Chris M.

I've been a long time Linux user after first being introduced to it in 1997 when I arrived at college. At that time Linux was pretty primitive. Users usually had to setup their own X windows modelines  or they would be greeted with low resolution video. Some of the big distributions at the time were RedHat , SuSE, Caldera , Stampede , Slackware , and  Debian . Every couple of months I ended up messing something up and breaking the bootloader, kernel or some important libraries. I was mostly using the computer to learn and experiment with so I would re-install with a new distribution each time. I must have tried a more than a half dozen distributions over a few year period. KDE on Debian/Ubuntu Around 2004 or so I made the switch to Linux, with a virtual machine for Windows. Over the years since the switch I ended up running Debian for several years and most recently Ubuntu for four or five years now. Throughout this time I've preferred and used KDE , the K Desktop E...

This year we decided to build a raised bed garden and grow some of our own vegetables. It's a nice idea to be able to grow your own food. You can choose to grown things organically as we are doing, you know where the food came from, and its fresh. This is a picture of the beds after we built them and filled them with soil. You can see the rows at the end of one of the beds where we planted the first seeds for Brussels sprouts and peas. After building the beds After the garden started coming up we put up a short wire fence to keep small animals like rabbits out of the garden. Garden starting August, 2013 zucchini So far we've gotten several zucchini out of the garden, along with a few handfuls of peas. We've made a couple of batches of zucchini muffins so far. There are some tomatoes growing and turning from green to red and a few peppers. The carrots and beets are growing well. Early in the year some Japanese and Flea beetles were eating a lo...

As part of an on-going discussion on the KiCAD devleopers mailing list about library crowdsourcing, I wanted to put together more detail about the issue. I've been using KiCAD for a handful of months and was unaware of some of the organizations, such as CircuitHub  and KiCadCloud , that have been working to improve the situation until this discussion. Background PCB development flow A typical circuit board development process in KiCAD looks something like: Schematic (eeschema) Design a circuit Locate components (or create the component symbols ) Add components to the schematic Connect components on a schematic using the component symbol Map component to footprint (cvpcb) Choose the specific footprint for each component in the schematic (or create the necessary footprints ) Layout (pcbnew) Place components Route the signals on the board The problem During schematic step #2 and the component mapping process, the highlighted steps above, any componen...

Top side of a BeagleBone Black I've been working a bit with the BeagleBone Black (BBB) , a $45USD single board computer, for the last couple of months. It's capabilities, relative to its cost, are impressive. Several sites have compared the specs of the BBB and the popular  Raspberry Pi (RPi) , another powerful and low cost single board computer. You can check out some analysis of the two  here . One important difference between the BBB and the RPi is that the BBB lacks a video processing unit (VPU) to accelerate video playback . A video processing unit helps improve video decoding and/or encoding rates by performing some or all of the specialized operations involved in video processing. Without a VPU or other specialized hardware, a system would have to perform the video processing using the system's core processor , likely a general purpose processor, and at a far slower rate.  This RPi and BBB comparison  picks up on the video decoding capab...

Having been involved in coding standards discussions at several jobs I've usually found the process to be an arbitrary exercise in codifying personal opinion. The conversation inevitably turns to pedantic things such as where to put curly braces or how to indent. I've started to think about how to try to focus teams on higher value areas of software engineering, and how to design coding standards to focus teams in these areas. This post is the product of those thoughts, written as a coding standards document. Coding standards Preface The purpose of this document is to describe some software development practices. The topics are ordered according to their relative importance to our organization. Where critical, firm rules are specified; elsewhere the standards are intentionally relaxed so you have the freedom to express your personal preference. This document is intended to be a helpful tool that improves the quality of the engineering of our organization. It is not inte...

Earlier this year I purchased a Toyota Plug-in-Prius . The car comes with a slow charger module that is powered through a standard 120v 15amp outlet. This kind of outlet can deliver something around 1kw of energy. For the 4.4kw battery pack in the PiP , it takes about 3 hours to charge the pack from its empty state. Empty for the PiP isn't actually a zero charge level, the battery is kept within a 15% to 85% State-of-charge(SOC) to prolong its life. Frequently I was finding that I didn't have enough time to charge the pack before leaving on another trip. One option was the $1500 or so to purchase a 240v charger and have someone install it. A quick search on the web turned up the OpenEVSE project , a project to build a evse charger. I started to read about the evse project and got interested in building one. I did want to have some kind of network support so I could control and monitor charging, schedule it better than the car could and otherwise expand upon what the proj...