edit of some WellyWanger comms code, and I can capture the data that the software is sending.

Now for the interesting bit, the data is not just an ASCII message being sent, so I have to capture the data as something other than ASCII – I prefer to look at it in decimal, besides it’s a little easier to present the data in decimal in Java than it is in Hex.

The software allows for 10 different messages to be stored on the badge, so I try sending a single character ‘A’ to channel 0 and channel 1:
The data stream captured is:

251 243 89 254 251 246 1 16 2 0 254 = 'A' channel 1
251 243 89 254 251 246 0 16 2 0 254 = 'A' channel 0

Try sending character ‘B’
251 243 89 254 251 246 0 16 2 1 254 = 'B' channel 0

Try sending ‘AB’ to see if there is a char count:
251 243 89 254 251 246 0 1 2 0 1 254 = "AB" channel 0 (no char count!)

Changing the other options and logging the output takes about 1/2 hour, and gives me a bunch of data to work with – I’ve worked out most of the protocol.

A little programming work this evening in Java has resulted in a couple of classes which run from the command line and allow programming of the badge from Mac OS X.
A GUI might have to come later on, but for now I’ve got a command line program that has a number of options, allows you to program all 10 channels, has the first 96 characters mapped out in the conversion. This gives me the ability to use the badge as a status display on a server when I’m not using it as a badge.

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Eclipse IDE 5 years old!

Cnet has a story on how the Eclipse IDE is now 5 years old, and has a huge impact on the development process as well as proving how successful open source can be.
Eclipse is my tool of choice, and I’ve been using it for a few years now, whilst I only use a few of the features I do find it to be an incredibly easy platform to use, and the fact that it lets me get on with coding without getting in the way of my coding just fits the way I like to work, like using MacOSX.

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Ubuntu Edgy Eft released

I’ve just upgraded this server from Dapper Drake LAMP server to Edgy Eft using apt-get dist-upgrade after changing all occurrences for dapper to edgy in /etc/apt/sources.list, and so far everything looks good.

There are some issues with the new release, but nothing that should affect this server – only things that might affect desktop systems.

It does have quite a lot of new features as standard including Firefox 2.0 and you can still download it unlike Fedora Core 6 which was avaiable for download for a massive 4 hours before it was pulled.

Release notes are here
Arstechnica article here

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Wellies again

This will be the last welly post for a while, but we’ve just had some more nice press coverage in the Times Good University Guide – You can look at the pdf of the two page spread here.

The photo was taken by a very nice freelancer called Tim Cuff who has a gallery of six different photos which you can purchase if you feel so inclined.

I do like the magic levitating wellies.

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New anti-hacking laws

It looks like the proposed new anti-hacking laws might do some good for prosecuting offenders – Denial of Service attacks are now classified as offences, but then it might also outlaw legal uses of hacking tools.

More on Spy blog and The Register

There’s a link to the text of the new bill here

Wikipedia has an article here

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Wellies again

It’s been a frantic few days, mainly getting the embedded assembly language debugged on the welly wanger.
This afternoon, we transported it down to the department, and doing some testing on a grassy area outside, then the weather broke.

I moved the car next to the machine, so that I could keep the laptop dry whilst keeping firing, which we did for a short while, and we were achieving reasonable distances – I have records of over 40 metres on some shots with plenty of power to spare. The crosswinds were quite gruesome, and we nearly lost a welly a couple of times, but Tom managed to recover them every time.

The the rain really started, and we were gratful for the tarpaulins that I’d bought last weekend, as evidenced by the photo. album361/DSC_1459.jpg

We had a couple of problems – one of the motor solenoids came loose and shorted out against the chassis, causing it to activate unexpectecly. Then, as the rain started to ease, we were doing a last couple of tests, and the motor released some “magic blue smoke” – if we don’t have a big motor, we don’t have a machine, and it looked like ours was dead – nothing electrical works after the “magic blue smoke” is released.

We took the motor back to Ians, and found the problem – probably due to us runnning it at 24V we had overheated the main supply wire inside the motor case, melted the insulation, and it had shorted to the case. We spent an hour or so rebuilding the connections, and tested the motor – it works off load – we just have to re-install it tomorrow before driving down there.

Travelling tomorrow, competing Wednesday, then holiday for a few days.

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Binary liquid explosive

It’s really annoying me at the moment – I might want to fly somewhere, but I won’t be able to take a drink on the plane – why? Because the media have somehow convinced the “authorities” that I could take a bottle of something from my bathroom, and one of my fellow passengers could take on another, and if I retired to the bathroom for 5 minutes could mix them together and blow up the whole aeroplane!

Now this is sensationalist nonsense, but it appears that somewhere along the line the police, secutriy services or whatever have forgotten that (excuse my shouting) MOVIES ARE NOT REAL LIFE!

I’m not a chemist – the last real chemistry I did was in school when making sulphuric acid in my parents garage by electrolysis of copper sulphate solution, but I do think that maybe umm the Journal of the American Chemical Society might have something to say on the matter.

TATP is the most widely quoted binary liquid explosive, and in the 4th February 2005 issue published a piece Decomposition of Triacetone Triperoxide Is an Entropic Explosion on the synthesis of TATP. Dick Destiny has an article on the journal piece, and I’m not going to repeat what he said so go read it here.

Look, my favourite news source, The Register has also done a piece illustrating how difficult it would be.

And Dick Destiny has been busy on since then with more and more on the subject.

I’m glad I’m not the only one that it’s annoying – Ryan Air have something to say on the matter about the new secutiry measures, but if you’re at work you might not want to click here (NSFW).

Even if you’re not blowing up aeroplanes, you will get into trouble if you’re plaing with chemicals – the 20 year old in Manchester has shown that – but again, the media appears to have blown it all out of proportion, and completely lost any sense of reality.

Is it just me or are the power that be getting better at controlling us through fear – or are they getting more desperate and more obvious?

I’m guessing that this blog is now going to be watched on some list by the number of references to explosives and bombs and aeroplanes and aircraft and security services… maybe they’ll conclude that the welly wanger is the new Welsh weapon of mass destruction and confiscate it before Wednesday. 😉