An RSS feed of blog postings for the FreakLabs Open Source Zigbee Development Blog. http://www.freaklabs.org Sat, 25 May 2013 11:12:20 +0100 FeedCreator 1.7.2 http://www.freaklabs.org/images/M_images/joomla_rss.png http://www.freaklabs.org An RSS feed of blog postings for the FreakLabs Open Source Zigbee Development Blog. http://www.freaklabs.org/index.php/Blog/Misc/FreakLabs-Store-On-Holiday.html Hi everyone.The FreakLabs store will be on holiday from 05/15/2013 to 06/03/2013 and the shopping cart will be disabled. I'll be traveling to the US to attend Maker Faire and also visit family and friends. I'm really excited since it will be my first Maker Faire and also a welcome holiday for me. Looking forward to the recharge and hopefully to get some new ideas for interesting projects:) Wed, 15 May 2013 04:54:11 +0100 http://www.freaklabs.org/index.php/Blog/Misc/Ghetto-Casio-G-Shock-Battery-Replacement.html I've had my Casio G-Shock for about 8 years now. In that time, it's run out of batteries on me a few times. The first time, I spoke with a shop and they said they had to send it in to Casio to have the battery replaced. The cost would be around $70 and take about two weeks. I then asked if I could replace it myself and they said it was impossible. I checked on the internet and the... Sat, 20 Apr 2013 05:20:12 +0100 http://www.freaklabs.org/index.php/Blog/Misc/The-Road-to-Dharamsala-The-Deployment.html With the workshop closed out, the next two days were reserved for deployment and installation of the sensor nodes. The night before, I had modified the code the participants were using to harden it a bit for an actual deployment. The main thing I added in was a watchdog timer and protection against a few failure scenarios. The main ones I was concerned about were if the software hangs, if it fails to get an IP address, and if it... Wed, 17 Apr 2013 05:05:37 +0100 http://www.freaklabs.org/index.php/Blog/Misc/The-Road-to-Dharamsala-The-Workshop.html I had one free weekend after arriving at Dharamsala. I contacted Mikey from Air Jaldi, one of the workshop organizers, and he took Jacinta and I around for a site survey and also to discuss the workshop agenda. The workshop consisted of three major parts. The first part was the actual workshop to teach the participants about sensor networks using Arduino. The second and third parts were actual sensor network deployments at the Tibetan Childrens Village (TCV) and Sarah... Wed, 17 Apr 2013 02:56:12 +0100 http://www.freaklabs.org/index.php/Blog/Misc/The-Road-to-Dharamsala-Road-Trip.html I finally arrived in Delhi, India and the first thing I noticed was that immigration was opulent. I was a bit nervous because I was there on a tourist visa but had a huge amount of wireless electronics in my suitcase. If customs checked me, it’s likely they would have confiscated most of the electronics and rendered the workshop useless. Luckily, they didn’t and I was allowed to proceed to the exit. Customs always freaks me out, mostly because I... Tue, 16 Apr 2013 23:50:25 +0100 http://www.freaklabs.org/index.php/Blog/Misc/The-Road-to-Dharamsala-The-Beginning.html As I'm writing this, I'm waiting at Narita Airport in Tokyo for my flight to Delhi. How I ended up here is kind of interesting. My New Year's resolution for 2013 was to travel less so that I could get more work done. As soon as the new year started, I was on a plane to Shenzhen to help Bunnie run factory tours of Shenzhen for MIT Media Lab. That was an amazing adventure but when I got back to... Wed, 03 Apr 2013 21:17:46 +0100 http://www.freaklabs.org/index.php/Blog/Store/2013-03-28-Freakduino-Errata.html Hi everyone.Robin Scheibler, a Safecast member and also a Freakduino user, discovered and informed me about a dangerous bug in the AVR settings on the Freakduino. All Freakduinos purchased before 2013-03-28 are set to have a 4 kB bootloader (2048 words). In the Freakduino tutorial, I mention to use the Arduino IDE board setting "Arduino Pro or Pro Mini (3.3V, 8 MHz) w/ATmega328". This board setting assumes a 2 kB bootloader (1024 words). Using this board setting, the Arduino... Thu, 28 Mar 2013 05:40:25 +0100 http://www.freaklabs.org/index.php/Blog/MIT-Media-Lab-Shenzhen-2013/MIT-Media-Lab-Shenzhen-2013-01-27-The-End.html 2013-01-27 The End Well, that was an epic tour of the Shenzhen industrial complex. I think I've talked a lot about the different processes we saw and my feelings about the factory tours. This trip was a lot more than that though. I got to know a great group of people as we navigated our way through the complex markets, vast industrial factories, language miscommunications, and various other obstacles that we hit on this trip. Everyone pulled together and helped each... Tue, 29 Jan 2013 04:55:13 +0100 http://www.freaklabs.org/index.php/Blog/MIT-Media-Lab-Shenzhen-2013/-MIT-Media-Lab-Shenzhen-2013-01-26-Generator-Conference.html 2013-01-26 Generator Conference My final day in Shenzhen and also the final event on the itinerary is the Generator Conference. This is a conference put on by Cyril Ebersweiler and Seeed Studios for the hardware startup scene. It was a little bit crazy for us because the previous night, we had a big BBQ party on the top of Rapscallions and invited a bunch of people including AQS, HAXLR8R, Dangerous Prototypes, PCH, and others. It turned into a huge bender and... Mon, 28 Jan 2013 18:21:30 +0100 http://www.freaklabs.org/index.php/Blog/MIT-Media-Lab-Shenzhen-2013/-MIT-Media-Lab-Shenzhen-2013-01-24-PCH.html 2013-01-24 PCH Although the factory tours had ended, that didn't mean the events had ended. As usual, the schedule was still packed and today, we had the chance to visit the headquarters of a large contract manufacturer and logistics company called PCH. According to rumors I overheard, PCH was named by the founders, a group of Irishmen, as they were traveling down Pacific Coast Highway in California. They needed a name for their company and figured PCH would work. PCH is... Mon, 28 Jan 2013 15:29:39 +0100