Author Archives: mario

Printing GPS information to LCD

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Today i tried to code a small programm that displays information from a GPS receiver on a LCD display. It receives the data via the UART and searches for the GPGGA dataset. If one is received the information (character strings) is written to a 4×27 character HD44780 display. Currently there is no convertion of the data to numbers and no calculations too. A future version might calculate the Maidenhead locator and the distance to a certain coordinate. At my side the programm is running on a Atmega8535 at 16MHz.

GPS2LCD Version 0.8

GPS2LCD Version 0.8

gps2lcd_08

Alix1.C Mini PC

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Für alle, die sich mal gefragt haben, wie klein ein “Zuhause-Server” sein kann hier mal ein Bild von dem Rechner auf dem dieses Blog läuft.

Es handelt sich um ein Alix1.C Board mit Geode LX. In das Gehäuse ist noch eine 250GByte 2,5 Zoll Festplatte eingebaut. Auf dem Rechner läuft der Webserver mit Blog, ein Multimedia Streaming Server, die AX25 Router Software XNet, Samba als File- und Druckserver und einiges mehr.

Der Stromverbrauch inclusive Netzteil wurde mit 11Watt gemessen.

Alix1.C Board in Betrieb....

Alix1.C Board in Betrieb....

UART2LCD

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Just for fun i hacked a short program for Atmega that prints all the stuff that comes in at the UART to a 4×27 character LCD. The lines are wrapped automatically. Different baudrates can be selected via 3 input pins. Unfortunately printing to the display is not fast enougth. For that reason characters get lost if you send the complete input for 4 line at once in case a UART speed greater than 19k2 is used.
Future feetures might be:
– improvements to avoid loosing characters from the UART
– adding a mode that cuts lines longer than 27 characters instead of wrapping them
– adding keyboard input possibility

uart2lcd_09

Using a 4 line HD44780 LCD at Atmel controllers

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Recently i found a nice C library for AVR controllers that enables to use LCD displays with HD44780
controller connected to the MC. Since i own a 4 line display with 2x HD44780 i wanted to get this
display working too. But two controllers were not supported. At the LCD2USB project sources which use a earlier stage of the libraries from Peter Fleury i found that support for two controllers (which is actually only to handly two enable lines) was hacked in. Since there are some more nice functions i merged the changes necessary to support two halfs of the display to a newer version of the library from Peter.
The result you can find attached. However it comes without warranty ;)

avrlcd_2

Reboot of Ubuntu on Alix boxes

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I own a Alix1.c (GeodeLX) Box. I installed Ubuntu 8.04 to a harddisk that is connected to this box. Always when rebooting i discovered that something fails and the system hangs switching the display on and off all the time. I got the tip to try to switch off the kernel splash screen which might be the reason for this behavior. What should i say… thats the solution.
Just remove the “splash” in the line with the kernel arguments in /boot/grub/menu.lst and save the file.
After next reboot the shutdown and reboot will work.

It works ! – Kernel AX25 with OpenWRT

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… Kamikaze 7.09 and Kernel 2.6.22.

It took a while but finally i got it ;)

Compiling a Kamikaze with build in AX25 support, manual copy of crc16.ko because the package is not built automatically. Afterwards install stty manually because i did not know whether the serial port was working with the correct speed. In the end i discovered that you have to set the correct speed in /etc/ax25/axports because this number is used by kissattach to overwrite the value that was set before. Nice to know. This was not the case some years ago.

The connection from the terminal to my XNET TNC3S looks like this:

KF428T (KF Chip T)

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Heute sind mir 2 Stück KF428T von Bosch in die Hände gefallen. Offenbar lassen sich die Geräte für 70cm Amateurfunk umbauen. Wahrscheinlich muss allerdings die PLL zu Fuß programmiert werden und die HF Filter für das UHF Band ausgetauscht werden. Eine erste Suche zu dem Thema hat die folgenden Seiten zu Tage befördert:

http://www.agfunk.de/amfu/

mit einem Basic Programm von Armin, DF1QE

und http://dc4mf.de/ von Marco, DC4MF. Er hat sich schon sehr viel Mühe gemacht, und eine relativ komforable Steuersoftware mit Display Anzeige geschrieben.

Bei mir soll das ganze am Ende allerdings nur 1 Kanal und 9k6 Packet Radio beherrschen.

Bosch KF428T - top

Bosch KF428T - top