Shoutbox

Tobbe 01/08 14:03

They're back now, sorry about that :)

the-golem 31/07 21:43

Whar did mah LOSI pages go?

Tobbe 30/07 20:46

Now it doesn't say that anymore :)

Acidfire 06/05 14:53

The shoutbox says doesn't work yet, but it does!

Tobbe 08/04 10:08

Sorry about lsp... You should be approved now.

Joacim 05/04 18:43

btw. You Should Fix The About Me Section On The Left

Joachim 05/04 18:42

Hi Tobbe, nice site. I've regostred at lsp.litestep.info. now. I've done it some weeks before to, but registration has faild. Now I'm waiting for my approval.

Acidfire 23/08 22:38

So how's the new layout coming Tobbe? >:)

Tobbe 19/08 10:37

Yeah, I've been bugging Acidfire about adding that :)

B110 18/08 21:16

Hey, love the new lsprogress site. How about an rss-feed for it? :)

See all shouts

News

tVolEzy 1.0

Added Vista (and 2k8 and 7) support to tVolEzy. Changed the volume span to 0-100 so it could be the same on both XP and Vista.

I think this is the first module for LS that can change the volume on Vista :)

Binary: http://tlundberg.com/downloads/tVolEzy-1.0.zip
Source: http://github.com/Tobbe/tvolezy/zipball/v1.0

tVolEzy 0.1

I have a new volume changing module for LiteStep for you :)

Binary: http://tlundberg.com/downloads/tVolEzy-0.1.zip
Source: http://github.com/Tobbe/tvolezy/zipball/v0.1

From the readme:

tVolEzy - The easy to use volume changing module written by Tobbe
=================================================================...

[more...]

Building a Tetris, part nine: Done

Playing the final version of the tetris (with uart disconnected).

As always these things take longer than you thought they would when you started. There have been many long days in school to finish this. But in the end it was really worth it. I have learned a lot and without this class I would never had began playing with microcontrollers even though I've been wanting to for some time.

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Building a Tetris, part eight: High scores

Screenshot of the high score registering program running on Windows XP.

Only thing I had ever written previously that used the COM port of the computer was a small Java program for Linux that used an already written library. Now I was going to write something from scratch in C++ that ran on Windows.

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Building a Tetris, part seven: A menu

This is the final look of the menu. Everyone I've shown it to this far has been impressed. That's a good sign :)

To give a good first impression I wanted a nice looking menu when starting the game. To save program memory and speed up drawing I split the menu graphics in three different matrices instead of one big as I did for the game background. I have one big for the top half of the screen with the text "Tetris by Tobbe".

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Building a Tetris, part six: Battery power supply

This is all the hardware needed to build a tetris. Finally found some black wire for Gnd :)

I had this idea that the tetris should be able to run on battery and that it should be able to power itself down from software. I needed some extra hardware to solve that. You can see it all in the photos. For the battery part I needed a voltage regulator so I could run everything off of a 9V battery.

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Building a Tetris, part five: UART

This is a photo of my tetris running with both the cables I mentioned visible.

One of the things I wrote in the initial list of requirements was that I wanted to be able to send the final score of a round of tetris to a computer. I was going to do that using the uart capabilities of the atmega. This communication protocol is very timing critical and the internal clock source of the ATmega16 just isn't precise enough.

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tVol-0.4

New update to my tiny system volume controlling module for LiteStep.

Changes in this version are:
* Included the tlibc project in the tVol solution, and added lsapi.h and lsapi.lib from the LiteStep SDK to the tVol source folder. This should simplify compilation for everyone.

[more...]

Building a Tetris, part four: Programming

Here I had just figured out how the lcd screen works.

With the basic hardware connected it was time to start programming the microcomputer. I've been using AVR Studio with WinAVR (AVR-GCC for Windows). I had never written anything from the ground up for any atmega computer before so I had to start with the very basics. My first program only made an output pin go high (+5V).

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Building a Tetris, part three: Soldering and wire wrapping

I've used thick wire for Vcc and Gnd, and thin wrapping wire for everything else. Unfortunately I couldn't find any black wire for Gnd.

When I had decided on a layout I started adding wires. First I added all wires that needed to be soldered, and then I finished off with those I could attach with the wire wrap gun.

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Building a Tetris, part two: Component layout

Semi-final layout. None of the parts are attached.

Before soldering anything to the protoboard I played around with different placements of the parts to get a layout I was satisfied with. My main concern was to have adequate space around the direction keys (left, right, down, rotate). I also had to place the display somewhere above the buttons.

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Building a Tetris, part one: Paperwork

Block diagram with all the components. Worth noting is that I have also enabled the internal pull up resistors on all the button IO ports (pins 17-21).

I'm building a Tetris as a project for school. I'm using an Atmel ATmega16 AVR micro computer, a 64x128 pixel LCD with a KS0108 driver and some other small pieces of hardware. I began by writing a list of requirements for my tetris game. When I had those on paper I drew up a block diagram so I knew how to connect all the hardware.

[more...]

Building a file server, part three: Operating system

There are a few options here: Windows, Linux, BSD, Mac OS, and Solaris. If you read my last post about building a file server you probably guessed that I liked the sound of ZFS and it's z-raid. You would have made a correct guess. This eliminates Windows and Linux.

[more...]

Moving code

I have moved the code to add and edit posts to my two new classes, TPostsList and TPost. It used to just be functions in index.php, but it obviously fits better in the aforementioned classes.

Doing this shrunk index.php from more than 600 lines of code to about 300 lines. It really is much easer to get an overview of what that file does now.

[more...]

Formating my cellphone

My cellphone has been acting out on me. It started with the music player crashing way too often. It played around five songs, then it ended with the very uninformative message "General: System error". Sometimes it ended with a "corrupt file" error message. After rebooting the phone I could play those files just fine though...

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More changes - Images

I have added a few more options to how images are displayed. It used to be that all images were resized and displayed to the right. Now when I post an image I can choose if I want it to be resized or not (on the front page list of post) and where I want to put it (top, right, bottom or left).

[more...]

Changes to the website

I have made some changes to the website over the weekend.

Most notably for any visitors is that all the small images on the main page of the site are now clickable to get to the bigger version.

I have made tweaks to the function that creates the excerpts.

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Building a file server, part two: Storage

One important question I had to answer was "What kind of storage solution do I want?". Some of the hard drives I store my things on now are about four years old and I'm starting to worry that they might die soon. I don't like worrying about that, so for my file server I wanted to use some kind of RAID solution.

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Setting my Nokia 6220 Classic free

Screenshot from the OYSOISC tool.

Most of Nokia's upper middle class to high end phones run Symbian Series 60. And so does my 6220c.

Even before I bought this phone I knew s60 was pretty locked down when you got it. I also knew it could be hacked (thanks to my favourite technology blog www.engadget.com).

[more...]

Building a file server

This is the first post in a series I'm going to make about building a file server.

I've been wanting a file server for a while. Right now I'm just storing my stuff on the regular hard drives in my various computers and then I use Window's shared folders to make it available across the network.

[more...]

tSFD plugin for NSIS

I have just created my very first plugin for NSIS, the Nullsoft Scriptable Install System (http://nsis.sourceforge.net)

It's called tSFD (SFD = Select File Dialog) and provides a replacement for the SelectFileDialog in the nsDialogs plugin. I needed some functionality that wasn't in there, so I wrote my own replacement.

[more...]

My new toy

I bought myself a new toy a couple of days ago :D

It's a Kawasaki ZX-6R Ninja from 1998. Quite the upgrade from my old Suzuki GSX 750 ES from 83! I hope I get the chance to take my new zx-6r out to a couple of runs on a race circuit next summer.

Starting on the frame

Before I could start working on the frame I had to go buy a pipe bender. A lot of people I had talked to advised me not to get a bender like that. They all said it was useless and would destroy my pipes. I wouldn't get a smooth bend. But since it was the only pipe bender I could afford the choice was simple... I had to get it!

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[more...]

I've added [more...] links to posts that has more text/images than what is shown on the main page. I've also made all post titles clickable to view that post only.

Excerpts

I've decided not to show entire posts on the first page (category news) if the post is more than 350 characters long. This is done to encourage people to use the category links. If you want to read the full post, and get clickable image thumbnails, you have to go to that post's category page. You can do that by clicking on the post's category name.

Starting to build my crosskart

The first thing I had to do was to build a table to work on. It's built to be disassembable in to three parts for easier storage. The three parts are the top board, the three legs on the far side and the three legs on this side of the table.

I've wanted to build myself a crosskart for some time. For those of you who don't know, a crosskart is a small four-wheeled vehicle built to be driven on gravel roads and forest trails.

I wanted my crosskart to be a one-seater, have both front and back suspension and be powered by a small motorcycle engine.

[more...]

New cellphone

More of a close up shot.

I bought myself a new cellphone a few days ago :)
It's a Nokia 6220 Classic. It runs Symbian S60, has GPS and a 5 megapixels camera. I took a couple of photos as soon as I had unpacked it. This is how they came out.

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Posting images

I choose this image just because it was the largest one I could find (4mb). Wanted to see if the web server could handle an image that big.

I'm going to use this post to see how my image posting works. Hopefully there won't be any problems. I have also fixed the bug I noted in the last post about viewing the bigger size images. It should now technically work but I don't think you can access it. This is because of my crappy host. I'll see what I can do about circumventing that.

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Support for categories and images

I have added support for posting stuff in different categories. The different categories will show up in the navigation menu to the left where you can click on a category name to show all posts made to that category.

The main page shows posts from all categories.

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User class

I have written a php class for handling users. It's based on the same class I used at LSP (http://lsp.litestep.info), but I have made some updates to it. I have tried to simplify it, and I have rewritten it to use mysqli instead of the old mysql functions. There is more work to do before it is simple enough though, it's still too complex...

Working on the design

I've been looking at various free css templates to find something I could like. I ended up finding one with a layout I liked, and one with a design/look I liked. So I tried to combine the two. Since I suck at making things look nice I've been spending a lot of time on this. And I can't even say I like the end result very much...

Decided to fix a real page

I decided it was time to finally fix a real web page again. I haven't had one since the hard drive crashed at my host.

At first I wanted to write it in Python, but my webhost doesn't support that, so it will have to be PHP again. So I went out looking for some cool python framework or something.

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Spam and bugs

I came here to see if anyone had written any comments and noticed that I couldn't read any comments any more! It has worked just fine for a long time, and now all of a sudden it doesn't work any more... My theory is that something happened during the last php upgrade my host did.

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