I love to shop at Fry’s. I used to make sure I had an extra day in the Bay Area when I traveled there to shop at a few stores including Fry’s. Now we have one about a mile or two from my house. What a treat! Sort of.

I decided to buy a new CPU the other day — I had plans for the old one. Fry’s had their usual good deal, so I bought an AMD X2 5600+ and a fan. I popped it into the motherboard which has worked for some time and turned it on. All seemed well. But there was some disk problem booting XP. Must have wiggled a cable loose. After a few fidgets, it booted. Kind of. Several programs were unhappy. VirtualBox refused to run. Temperature monitoring showed the chip was at about 40C which is ok for a chip like this.

Next thing you know, the computer refused to POST. Ok, must be a defective CPU. I pulled the chip — the Arctic Silver was already getting pretty sticky — and took it back to Fry’s. The clerk insisted that the chip was damaged — bent pins and burn marks. I asked them to show them to me, but they couldn’t. But they refused to exchange the CPU. The manager (a very young woman) wasn’t helpful at all and was argumentative. So I left.

As many insurance companies and retailers will tell you, it isn’t nice to mess with me. I went back to the lab and put the chip under the microscope, taking pictures of all the pins and the surface area. Then I went back to the store with a 10X loupe in my pocket. There was a new crew at the service desk. It was only a few hours later, so I decided to just try again. This time, they looked at it, whipped out a motherboard, verified that it wouldn’t post, and gave me a new chip without the slightest trouble.

So beware. Customer service at Fry’s — as so many people have warned me about in the past — is luck of the draw.

There are many things I enjoy that I can’t actually do. I don’t think I could write without a computer — I’m too sloppy. The one time I tried to lay out a PCB by hand in the old days, my boss threatened to fire me if I did it again, but with a computer its easy.

One of my interests is CPU design. I have two processors I work on from time to time. One is kind of a classic 16-bit mini architecture and the other is a very novel 32 bit design that I’ll talk about some day. But I don’t think I could actually wire up a whole CPU from scratch. The fact that I can describe my circuits and push them onto an FPGA fabric makes it possible.

Apparently, that’s not true of everyone. I’ve posted links before to relay computers and discrete computers. Here’s a blog detailing a CPU builder’s journey: http://www.stevechamberlin.com/cpu/

Some people might ask, Why? But I know that if you have to ask, you wouldn’t understand the answer.

Good luck Steve!

It seems like I get more hits about Morse code on Jericho than just about anything else, so…. The series finale was necessarily disappointing. But you can see they are setting up for a new “Civil War” show on SciFi, I bet. Perhaps with a mostly new cast at that. Maybe they’ll call the show “Republic” and it’d be about the Texans kicking everyone else’s… um, well.

Episode 1.01: The Pilot
Jericho Pilot

Episode 1.02: Fallout
Jericho Fallout

Episode 1.03: Four Horsemen
Jericho Three

Episode 1.04: Walls of Jericho
He knows Rob

Episode 1.05: Federal Response
There is a fire

Episode 1.06: “9.02″
The EMP hits

Episode 1.07: Long Live the Mayor
Pray for NYC

Episode 1.08: Rogue River
Rob not FBI

Episode 1.09: Crossroads
AOV Surprise

Episode 1.10: Red Flag
It begins with

Episode 1.11: Vox Populi
6 and ends with

Special Episode: Return To Jericho
back next week. 36 hours before bombs

Episode 1.12: The Day Before
Bloodshed

Episode 1.13: Black Jack
Bleeding KS

Episode 1.14: Heart of Winter
4 Down 4 to Go

Episode 1.15: Semper Fidelis
They will need it

Episode 1.16: Winter’s End
A costly deal

Episode 1.17: One Man’s Terrorist
Rob Exposed

Episode 1.18: A.K.A.
Who Ran Red Bell

Episode 1.19: Casus-Belli
ONE GOT AWAY

Episode 1.20: One If By Land
We Pledge

Episode 1.21: Coalition of the Willing
Allegiance

Episode 1.22: Why We Fight
To the Flag

Episode 2.01: Reconstruction
WE’RE BAAACK

Episode 2.02: Condor
J&R RAN BOXCAR  (man… have you ever heard an & sent using Morse code before? I hadn’t)

Episode 2.03: Jennings & Rall
CALLER KNOWS ALL

 Episode 2.04:  Oversight
A Costly Death

Episode 2.05: Termination for Cause
THO IT IS DARK

Episode 2.06: Sedition
Know our Flag

Episode 2.07: Patriots and Tyrants
Is still there

The code was sloppy at the start of the series. In addition, I always thought “AOV Surprise” was a mistake, although some say it means “Area of Vulnerability.” Right.  It got better, but also got faster and covered up more with music. The sloppy nature and the use of the & symbol makes me think that whoever was responsible for this was not a ham, but just someone who thought it was a cool idea and looked up the Morse code.

Too bad about a great show. They really dumbed it down for the 2nd season, which I guess was necessary. I wonder if they’ll release the alternate ending on the Internet?

73 de WD5GNR

I’ve used FTDI chips to add USB to projects before. The last time I tried them, they were pretty easy to use (provided you can handle surface mount). Basically, your PC software saw a serial port and you would hook the chip up to your microcontroller’s serial port. However, you did need a bunch of support components to make it work.

I recently picked up the latest version of FTDI’s chip — the FT232RL. They can hardly make this any simpler. The reference schematic shows a capacitor on the 3.3V output (the chip gets its power from the USB port). It also shows a handful of capacitors and a ferrite bead that are marked “optional” (although if you need to pass FCC acceptance, you probably need them). I left off all the extra parts including the 3.3V output capacitor.

I soldered the chip on a DIP adapter. I also got a Kobiconn USB connector (Mouser 154-UAR80). This is the “wrong” kind of connector. Its the skinny kind, not the fat kind (I always get A and B mixed up). However, it has 4 pins inline on .1″ center. However, the pins are too thin for a breadboard so I put them in a strip of machine pin sockets and soldered the “back” pin to the sockets for stability.

This let me put the USB connector in a breadboard and the chip too. I had to have a USB cable with two “skinny ends” (I happened to have one). A rubber band helped hold the connector down to the board and offered some strain relief.

That’s it: the chip, the connector, and some wire. I put two 5V LEDs on the handshaking outputs so I could turn them on and off with RealTerm (a good program for messing with serial ports; find it on SourceForge). I plugged the cable into the lab PC and it came up looking for drivers. I loaded the FTDI drivers and wound up with COM29 (that machine has a large number of serial ports already — don’t ask). Sure enough, manipulating COM29 with RealTerm caused things to happen down at the breadboard.

What could be easier?

When I actually turn on the ham radio, it is a good bet I’ll be using a digital mode. I do try to do CW sometimes although the noise level in the house makes that hard unless I’m alone. I’d been a RTTY operator for many years, and when I discovered PSK-31 back when it first started, I actually wrote PSKGNR (a front end for the only available PSK31 program at the time). So I was a little spoiled — if I wanted a feature, I just added it to my program.

Of course, time marched on and other programs came out that far surpassed PSKGNR. I wound up using WinWarbler for the most part when I take a spell of operating. However, I recently fired the rig back up and decided to try some of the new software. I downloaded Ham Radio Deluxe which is a nice rig control/log/spot program. If you get the beta version, it includes DM780 which is an excellent PSK, RTTY, CW, Olivia, MT63, MFSK, THROB, and SSTV program (and probably some other modes I’ve forgotten).

Works great and the integration with Ham Radio Deluxe is great. I run two screens with one program on each screen (see the picture).

If you try it and you don’t like it at first, give it some time and adjust what you don’t like. For example, I didn’t like that the transmit buffer didn’t erase after you sent text. You can change that. I didn’t like the way sent text showed up. You can change that. I also set the two programs to use the same log database which is not the default.

Just be sure to get the beta “kit”. As of this writing the regular download has a PSK-31 program but not DM780.

I’ve had a TS-570D for quite some time. Of course, I always say I go through more solder than log books, so it goes a long time between uses sometimes.

Lately, I’d noticed the Multi/Ch knob was “sticking” or behaving erratically. This makes it hard to do things like set filters and menu items. I don’t know if sticking is exactly the right word — the encoder would seem to rotate “the wrong way” and otherwise behave strangely.

I had about resigned myself to opening the case and cleaning out the encoder. A quick web search, however, indicated the encoder was sealed. However, on a Web forum I read of a strange fix. Apparently, if you rotate the knob quickly for a long period of time it will “fix” itself. The poster outlined attaching a cordless screwdriver to the shaft and using it to clear the fault.

Well I went low tech. I just rotated the know manually as fast as I could probably 50 or 100 full rotations. And oddly enough that restored the encoder to like new behavior. I have no idea why.

But meanwhile, look for me on PSK-31!

I was recently behind a firewall and needed to FTP a file. The company has a “reverse proxy” but it always takes me a half hour to find the instructions for how to make it work. Then it came to me that a Google might find a better answer. Sure enough: http://www.net2ftp.com is a Web-based FTP client. Works great.

Looking for parts? Try Octopart. You get a variety of data and filtering options based on your search and you can build parts lists. Not as wide a reach was Findchips, but higher tech.

VirtualBox is a great virtualization program similar to VMWare or VirtualPC except it is open source (and recently acquired by Sun, by the way). What’s cool about VirtualBox is that it has “additions” for the guest OS that really makes cursor and video management work well. For example, right now I have Kubuntu (the KDE version of Ubuntu) running on my right hand screen (full screen) watching a Youtube video. On the left I have my Windows host operating system. I can move the mouse between screens as though it was just one single computer (although I wish they’d integrate the Alt+Tab key combo — when you Alt+tab into Linux you get “stuck” until you use the mouse.

Youtube is sort of my standard test for virtualization. It won’t be as good as watching it on the host OS, but playing a flash video in a browser is a pretty good stress test for the audio and video virtualization. The new VirtualBox does just fine — even full screen works pretty good. Of course, VirtualBox also supports USB and serial device virtualizaton which is key for a lot of what I do. On the other hand, VirtualBox lacks some 64 bit support and doesn’t make good use of my multiprocessors (would love to dedicate one CPU to Linux).

Have you ever had a serial device you wanted to use over the Internet? Turns out its easy to do with com0com. This open source program lets you create a virtual serial port pair. You can use the pair to connect two programs that “think” they are both talking to a remote program over a serial port. You can also tunnel the end point over the network to a remote machine’s serial port. In addition, there are tools to let you do things like share a single serial port with multiple programs. This might be useful, for example, if you want to use a single RS232 GPS with several programs that expect direct connection to the GPS. It would also be useful for monitoring a serial connection.

This article explains how to use my favorite GP3 over the internet. The software running the GP3 runs on one computer and the GP3 is connected to a remote computer across the LAN or around the world.

Although the article uses a GP3, almost anything with a serial port could use the same technique. After all, the GP3 has no idea it might be connected remotely. This tool could “hack” a lot of RS232 devices and transform them into network devices.