In addition to the added functionality the boards provide, we’ve also found some *neat* unintended things along the way that occur in the RF stacks.

I agree with opponents of the bill.  it violates the First Amendment, is Internet censorship, will cripple the Internet, and will threaten whistle-blowing and other free speech actions.

More info can be found on Wikipedia, which, by the way, will also be blacked out:
SOPA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act
PIP: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PROTECT_IP_Act

If you agree with me, feel free to contact your relevant Representative and Senators that represent you in Congress.  Don’t know who that is?  Find out here: http://www.congressmerge.com/onlinedb/

Thanks for your support.

I also found an Eagle Library from the guys over at NBitWonder, available here, referenced in the same thread.  This was GREAT, but there was one problem: the schematic symbol in the library left a little something to be desired.  Most of my schematics are printable and contain byline legends as well as borders and the NBitWonder library stuck a symbol on the schematic that had OSHW along with a box around it:

Granted, this is leaps and bounds from what I had started with (which was nothing) but I wanted to show off the logo on my schematic as well!

So, I drew a schematic symbol….well, not totally “drew”.  I used Bill Westfield’s ULP file, with the layers hard set to the symbol layer, which drew the OSHW logo without the text, and then I just drew in “OPEN HARDWARE”:’

It’s not an EXACT match, but fits NICELY by the byline legend in the schematic. I am releasing it for anyone who wants to improve upon it, available for download here under CC-BY-SA.  Have some fun with it!

You may have noticed that I have added a “Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License” to the website.  Some of you may also have noticed that this is the strictest license available, and I would like to address that.

I don’t really do a lot of earth shattering design work, and certainly somewhat low on the list of knowledgeable electronics designers, mainly out of laziness.   I also don’t really ever consider myself to be competitive or noteworthy in that regard.  However, there are a few companies out there who I’ve seen profit off of the ideas of someone else with no attribution or monetary compensation to said person.  This is perfectly legal if no license is specified or such is waived, and even so, perfectly legal if certain licenses ARE specified.  Open source is a blessing as well as a curse in some respects.  America has always been a country that has citizens with a higher-than-average ability to create wealth out of thin air with their ideas.  This is why we have the highest GDP in the world, and the largest GDP to population ratio as well by an order of magnitude.  Lately, the world is catching up in this regard, which I am not at all sad to see.  I read an article not too long ago about kit companies, and how they are the latest craze, some of them earning gross profits of over a million dollars a year.  Some of them seem slightly higher in morals than others.  Looking a little further, some of these designs can be tracked back originally to other people, and due to tweaks in the design, or not selling “complete units”, but kits, allows them to skirt the commercial-use aspects of licenses.  It’s the same scenario that gun manufacturers are using with regard to firearm kits, and selling “80% uppers”.  They facilitate the means, you assemble the product for “non-commercial, private use”.  It’s really just a way to skirt through the loop hole of an agreement, whether that be a written law, or license.

But what about that guy who originally had the idea?  Isn’t that worth something?  In my opinion, if I publish a working schematic, I’ve done 95% of the work for you.  A trained monkey can create a circuit board layout, order parts, put them in bags, and ship them.  Legality aside, does anyone not see morality issues with this?  I’d like to hear your thoughts.

So, again, why did I choose that particular license?  Let’s break it down.

You are free:

• to Share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work

Absolutely.  Feel free to take anything I publish and make use of it without intention of making money off of my idea, which very well may have involved a significant amount of time.  Only for private use.  Information belongs to the world, but I’m not looking to fund your early retirement with my idea.  That’s all I am saying.

Under the following conditions:

• Attribution — You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).
• Noncommercial — You may not use this work for commercial purposes.
• No Derivative Works — You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work.

Why do I require this?  If you’re using my idea, or have a better way of doing it, I want to know.  I’d like you to tell the origin of such, because you may not have the best rendition of how to improve upon a process, but someone who goes back to my original work may.  Again, it’s not because I want to make money off of your improvement, but because it keeps me in the loop and keeps both of us from having to do double duty on development of the same thing.  You may be saying, “Yes, but your license says ‘No Derivative Works’”.  Well, yes it does, but please see my explanation under “waiver”.  Fundamentally, it really just prevents someone from making a few simple tweaks to a board layout, or schematic, and selling it as their own.
With the understanding that:

• Waiver — Any of the above conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder.
• Public Domain — Where the work or any of its elements is in the public domain under applicable law, that status is in no way affected by the license.
• Other Rights — In no way are any of the following rights affected by the license:

1) Your fair dealing or fair use rights, or other applicable copyright exceptions and limitations

2) The author’s moral rights;

3) Rights other persons may have either in the work itself or in how the work is used, such as publicity or privacy rights.

The waiver portion is what made me lock into this particular license.  It’s not that I don’t want people to build upon and make better my ideas, I just don’t want them to do it without me seeing how my idea has grown and blossomed into something better.  I’d give anyone permission just for the asking, provided you’re not going to mass produce what I’m working on without cutting me in just a little.  That’s important.  Your materials might cost the bulk of what you’re selling, but without the idea, your kits are merely fiberglass pulp and metal in a pile.  My time is worth something too, and it’s only fair considering you’re going to profit from it.  There’s a word for that.  It’s theft.  Maybe not legally, but under core principles of self ownership, when you deprive me from the product of my time and efforts, it most certainly is.  I really won’t go into “public domain” or “other rights”, because if you don’t understand these core concepts of the Creative Commons license, then the idea of asking for a waiver for non derivative or commercial production isn’t really worth bringing to my attention.

• Notice — For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. The best way to do this is with a link to this web page.

This is self explanatory. I really just want to know what’s going on with anything I come up with.  Not because I’m a control freak, but again, because it’s fun to see something I’ve done flourish.

Do the right thing.  That’s all I am saying.

]]> http://www.n5ebw.com/2010-12/holiday-cheer/feed/ http://www.n5ebw.com/2010-09/dewalt-powershop-rebuild/ http://www.n5ebw.com/2010-09/dewalt-powershop-rebuild/#comments Fri, 17 Sep 2010 23:05:03 +0000 n5ebw http://www.n5ebw.com/?p=365 I have no idea why I haven’t written about this until now, since the video have been together for almost a year now, but enjoy.  Here’s build highlights from a 1960’s DeWalt Powershop that I put back into good working condition after I inherited it from my father-in-law.

Recently, I filled a 4 foot rolling rack with equipment.  A 4 core IBM eSeries server with 2 TB of SCSI storage running ESXi is one of the main components.  I always like to keep the server online for various sundry items, but it usually sits largely idle, even with two Red Hat Linux instances running on it while I am studying.  This is somewhat of a waste in my opinion because the server is sitting idle with spinning fans while not doing much of anything.  A wonderful solution to this is have ESXi run a guest, specifically for the folding application.  If set up correctly, you can even have ESXi dedicate as much of the machine’s resources for CPU and memory as possible during downtime, and have it throttle it back when other applications are working on mission critical things.  I’m looking at you, small business and enterprise owners.

Most people download and install Ubuntu, or Windows as their OS choice for Folding@Home.  Since these OS’s are geared more toward the Desktop user, they have a little too much overhead for my liking when picking something for one process (yes, I just said that).   My OS of choice for this process was CentOS 5.5, but that’s just personal preference.  I aimed to install a minimally loaded, no frills OS with bare minimum internet connectivity and libraries required to make Folding@Home run, but it can happily share any Linux box you’ve got.  My base installation, along with a few programming libraries and a webserver, took about 2.5 gigs (keep in mind that a lot of this was the swap file I allocated during install, you may choose an amount that is drastrically lower).  If you aren’t familiar with the Linux command line, you’re going to want to install the GUI, but I’m right at home there, so I opted to save space.

It’s then a simple matter of downloading and installing their client onto your machine, here’s the blow by blow:

(Note: Be sure to find the correct version by checking http://folding.stanford.edu/English/Download)

Once you’ve determined your version, find a suitable install target, download and install by unarchiving…

Make the directory. Go to it.
ewolf@folding$ mkdir folding; cd folding/

This command downloads the package from Stanford, substitute the link to your install here.
ewolf@folding$ wget http://www.stanford.edu/group/pandegroup/folding/release/FAH6.29-Linux.tgz

Uncompress and unarchive the install.

ewolf@folding$ tar -xzvf FAH6.29-Linux.tgz

This will leave you with 2 files.

ewolf@folding$ ls
fah6     mpiexec

Give the binary execute permissions.

ewolf@folding$ chmod u+x fah6

Now, we have to configure the client settings by running the following command:

ewolf@folding$ ./fah6 -configonly

Follow the onscreen setup instructions.  These are the same as the configuration pane on Windows, just in text form.

Next, make it easy on yourself.  Build a start script for the startup command, give execute permissions:

ewolf@folding$ echo “./fah6 -verbosity 9 $*” > fah; chmod u+x fah

If this is a dedicated VM or machine, and you want this process to use all of your allocated processor power, this is the last step required for configuration.  To run this script on demand, simply execute it:

ewolf@folding$ ./fah

This will bring up a super neato (Not) screen with status information on your fold workload.

(click for full size)

Now for the tweaks.  There are two you may want to do right off the bat: CPU throttling and Automatic startup.  Here’s what my VM performance looks like when running this with minimal configuration:

(Click for full size)

This may be a problem if you aren’t fond of running your CPU’s at full utilization, due to electricity costs, wear and tear/etc….  If that is the case for you, there is a 3rd party utility available (freeware) to get the cpu utilization throttled back called “fahlimit” (click here for website in new window).  Run it as a part of your start/stop script I am going to cover shortly if this is a consideration.

<rant> Just as an aside, there’s a lot of talk on the Folding@Home website about how you should be able to run your processors at 100% all the time, without consequence (other than power consumed).  I’m here to tell you that this is just NOT TRUE.  Any amount of added heat, especially from processing wear and tear, will always cause your electronics to fail sooner than they would have if they had an average load on them.  Heat is the absolute enemy of electronics.  100% CPU utilization all of the time causes LOTS of heat.  The fact that the heat is dissipated with adequate heat sinking and fan cooling is immaterial.  These measures only will prevent your CPU from absolute failure from overheating. </rant>

Here’s what I did to install fahlimit:

First, get into the install directory (substitute $FAH with your install directory path)

ewolf@folding$ cd $FAH/

Download fahlimit.

ewolf@folding$ wget http://calxalot.net/downloads/versions/fahlimit/0.6/fahlimit-0.6-linux.tgz

Unarchive and uncompress fahlmit.

ewolf@folding$ tar -xzvf fahlimit-0.6-linux.tgz

Now run the extracted tool, also called fahlimit, with your desired utilization with this command:

ewolf@folding$ ./fahlimit -daemon -percent 50

As you can see, I’m using 50 percent here, and it’s brought my CPU utilization down accordingly:

(Click for full size)

Now that we’ve configured everything for optimum use within the OS, I will show you how to put it all together and autostart your folding when your VM comes up.  Instead of explaining everything in the start/stop script, and pasting it here, I am offering it in a .txt file, viewable here.

I installed a copy in my installation directory, and soft linked it to /etc/init.d, but it will of course work just as well if you have a copy in both spots.  Pay close attention and edit the script as necessary to suit your own installation needs.  And also, don’t forget to give the start script execute permission:

chmod u+x folding

To get it to start with the server, we just register it with chkconfig (You will probably have to be root to move the file into /etc/init.d as well as register with chkconfig):

root@folding# chkconfig –add folding

And that’s all it takes.  To verify it’s going to start, just query chkconfig to tell you which runlevels it will start with:

root@folding# chkconfig –list folding

You should see the word “on” after runlevels 3, 4, and 5.  If this is not the case, please consult the man page for chkconfig for further assistance.

Next, continue on to part 3, where I will briefly show you how to set up ESXi to utilize this lovely purpose-driven VM during off hours and non-peak processing times……but first, I need some sleep.  More to come in the next few days!

]]> http://www.n5ebw.com/2010-05/the-foldinghome-project-with-a-little-vmware-part-2/feed/ http://www.n5ebw.com/2010-05/the-foldinghome-project-with-a-little-vmware-part-1/ http://www.n5ebw.com/2010-05/the-foldinghome-project-with-a-little-vmware-part-1/#comments Sat, 22 May 2010 08:45:28 +0000 n5ebw http://www.n5ebw.com/?p=326 Around this time last year, I made a post about helping the environment through a service called “Earth911″ (See that post here).  This post isn’t about the environment, nor is it about woodworking, electronics, weather, or any of the other weird stuff you’ve come to expect from my writings.  This is about helping the thing we all hold most dear in this life: ourselves.  Readers in my audience who are on the techie side of things will likely have already known about this for years, but I also know I have others in my audience who are not.

Normal, healthy proteins take on a shape called a “fold” during their natural course of action in a healthy environment.  Protein mis-folding causes diseases such as Mad Cow, Cystic Fibrosis, Alzheimer’s, and some cancers, just to name a few.

Here’s where it gets personal.  My father-in-law (from whom I inherited all of the tools I restored), passed away at the age of 55 from complications of early onset Alzheimer’s due to a stroke.  Two of my grandmother’s are breast cancer survivors, but 1 also has Alzheimer’s, and my grandfather has an ongoing battle with Lung Cancer.  I am doing this to not only contribute to the research of these horrible diseases for their health and well being, but at the risk of sounding slightly vain and selfish, I’m doing it for myself, as well as my siblings, and immediate family.  We’ve determined the risks for these diseases are abundantly heightened in our family.  I’m quite sure I’m not the only one, otherwise Folding@Home would not exist.

Now that you have way too much background on the “why”, I’ll go into the “what” and “how”.

The “Folding @ Home” project (http://folding.stanford.edu/) harnesses the distributed computing power of idle computers on the internet to study protein folding.  Stanford’s protein folding researchers have developed a desktop application that runs in the background of your computer and does “simulated protein folding” to glean the output of different scenarios they can’t observe in the real world in abundance. It would take 10,000 CPU days to simulate folding, one CPU alone doing it would take 30 years (folds happen in a matter of 10,000 nanoseconds).  That’s unacceptable.  With the computer power harnessed from idle CPU power, the workload is distributed and results are produced much faster in their simulated folding time line environment.  I’m participating in the folding project by dedicating one of my idle CPU cores (I’m running a dual core) and as much available RAM as I can spare (I have 8 gigs total) to the cause while I do low CPU tasks like browsing the internet, listening to music, even as I write this article.  You can participate, too.  Go to the Folding@Home website, download the install program, which is very small, AND cross platform for all of you Linux and Mac users out there, install it, and turn it on.  (There’s even a app for your Playstation 3!) I promise that you won’t even notice it’s there, other than the icon on your taskbar, which usually brings a smile to my face.  Without sounding too cliche, “The life that you save may be your own”.

I’m taking it one step further, though.  Most of you will agree that if there were a kingdom where all of the subjects over-engineered and over-thought every little thing, I’d be a Prince.  Probably not the purple velvet wearing, pancake making one, though.  Now, I’m going to discuss how to get this running with spare CPU and memory on a VMWare server, so discontinue if this isn’t your brand of tech.

(Continue to Part 2 by Clicking Here)

Refurbishing Old Hand Planes Part 1: Flattening the Sole
Refurbishing Old Hand Planes Part 2: Truing the Frog
Refurbishing Old Hand Planes Part 3: Modifying the throat and chip breaker
Refurbishing Old Hand Planes Part 4: Sharpening the iron