The trouble with Windows…

For many years I’ve been a happy (albeit slightly frustrated) Windows user. I felt safe in the knowledge that whatever problems came my way I had the skills necessary to pop the hood on XP and tweak a few settings to get through the day.

Not any more.

I recently bought a new laptop. In retrospect I should have researched a bit harder before I bought it, but I thought that using the same model at a client site for 3 months would have been research enough. True it didn’t have Bluetooth (despite being told otherwise by the salesman) and it had one of those new fangled Express Card 54 slots, so my lovely Cardbus Indigo sound card wouldn’t work, but that wasn’t enough to put me off.

This one however, had Windows Vista.

I really really want Vista to work out – I really do – my future as a Windows developer really depends on Microsoft pulling off this new release of their OS. The trouble was it just didn’t work with what I wanted to do.

None of my laser show software would run – “sounds like a problem with the software” – one helpful Vista supporter wisely told me on the forum. Yes thanks for that, but it doesn’t help me that the vendor’s customer base is majority XP and they’re (quite rightly) not going to waste resources on supporting just little ol’ me.

Network file transfers seemed doggedly slow as well – it took Vista 20 minutes to work out that it was going to take 4 minutes to copy the files I wanted. Nice.

I’m 38 years old, and the more years I clock up, the more I begin to realize that my time on this planet is limited. In the heady days of my youth I would have thought nothing of pulling an all-nighter just to get the OS to recognize some new and esoteric piece of hardware.

Not any more.

I need stuff done, and I need it done now.

So sorry Vista, you gotta go…

This is where the fun really begins. My laptop is a ‘Vista’ laptop – which means that the manufacturer and Microsoft do not provide or support drivers for XP. All the hardware ID’s have been sneakily changed so that the audio driver (for example) on the XP version of the laptop will not install on the ‘Vista’ laptop.

So I spent 3 joyous days rewriting driver installers just to get the hardware to run under XP.
I chose XP service pack 3 – something else that I regret. I’ve installed this version of XP on 3 machines, and they all exhibit freezing issues. One just loses network connectivity every hour for about 5 minutes – and I can’t for the life of my work out why.

Reverting to SP 2 seems to address this issue, but leaves me open to security holes…

Hmm… Damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.

And the reason for this post?

I got home last night and Outlook 2003 (the fast Outlook, unlike Outlook 2007) suddenly lost the connection to Exchange. Nothing I could do would restore the connection. The Exchange server was running, and visible on the network – all firewalls were configured to let the traffic through – but Outlook refused to connect.

Sheesh.

Thank goodness for Norton Ghost – (even though that has become suspicious bloatware in the last 3-releases). I dug out my restore DVD and booted up the recovery manager. After 4 minutes restoring my OS I finally got Outlook to work again.

I’ve been toying with the idea of getting a Mac, but when I think of all the additional expense of (re) buying my software I soon forget about it.

One thing is for certain, we live in troubled times.

Someone said to me recently “computers shouldn’t get less efficient as technology improves” and I’ve got to think that they’re right.

Footnote: Why I love embedded microcontrollers.

My laser harp uses an Arduino to drive the laser, scanner and sensor. It’s pretty efficient code (even if I do say so myself) and uses timer and hardware interrupts so that the MPU only works as hard as it needs to. I dread to think how well this kind of system would function under Windows.

It gives me a warm fuzzy glow every time I switch it on, and it just *works*…

…and it wouldn’t be a laser show without the liquid sky effect.

Last night we went shooting some footage for MakeTV and moved the harp to Anton Phibes’ secret underground lair..*

This was the first time we’d had harp set up in a proper venue, and it looked pretty amazing. We also took along the my homemade display scanner for a bit more p’zazz.

*Google:The Abominable Doctor Phibes

On the show it looks effortless, but in real life it can take a little longer to make the TARDIS appear…

Today is the birthday of the LASER beam - it’s 48.

From Wikipedia:

The first working laser was demonstrated on May 16, 1960 by Theodore Maiman at Hughes Research Laboratories.[2] Since then, lasers have become a multi-billion dollar industry. The most widespread use of lasers is in optical storage devices such as compact disc and DVD players, in which the laser (a few millimeters in size) scans the surface of the disc. Other common applications of lasers are bar code readers, laser printers and laser pointers.

Google did a nice logo today - spelling out “GOOGLE” with lasers and mirrors.

Which I will put here until someone from Google tells me to remove it.

I made some progress today - it looks like the majority of the components used in the PixArt hookup here:

http://www.kako.com/neta/2007-001/2007-001.html

Are for creating a clean 25Mhz clock signal from a bare crystal. If I buy a crystal oscillator, in place of a bare crystal, then I don’t have to worry about any of that stuff, I can just plug the output from the oscillator straight into the sensor.

I have to film the laser harp for MakeTV this weekend so I have to wait until that’s complete before trashing the WiiMote to get the camera out…

Some of you will have noticed that I was able to modify a WiiMote to do visible light tracking recently. My goal was to produce a gesture tracking system for the laser harp.

This was OK, but having to use Bluetooth, and Windows was a PITA - I needed a hardware only solution that could be wired straight into the harp.

At the recent Maker Faire I talked to Johnny Lee about the amount of information available on WiiMote internals - he directed me to the WiiMote project forum and I was able to locate this post that hinted at how the PixArt sensor could be attached to a microcontroller using I2C.

http://www.wiimoteproject.com/other/red-laser-and-i2c-bus-done-t579.0.html

Post #34 is pretty crucial:

Here’s how I get this to work:
Remove Pixart sensor from wiimote.
The sensor needs a 25 MHz clock signal here’s a circuit and pinout:
http://www.kako.com/neta/2007-001/2007-001.html
Connect the Sensor to your MC (don’t forget the pullups)
The slave address is 0xB0.
Initialise like here
http://www.kako.com/neta/2006-019/wii_ir_test2_src.zip
http://www.kako.com/neta/2006-019/2006-019.html
Now send 0×38
Capture 8 Bytes from slave
Capture 4 Bytes from slave
(I’ve seen this by sniffing the Bus)
I’m not sure about how to interpret the data(Haven’t even tried this yet, maybe it’s like the basic report?)

Please share your experience with the community.
If somebody knows how to remove the IR filter please post it here!
Does somebody know if the sensor can be used with 5V?

Fortunately the good ‘ol Arduino has everything we need - 3.3v output and an I2C protocol, accessible using the Wiring language.

Here’s a nice article on using I2C with an Arduino

Over the next few weeks I’m going to be trying to create an Arduino/PixArt/WiiMote hybrid that is capable of 200Hz blob tracking and MIDI controller output…

Stay tuned!

But in the meantime - check out LadyAda’s excellent new Boarduino USB!
All the goodness of a regular Boarduino, now with the FTDI chip/USB built right in.

It’s funny, but when I first heard about “blogging” I couldn’t really grasp what all the fuss was about. The notion that you should post entries on the web that really should be kept in your private diary seemed rather strange.

I think that there is a major flaw in the whole blogging concept, (for most of us): When lots of stuff is happening in your life, you don’t have time to update your blog, then when things calm down a bit, there’s nothing to write…

Some people actually seem to make money doing this too - although I’m not sure how many people make liveable income from AdSense et al. I’ve always viewed it as something that produces “bonus” money, but no steady stream of income.

So anyway, I thought it was about time that I used my blog a bit more responsibly and actually posted things that might be of use to the rest of the human race…

Skip Russell emailed me to send me this link to his pictures from the Maker Faire - great job, as the lasers are not easy to capture on camera…

http://www.flickr.com/photos/skipr/tags/laserharp/

Looking at the EXIF data, it was 18mm, at 1/5s F3.5 - not sure about the ISO, but I should imagine it was set fairly high. Short exposure time and center-weighted metering help to capture the swirling fog patterns quite nicely…

This is me (looking slightly startled) with Limor Fried - also known as Lady Ada, head honcho of AdaFruit industries. Creator of the Boarduino variant of the Arduino microcontroller, and a whole bunch of other really cool gadgets and gizmos. Check out the SpokePOV - genius!!

http://www.ladyada.net/make/spokepov/