Eric Preston / Software Development

I've got some extra hardware kicking around that I'd like to sell. I've got a small number of Snapper USB dongles (compatible with the ibnfc project project (which is why I got them in the first place). As well as a few OpenPCD readers.

Contact me if you're interested in these readers.

I've spent some time looking over the proxmark3 hardware design and the bill-of-materials and updated it to current part numbers on DigiKey. There are some discrepancies for some parts which I'm sorting out at the moment, so I don't promise that this BOM is entirely correct yet. C35 for example is listed as 50pF on the schematics but 100pf in the original BOM. C37, C38 are listed as 220uF on the schematic but 100uF in the original BOM. Who knows, maybe I'll notice more, the more I look.

I've been working on putting together a portable rig that someone else designed and started but couldn't finish as part of augmented reality research at Brock University. I've been spending alot of time in the past week putting together all the disparate pieces together into a new headset. I'm slowly putting the wiki back up and filling it in.

You can take a look at my Augmented Reality wiki.
And I've also posted some photos on flickr of some of the hardware.

After posting that last entry I went looking for the latest version of app_swift but the latest maintainer's site seems to have disappeared and nothing was ever checked into the repository on sourceforge. I've put up app_swift-1.6.2.tar.gz on my download site as a courtesy.

I have a bit of a rewrite and improved code that I started a few months ago that I will eventually post when I get some time to test it out further.

I've been meaning to write about this for a while.

Whatever you do, do not purchase Cepstral Voice Starter pack from Digium's online store. For starters, I found out after purchase I might add, that at the time (a few months ago) and currently (from the periodic support ticket reports I keep getting) that their proprietary binary blob text-to-speech module (which they force you to use) doesn't work with Asterisk 1.6. (There was no mention of the fact, or versioning info on their storefront).

I've updated and uploaded 3 of my miscellaneous scripts.

1) build-arm-toolchain.sh will build and install and arm-elf toolchain with soft-float enabled under Fedora 10 as simple as calling sh ./build-arm-toolchain all. The toolchain will be installed under /usr/local/arm. It currently builds gcc 4.3.4, newlib-0.17, binutils-2.19.1, and gdb-6.8 successfully but I haven't tested any code build with this toolchain just yet.

*** Update: Firmware build and flashed successfully, read the comments on howto ***

Hmm. The WRT54 tomato firmware sources v1.25 doesn't build out-of-the-box for me. Goes into an endless lookup with ever increasing path depths, I killed it off when it seemed to be reconfiguring the kernel the umpteenth time and was at something like make[200]. Something is wrong.

I've setup a subversion repository to share some of the stuff I'm working on.

You can browse the subversion repository.

I finally got around to toying with NX server again on a Fedora 10 box.

Installing freenx-server on the server and nomachine's nxclient on the client side, things did not work out-of-the-box on my particular setup. On the server side,

• You have to make sure you're allowing sshd via localhost.
  
• You have to ensure that ENABLE_PASSDB_AUTHENTICATION="1" is turned on in node.conf.
  
• You have to add the client username and password via:
  
/usr/libexec/nx/nxserver --adduser somebody
/usr/libexec/nx/nxserver --password somebody


I've spent a little time fixing up the arm toolchain build script that I whiped up last year. It's definitely still a work in progress. It automatically pulls down and builds binutils, newlib, gcc and gdb and builds them, logging everything as it churns.

The build script is a bash shell script intended to be run on Fedora.

Free free to download my arm toolchain build script and give me some feedback.