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Quorten Blog 1

First blog for all Quorten's blog-like writings

Smart thermostat dual MCU and SoC design

quorten

2019-01-30

Categories: home-network   raspberry-pi  
Tags: home-network   raspberry-pi  

One of the problems with modern-style smart home devices is that although they bring in the benefits of the larger, more complicated software world into traditional applications, historically, often times their design was also such that they bring in all the bugs known to corrupt the large and complicated software world. But, this doesn’t need to be the case. What would a design look like that incorporates “the best of both worlds,” the best of traditional firmware engineering for microcontrollers and the best of large and complicated software-driven SoCs that can connect to the Internet?

T = Temperature sensor
F = "Firmware" traditional MCU
S = SoC
C = "Controller" tournament MCU
Smart thermostat diagram 1

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The other Jessi Lang

quorten

2019-01-30

Categories: twitter   motor-vehicle  
Tags: twitter   motor-vehicle  

As is classic with Twitter, there is always more than one person that you know who has the same name. So, there is one person from Twitter that I’ve been reading their tweets from Twitter that you may know of as Jesse Lang, and sure enough, there is another Jesse Lang on Twitter, more than one, matter of fact. So, who is this other Jessi Lang? Sometimes I think of this other Jessi Lang as an “alter ego” of the Jesse Lang I know. The Jesse Lang I know likes to ride around a motorcycle every once and a while. This Jessi Lang, by contrast, is a real “gearhead” car geek.

20190129/https://twitter.com/imjessilang

This Jessi Lang also experienced the extreme of a near fatal motor vehicle collision. I believe it happened on the German autoban, while test-driving a prototype car at high speed and a lower speed car careened out in front of them. But wow! Can those autoban accidents be quite severe, where inexperienced and highly experienced drivers may be sharing the same road. No wonder why there are no autobans in the United States like that. Sactioned racetracks are definitely a safer place to test-drive cars at high speed.

20190129/https://www.gofundme.com/jessilang

Another Tesla fatal Autopilot crash

quorten

2019-01-29

Categories: motor-vehicle  
Tags: motor-vehicle  

Well, the title says it all. Another Tesla fatal Autopilot crash. Again, similar to the last time, the vehicles vision system was designed such that it could easily get confused by white markings, but this time end up steering into highway barriers dividing branches of a highway that splits into two routes.

20190129/https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/06/07/tesla_crash_report/
20190129/https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/04/02/car_safety_watchdog_growls_at_tesla_for_reveal_crash_details/

Apple saying you can't sue them for software updates that slow down, Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3+, RPi PoE woes, and multi-terabyte disk drives more reliable

quorten

2019-01-29

Categories: random-software   raspberry-pi  
Tags: random-software   raspberry-pi  

Well, the title of this article basically says it all. I did some random reading on the Register, and found articles along the subject lines of Apple saying you can’t sue them for software updates that slow down, Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3+ RPi PoE woes, and multi-terabyte disk drives more reliable.

20190129/https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/01/28/apple_iphone_batteries/
20190129/https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/01/28/compute_module_3_plus/
20190129/https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/09/11/raspberry_pi_poe_hat_issue/
20190129/https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/01/28/disk_drive_failure_rates_improving/

So, the Apple class action lawsuit brought up some interesting analogies. Is Apple like the builder you bring into your house that messes things up under contract, or is Apple like a vampire? Also, it is rightfully so that Apple claims the battery is only covered under warranty for 12 months, but in the perspective of a $1000 device, is it really justified that the entire device should be considered broken by the end of a year?

About the Raspberry Pi article. So, one intersting thing was the speed upgrade to the compute module. The compute module’s speed was only sped up to the limits of the original power supply specifications, which is good. But also, the upgrade to the compute module was considered “the last of the 40nm line,” which is also good news that the Raspberry Pi Foundation will be coming out with a whole line of new and improved Raspberry Pis. At least the Raspberry Pi Zero was held constant and good after the camera module addition.

As for the Raspberry Pi PoE woes, that is really unfortunate. Well, at least I didn’t try to get myself involved in that sticky situation.

Why I hate the new Microsoft flat UI designs

quorten

2019-01-29

Categories: random-software  
Tags: random-software  

Wow, every single time I see one of the new Microsoft flat UI designs get upgraded, I think it just keeps getting worse and worse. Some of the early changes, they were laudable, but then Microsoft makes some other not-so-opportune changes and things end up overall worse. So, what’s the problem? One of the things that people point out is lack of customization in Microsoft’s newer products. In the past, especially on Microsoft Windows, the look and feel was easily customizable to any way that you would like it. But on the modern Windows, there is no room for customization. Another problem is that Microsoft’s flat UI designs are simply not well executed. You can make a flat UI design that works well and is minimalistic, but unfortunately for Microsoft, they have not put very much thought into their flat UI designs. So, although Microsoft’s designs are minimalistic, many of the design decisions are quite jarring.

The other thing is that people say that how well a UI looks is highly subjective… but I can dispute that. There are objective things in Microsoft’s implementation of flat UI that do not exist in other party’s implementations of flat UI, such as lack of contrast between borders and overuse of colors.

20190129/DuckDuckGo why are microsoft icons so ugly
20190129/https://www.quora.com/When-will-Microsoft-get-rid-of-the-ugly-flat-icons
20190129/https://www.quora.com/Why-is-Windows-10-so-ugly
20190129/https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/insider/forum/insider_wintp-insider_personal/the-ui-is-so-ugly-an-there-are-no-options-to/d5d716ef-443d-49cf-a3ef-719bf65df0d6

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Static electricity IS causing the hanging on my smart switch

quorten

2019-01-29

Categories: home-network   raspberry-pi  
Tags: home-network   raspberry-pi  

So, for quite some time, I was wondering about what the causes of my NETGEAR GS108Tv2 smart switch hanging could be. For a long time, I knew that the hanging tended to happen more when people were plugging in and unplugging cables. After thinking about this and studying a bit about CMOS logic more, I came to a few conclusions:

  • The smart switch does not like “floating” connections on ports. Ideally, all 8 conductors should be wired to a cable. Using a cable with less than 8 conductors is likely to cause trouble due to the “floating” connections.

  • Indeed, it is static electricity that can cause the smart switch to hang. Furthermore, some laptops don’t have good grounding.

  • The DC power jack lacking a ground connection is indeed part of the problem. For some people who have been having trouble with similar NETGEAR switches out in the field, attaching a ground point to the case solved the problem. Good thing the smart switch comes with a metal case.

  • Some cheap PHY Ethernet ICs lack adequate electrostatic discharge protections. It’s likely that cheaper models may forgo proper ESD as a cost saving measure.

  • You might be able to add ESD protection on the outside of your smart switch by placing a “tranzorb” style device right at the jack input.

Read on →

3 common foods surgeons are now calling death foods

quorten

2019-01-28

Categories: random  
Tags: random  

So you see this in random ads, so you search for this rather than clicking through, what do you see? Basically, this is a vegetable company trying to promote their party line hoping you buy more of their foods and saying in the process that high fructose corn syrup can build up insulin resistance and lead to diabetes if taken too much. This other studies note this is mainly a problem with processed foods and isn’t really a problem with fresh fruits that naturally contain fructose as they have other things that slowdown the release of the fructose into your blood stream.

20190128/DuckDuckGo 3 common foods surgeons are now calling death foods
20190128/https://www.reddit.com/r/savedyouaclick/comments/55sqe1/three_foods_surgeons_are_now_calling_death_foods/
20190128/https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/09/160926221442.htm

What is autovivication

quorten

2019-01-28

Categories: perl  
Tags: perl  

Perl has autovivication… which is basically automatically creating undefined fields and assigning them undef when they are accessed. “Autovivification is both a wonderful blessing and a curse in Perl.”

20190128/DuckDuckGo perl autovivication
20190128/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autovivification
20190128/https://perlmaven.com/autovivification

Updates on board support in LibreCMC

quorten

2019-01-26

Categories: home-network   raspberry-pi   important  
Tags: home-network   raspberry-pi   important  

Important! What’s going on with the latest versions of LibreCMC/OpenWRT? What’s this talk about ar71xx versus ath79 targets? Here’s what’s happening. As you may have known, for quite some years, the Linux kernel was going through a transition, an improvement, as to how it handles embedded systems. This was, and still is, very important as the embedded Linux market is booming in 2019. Namely, the main transition that must be taken is to migrate the board support package configuration method from the old C header file method of machine description to the new, standardized, Device Tree (DTS) configuration method. So, this is the main hurdle that must be undertaken to get your old Linux router running on the new kernel. Naturally, to distinguish the old and new methods unambiguously, the new method uses the board target name ath79 in place of ar71xx. Luckily, most of the old ar71xx devices are supported by the new kernel.

20190125/https://librecmc.org/news.html
20190125/https://gogs.librecmc.org/libreCMC/libreCMC/issues/79
broken/https://openwrt.org/docs/techref/targets/ar71xx-ath79
20190125/https://web.archive.org/web/20190104011616/https://openwrt.org/docs/techref/targets/ar71xx-ath79
20190125/https://lists.openwrt.org/pipermail/openwrt-devel/2018-February/011312.html
20190125/https://forum.openwrt.org/t/porting-guide-ar71xx-to-ath79/13013/79