Scoreboard Schematic

Scoreboard PCB

Circuit

Circuit is pretty straight as you can see. An external C/C power supply is needed to power the circuit. There is a voltage regulator so the supply in this case can be up to 15V (I didn’t measure consumption yet). The regulator has its respective capacitors in the input and output, used as filters. The bluetooth module and the microcontroller are connected through a single wire between module’s UART TXD and the PB5 pin of the ATtiny fused as an input (read more on Part 2 of this series).
A blue led with a resistor is attached to PIN24 of the bluetooth module, it will blink while the module is waiting for a connection and keep on when a connection is established, that’s using the default module firmware linvor1.5 that comes pre-programmed from DealExtreme, if you buy a different module or use a different firmware, you will need to review all the pin connections. According to the bluetooth module datasheet (at least the one that is supposed to be the correct one) you should put a 10K resistor from the reset pin to the ground, BUT actually I had to remove it to get the module working, otherwise it won’t even turn on. So DO NOT PUT R2.

The meaning of the pads in the PCB is the following:

• PAD1: Input supply V+
• PAD2: V- (ground)
• PAD3: HSYNC to the VGA connector DB-15 pin 13
• PAD4: VSYNC to the VGA connector DB-15 pin 14
• PAD5: RGB to the VGA connector DB-15 pin 1 to 3
• PAD6: Ground to the VGA connector DB-15 pin 5 to 10

Scoreboard on the breadboard

Scoreboard on PCB (top view)

Scoreboard on PCB (bottom view)

Scoreboard Android Application

Installation notes:
Just untar-gzip the file into your ~/.gimp26/plug-ins folder. Make sure that the cdcasefier.py is executable.

Note: I’ve stolen the case picture from the Rhythmbox project.

in line 674 add:
if mail in ("xxx@yyy.com", ): continue

then in line 770 add:
if email in ("xxx@yyy.com", ): return

So the final Controller.py will look something like:

....

    def checkPending(self):
        '''Check for users pending to be added'''

        if self.msn is None:
            return False

        if self.addBuddy is None:
            self.addBuddy = dialog.AddBuddy(self)

        users = self.msn.checkPending()
        if len(users) > 0:
            for mail in users:
                if mail in ("xxx@yyy.com", ): continue
                nick = self.msn.getUserDisplayName(mail)
                self.addBuddy.append(nick, mail)
        return False

....

    def addNotification(self, msnp, command, tid, params, email, nick):
        '''this method is called when a user adds you'''

        if self.addBuddy is None:
            self.addBuddy = dialog.AddBuddy(self)
        if email in ("xxx@yyy.com", ): return
        self.addBuddy.append(nick, email)

Then simply:
xhtml2pdf report.html
convert report.pdf report.jpg

Note: if you receive an error message in python “AttributeError: ‘NoneType’ object has no attribute ‘bands’” while trying to use the xhtml2pdf command, then you will need to apply this patch: http://hg.effbot.org/pil-2009-raclette/changeset/fb7ce579f5f9
In other words, edit Image.py and move line 1501 “self.load()” to 1497, just before the “if self.im.bands == 1:”

Download

Screenshots
 


 

About the UPI format (Sygic POIs)

It was pretty difficult to find information on the Internet about Sygic’s Mobile Maps (SMM) POIs file format (`*`.upi). Different from the TomTom OV2 format which is well documented and easy to find (see http://www.tomtom.com/lib/doc/ttnavsdk3_manual.pdf and http://www.opentom.org/Ov2).

One of the goals of POIMan for Sygic was converting the OV2 to UPI, in order to get the most popular POIs to work in SMM. So, the only way to do it without documentation was comparing an OV2 binary to its already converted UPI (converted using another existing tool — most people uses PoiEdit http://www.poiedit.com/) and try to discover what the differences are.

Differences between OV2 and UPI

• All the strings in the UPI files seems to be stored as inverted wide chars. By inverted I mean that each character occupies 16 bits, but the byte order is swapped (I guess is like a little-endian wide char string). And all the strings are null-terminated (two null bytes).
• There is a header in the UPI file. Contrarily to OV2 that starts directly with records, the UPI has a header and the format is the following:
  • First byte is the length of the POI file name (without extension) that will follow this byte including the null character (remember: everything multiplied by 2 since it is wide char)
  • A string with the name of the POI file without extension
  • Something that seems to be a filler record, composed by one byte 0×02 followed by 9 null bytes (0×00)
  • A byte with the length of the BMP file name that will follow this byte (including null character)
  • A string with the BMP file name including the extension
• The simple POI record in OV2 is the type 0×02 while in the UPI format is type 0×03
• The skipper record (type 0×01 in both formats) seem pretty much the same in both files, they are ‘rectangles’ composed by four coordinates (lat1, lon1) (lat2, lon2). However in the OV2 you can find skipper records following other skipper records, like if you subdivide the rectangles into smaller groups where the POIs that will follow belongs, but this does not works well when you convert them to UPI. So, in other words the POIs should be contained in only one rectangle, so the simples solutions was to use the outer rectangle and skip the rest.

List of tested XML’s

In the preferences page, you can configure the URL that will be used to download the POIs list. The URL usually points to an XML file, which schema is pretty much standard. This XML contains the links to the OV2 files (TomTom POIs), BMPs, map and group to which each POI belongs, etc. However, I’ve found differences regarding the contents of the tags, for example: sometimes the URL to the BMPs are relative to the URL list, sometimes it is the full path; also I’ve found that some pages may require a user name and password to download the OV2 so in the URL you’ll find the %Username% and %Password% variables that POIMan will replace with whatever the user inputs in its preferences page.

In theory, you should be able to use any XML of this page http://www.poiedit.com/sites.htm however, due to these differences I’ve found, it might not work correctly, let me know if you find any problem.

Tested XML’s

This is the list of XML’s already tested. If you have more to add please let me know.

• http://www.todo-poi.es/TodoPOI.xml (Spain)
• http://www.flitspaal.nl/poi_flitspalen.xml (Netherlands) – This one requires to full-fill user name and password. The user name is the e-mail address used to register in the www.flitspaal.nl site.

First try

1. First edit your aptitude sources list

alfersoft:~# nano /etc/apt/sources.list

2. Add the following repositories

deb http://www.debian-multimedia.org stable main
deb http://www.backports.org/debian lenny-backports main contrib non-free

3. Update

sudo apt-get update

4. Remove current ffmpeg (if installed)

sudo apt-get remove ffmpeg x264 libx264-dev

5. Install necessary packages for the build. Note that I’ve removed libvpx-dev from the original Ubuntu thread.

sudo apt-get install build-essential subversion git-core checkinstall yasm texi2html \
    libfaac-dev libmp3lame-dev libopencore-amrnb-dev libopencore-amrwb-dev libsdl1.2-dev \
    libtheora-dev libvorbis-dev libx11-dev libxfixes-dev libxvidcore-dev \
    zlib1g-dev

6. Build and install x264.

cd
git clone git://git.videolan.org/x264.git
cd x264
./configure
make
sudo checkinstall --pkgname=x264 --pkgversion "2:0.`grep X264_BUILD x264.h -m1 | \
    cut -d' ' -f3`.`git rev-list HEAD | wc -l`+git`git rev-list HEAD -n 1 | \
    head -c 7`" --backup=no --deldoc=yes --fstrans=no --default

7. Build and install ffmpeg. Note that I’ve removed the option –enable-libtheora and –enable-libvpx from the original Ubuntu thread.

cd
svn checkout svn://svn.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg/trunk ffmpeg
cd ffmpeg
./configure --enable-gpl --enable-version3 --enable-nonfree --enable-postproc \
    --enable-libfaac --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libopencore-amrnb \
    --enable-libopencore-amrwb --enable-libvorbis \
    --enable-libx264 --enable-libxvid --enable-x11grab
make
sudo checkinstall --pkgname=ffmpeg --pkgversion "4:SVN-r`LANG=C svn info | \
    grep Revision | awk '{ print $NF }'`" --backup=no --deldoc=yes --fstrans=no \
    --default
hash x264 ffmpeg ffplay

Almost there

Ok, everything works perfectly until I try to convert a video and I get the following error:
“lame: output buffer too small”
After a bit of googling, I’ve found a patch in this post, with an interesting discussion regarding to whom should fix the problem (ffmpeg vs. lame). It is also suggested to downgrade the lame library, but I’ve tried that and didn’t worked for me, so in summary, let’s simply apply this ffmpeg patch and everything will be fine.

1. Go to the ffmpeg source directory and get the patch

cd
cd ffmpeg
wget --no-check-certificate https://roundup.ffmpeg.org/file831/ffmpeg-lame-flush.patch3

2. Apply the patch

patch < ffmpeg-lame-flush.patch3
## (when the file name is required enter: libavcodec/libmp3lame.c)

3. Build and install ffmpeg again

make
sudo checkinstall --pkgname=ffmpeg --pkgversion "4:SVN-r`LANG=C svn info | \
    grep Revision | awk '{ print $NF }'`" --backup=no --deldoc=yes --fstrans=no \
    --default

And now you're ready to go!

Useful for sites that does not shows the upload progress like youtube.

This is my first add-on, so if you find something wrong please let me know.
I’ve submitted it to AMO but since it takes time to get released to the general public, I’ve decided to put it here in our blog if you want to give it a try.

Download it here, enjoy!

Tested in Linux, MacOS X and Windows, this small add-on is 100% JavaScript, no dlls no native XPCOMs. I’ve read in some forums that once upon a time (2004) Firefox already included an upload progress indicator but since then till today is broken. Today other modern browsers like Chrome already provides an upload percent indicator.

Edit: version 0.3 now displaying a small progress bar in Firefox’s status-bar. Check it out!

To create two bridged virtual serial ports use the following command:

socat -d -d pty,raw,echo=0 pty,raw,echo=0


The output will show you which are the virtual ports (or pseudo terminals) created, e.g.:

2010/02/19 16:16:33 socat[9662] N PTY is /dev/pts/3
2010/02/19 16:16:33 socat[9662] N PTY is /dev/pts/4
2010/02/19 16:16:33 socat[9662] N starting data transfer loop with FDs [3,3] and [5,5]


Note: if you are using Ubuntu and you do not have this command, try:

sudo apt-get install socat


Image source

Suppose that you want to calculate the space used by all the png files in current directory and all its subdirectories. From a terminal type:

find . -name '*.png' -exec du -ab {} \; | awk '{total+=$0}END{print total}'


Image source

The easiest way I found is dumping the binaries into text files using hexdump and then comparing them with your favourite program (diff, Meld, etc.). E.g.:

hexdump -C a.bin >a.txt
hexdump -C b.bin >b.txt
diff a.txt b.txt


Image source