Life, universe & arduinos

Well good day then! Some recent comments from the last Arduino GSM post has chimed me in to the fact that I still have this site out there, and after so I may as well make it useful

I had put the Car GPS Tracking project on hold for a while since I had a new group project I was devoting all my time on: Kwartzlab — Kitchener/Waterloo’s epic new Hackerspace . We opened the doors on October 1st and have been running at warp speed ever since! If you’re in the area, you oughtta make it out to one of our Tuesday Open Nights to check us out!

Now, as far as the Libelium GPRS shield goes, not long after that post I actually switched to a new module .. the anniversary of my stolen vehicles was approaching fast and I didn’t want to get caught without being able to engage the ejection seats via SMS (hmm, do those void the terms of a lease?). Anyhow, the module I ended up using is the GSM Playground from HW Kitchen. It’s similar to the Libelium shield but has some additional nifty features such as having a built-in microphone, amp (to connect a loudspeaker), and the ability to receive and send SMS messages reliably (yay!). It’s also got a rudimentary objected-oriented library available for communication right out of the box. Now with that project on the go, I plan to go back to the Libelium shield and complete the library I was working on for that.

Aside from the now working SMS component, I’ve recently hit another hurdle — the GPS unit. So far I’ve been using an antiquated serial GPS called the Delorme Tripmate, (which was modded into a standard NMEA receiver). While relatively large (pre-modded version required four AA batteries), it worked well enough and happened to come enclosed in a waterproof case that could fit the Arduino and GSM shield in as well. Problem is, the thing died on me recently so I’ve been looking for a suitable alternative. I could hook up a USB-based receiver but I’ve been considering stacking a GPS shield of some sort to keep things nice and compact. Stay tuned!

Posted in Site News | No Comments »

BBS Files Added

I’ve added a section for all the old Generik Productions files I still have kicking around here. For those of you like me that still poke around the BBS scene, you may find some of the utilities handy (especially the newer ones that will run on telnet boards with no modification).

I recently added the Renegade upgrade utility I wrote in 2005 to move just about every major RG release (from 10-05 to the latest at the time, 5-19.04). I may update that utility still to support the more recent versions, but for now you can use the standard upgrade packages to go from there.

Posted in Site News | No Comments »

And away we go

Well, this marks the first post on the new Viscera in the Vicodin. After a few brief years on hiatus, I’ve found something else to say

Here you’ll find stuff that didn’t make it to other sites, or my tech blog, Web Surfs You! along with thoughts, ideas and personal projects. If you really think you need to follow this hilarity, then go ahead and subscribe to the RSS feed, I ain’t stopping ya!

So here we go, round two!

Posted in Site News | No Comments »