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Tonight we talked with Daniel Marsh about his experiences at the First Robotics Competition in Atlanta, Rob finished up his Zipit Backlight writeup, and we discussed some of the details and possibilities OLSRD. There was also some euro to dvd blank exchanges going on, but I didn’t really follow all of that too closely.

Daniel hasn’t put up his 1500 pictures from the First Competition yet, but he’s got some of his trip written up on his blog. There will be an archive of the NASA TV coverage available soon for those of you that are interested in seeing just how these things perform.

On the Zipit front, I’ve been quite happy with my tiny terminal. I’ve pretty quick with the thumb-keyboard, and with the help of the folks on the Zipit Yahoo Group, I’ve got quite a useable image set up. Since the box only has 2 megs of flash, The Zipit Chat application is one of the first things you need to remove. WeeChat (IRC), and bsflite (AIM) should keep you connected to your online pals (as long as you’re not an MSN/Yahoo user). dropbear ssh gets you everything else you need (mail, rss, and every other unix utility out there). At this point, nobody has tackled kismet, but I don’t think it’s very far off. For those of you interested in battery life ‘after the mods’, my typical charge has been about 3 hours. Once we figure out the lid trigger signals, it should go up drastically.

Listen to the show, lots of good call-ins, including one from Ralf over at SFLAN with a plug for freenetworks.org!

FreePress wants you to cast your vote for the Big Media Hall of Shame!

At tonight’s HackNight, we played with the Zipit Wireless Messenger and the NetGear wgt634u, both of which I’ve mentioned here recently. Rob got his Zipit from Amazon yesterday, so today we got it running our own version of linux doing a 2 step flashing process (first the aibohack over the air, and then zflash over nfs). We also got a couple 6×4 sheets of white EL, so we were able to swap out my blue backlight and now I can see the top three lines of my screen!

Rob added a serial port to his WGT634U with one of the MAX233 chips we had left over from the zipit project, and although this is essential for flashing new kernels and such, there was a lot of discussion about other things we could add to both the zipit and the netgear.

A RS232 GPS Module is an obvious choice for a handheld wifi device, adding bluetooth ( and a phone with a data plan) would allow you to do something like the TacomaTrainNode without carrying a backpack full of gear. The Netgear AP is obviously suited for any number of wireless applications and with it’s USB2.0, it’s already a NAS (or multi-radio device), but by pulling it’s wireless and adding a MiniPCI sound card and a LCD serial display, you could build your own squeezebox running a smarter jukebox like squeal.

It’s a crazy world we live in. The cost of these devices come down as they become more specialized and more appliance-like for the masses. A little bit of hacking turns them into cheap general purpose devices that you can mold to your own uses, not the general markets’. You don’t need an EE to build your dream device, and you don’t need a lot of money. Just a few google skills and a little bit of imagination.

Adding a backlight to the Zipit is a bit more advanced than the 5 wire serial mod on the AiboHack page, but is still do-able for your average hardware hacker. In my opinion, this makes the device much more useable, and of course, with your choice of EL colors, gives you a bit of personal bling.

The first thing that you need to do is order some parts. The Jelu Web Shop has an awesome little EL Backlight Driver that is smaller than any of the driver kits available at the EL outlets I found on google. Second, you’ll have to get a piece of EL Panel. I ordered a nice red panel from Florida, but of course, it wasn’t in stock. Rather than wait around for the postman, I ripped apart a Virtual Bartender I had laying around (christmas gift?) and gutted it for it’s panel. It’s a little short, but hey, it’ll work until the red one shows up.

The EL Backlight Driver comes with a schematic, and this page has instructions for soldering to a yampp. For the Zipit, you’ll need to connect the EN pad on the board to RP4 on the Zipit motherboard. This will make the backlight shut off when you close the lid (running Zipit application only, Linux blanking is not supported yet). It’s a bit of a tricky connection, so I had Rob do the soldering here. Thanks Rob!

The LCD in the Zipit has a peel-off backing, so you can just peel that off and stick your EL on. I actually removed all the gummy bits with some goof-off, but I think it may have been an unnecessary (and brain cel killing) step.

With all of these mods, the wire snaking will be your own personal nightmare. I suggest you don’t use bits of Cat5 and go with a lighter gauge solid core wire.

Casey’s TrainNode got some ink in the Tacoma News Tribune today. I wonder how long it will take Sound Transit to come to their senses and start providing net on their own?

I was getting coffee at Joe Bar this morning when I met one half of the ultra-cool 80’s street duo fankick, who was kind enough to supply me with a lovely book of matches. Last summer, I saw fankick while at Vivace on Broadway and was lucky enough to catch some video on my camera. Apparently they’ve been hanging out down in Pioneer Square for the past 6 months, and some other group called Streetbeat is now biting their style on Broadway. The Stranger has picked up the story, and is calling for a DANCE BATTLE OF THE CENTURY!

Hopefully it happens on Broadway and I’ll be there to see it all go down and get some pictures, but if I’m not (and you are), I’ve created an iMob topic, so anyone can get those pictures online. Email your fankick (or streetbeat) pictures to fankick @ imob.org (http://imob.org/fankick)

MIT Roofnet and the South End Technology Center have been testing their software at Tent City. Tent city consists of 220 residential units spread across many four story buildings and a 12-story high-rise located in the South End of Boston. The current Tent City Network only covers a fraction of the apartments that can see the roof mounted APs, but by adding Roofnet nodes, they can improve coverage and cover much more of the complex. 43 nodes were deployed in the April 2nd test, and within the wireless network, transfers were generally fast.

Roofnet used to require a PC running Linux (available as LiveCD) or Linux-based embedded device (like the Metrix Kit), but it is now working on mass-produced linux-based APs such as the Netgear WGT634U

Rob is ordering one right now.

DailyWireless has some details (and pictures) of the PTP Mississippi Grant Project meetings recently mentioned in the Oregonian. For those that don’t know, the project consists of lighting up a pretty large swath of the north Portland neighborhood. Stephouse is donating Internet bandwidth to the project, and the Native American Youth Association will be providing the first rooftop. In addition to setting up a free network and procuring bandwidth for the neighborhood, PersonalTelco will also provide training for the residents on just how all this stuff works.

Congrats guys. Awesome work!