Posts

Console on a old Nokia display

After a night of hacking I have the cutest console ever: fbcon on my Arietta G25 showing on a 84×48 Nokia 3310 LCD thanks to fbtft. The nice thing is it’s tiny enough to fit on my RC car but shows as a standard framebuffer so will work with everything.

Shorter boot time on the Arietta G25

Short story: my Arietta G25 now boots to prompt in 3.9 s instead of the stock 50.7 s. Nice. I had a hack about with reducing the boot time of the Arietta G25 ARM9 based Linux board.

Arietta 25

I picked up two Acme Systems Arietta G25‘s. They’re a tiny Atmel ARM9 powered board with most of the I/O out on a 0.1″ header. I hope to hook one up to a GPS to send up in my plane and record the track and speed.

Some grass trimming

Two good runs with my plane today, including a good looking flare out on the second landing. The plane pulled up, stalled, and correctly came down on its belly. The very first try was… unfortunate.

Up and down again

This is what success with a Multiplex Dogfighter looks like: The canopy is on, the wing is on, and the battery isn’t kissing the motor. Success! Pro tip: wear long pants when flying else the long grass will make you regret.

Stopping ‘PAM service(sshd) ignoring max retries’ errors in syslog

Seeing messages like sshd[28778]: PAM service(sshd) ignoring max retries; 6 > 3 in auth.log? It’s caused by pam_unix disagreeing with sshd on how many times a user can retry their password before getting disconnected.

Huffman coding on NMEA sentances

I’m impressed with how well Huffman encoding works on the very verbose, very repetitive, ASCII based NMEA GPS sentances. I hacked up a Python script that bakes a fixed dictionary from example data and a device side C++ encoder that encodes based on the dictionary.

Three days to posession

As an experiment, I hooked up a spare ARM machine to the internet and left it running Tor. It only took three days for a script kiddie to break in, as it turns out the pre-built rootfs I used has a poor default root password.

First flying of the year

I dusted my T-28 Trojan off and took it for a fly in the Allmend today. Hard to say no to such nice weather. I could even feel my fingers when I got back!

Unstable heading

The replacement wishbone arrived so the cars in good shape, but still no luck with the heading controller. I can get it to slowly oscillate along a straight line by using a low Kp and restricting the steering, but the step response is poor.