Daniel Parnell's Stuff

My PCBs have arrived

Unfortunately they don’t appear to have worked out as well as I was hoping.

On the top side many of the tracks are incomplete, while the bottom side has no tracks whatsoever 🙁

The boards look really nice though. Â I’m going to have a go at making one of them work soon as I have a problem that needs to be solved using them.

Over the weekend I replaced the leaking inlet valve of our toilet. What should have been a 5 minute job took a couple of days as whoever installed it in the first place glued the nut joining the inlet pipe to the inlet valve. This meant that I had to cut the inlet valve out once I had managed to snap things off badly inside the cistern. No going back once I had snapped a couple of the plastic bits on the inside. Once I got it out I was able to replace it in a matter of minutes 🙂

I’ve ordered my first PCB :)

I’ve been playing with circuits.io and have decided to order a couple and see how it goes 🙂 Hopefully they should be here in a few days/weeks.

Strange smells

A while ago I came home to a strange smell in the house, then a little while later I found this!

SVG

I’ve been looking into making some software with my daughter. She wants to make a game with some characters she has drawn, so I need a nice way to render them. I want to make them using vector graphics, but iOS doesn’t really have a nice way of doing that. What I am in the process of doing is making a little command line tool that converts SVG files into CoreGraphics calls.

The code can be found here on github

This is a sample of the output of the tool. I have seen several other tools that convert the SVG paths to CoreGraphics calls, but nothing that will actually render the whole file including colours and fills. It is still very rough and doesn’t handle things like gradient fills, but for a quick hack it is working pretty well.

Success!

Time for bed. Â I’ve successfully hacked an app I need for work to do something it is not supposed to do 🙂 Â A little reverse engineering, byte patching and single stepping through machine code and I now have it being quite naughty 🙂

Hopper Disassembler

I’ve been using a new disassembler a lot over the last couple of weeks called Hopper. Â I’m finding it to be well worth the money. Â So much so that I initially purchased it through the Apple App store, and then purchased it again directly from the developer so I could get access to the latest version more quickly.

It has many of the features of IDA Pro at a fraction of the cost!

It is alive again

I got another email from the awesome tech support guys at Drobo this morning asking about my DroboPro. I told them it had died again and they offered to replace it rather cheaply, they also suggested that both batteries might need to be replaced rather than just the CR2032 coin cell. I removed the main backup battery pack and pressed the power button and the thing booted up. I’m not shutting the thing down again until I’m sure I’ve got ALL of the data this time 😉

Looks like it is dead again

I spoke too soon. I rebooted the box to get it to enable iSCSI to allow for a faster transfer and it hasn’t come back to life again 🙁
At least I managed to get the one thing I didn’t have a backup copy of off the unit, so I’m pretty much good to go on my rebuild using a simple beige box.

IT LIVES!

After a small hint from one of the Drobo tech support staff I was able to fix my DroboPro 🙂

It turns out that there is a little CR2032 coin cell on the main board that had gone flat. Â I replaced that and the machine came good 🙂

YAY!