smackeyacky

SmartShepherd is preparing to head into a new office. Sort of. We are shifting back out of my house and moving into a shed. I'm excited about getting the unholy mess upstairs into a decent workshop environment, it's cramped upstairs with two people working and the workbenches are just too small to be productive when doing any kind of assembly or repair work. The shed itself already has fibre to the premises thanks to the NBN network rollout here in Armidale. I didn't want to set up anything too complicated or expensive since our needs are relatively modest, but there were a few features I wanted to have: The ability to do VLANs easily. A solid firewall Some traffic shaping The ability to do small scale self hosting Mesh wifi A guest wifi network completely firewalled out of the office/lab network That's not one box, that's three I quickly realised that nothing on the market would cover all the possibilities. I was going to need a good ro...

Who cares what they spend their money on The advent of digital music reproduction seemed to make the established Hi-Fi journalists collectively lose their minds. Back in the pre-digital times it was perfectly plausible for untrained journalists to wax lyrical about the differences between turntable cartridges (because you can measure the differences) or debate the merits of amplifier design. By the time the late eighties had rolled around, the early CD players had become indistinguishable from each other which I guess must have prompted something of a crisis: what do we write about now? Cable nonsense, green pens, floundering Then these guys stumbled across jitter . Jitter suddenly became a big deal in the audio review community, mostly it appears because jitter was the answer to the CD manufacturers overstated claims of "perfect sound forever". The discovery by audio magazines of the existence of jitter enabled them to make plausible sounding claims about audio quali...

Attempt two at getting it working The SmartShepherd devices are based around a Texas Instruments bluetooth low energy chip: the CC2640R2F. I have been using Ti's "Code Composer Studio" to build the firmware for the device. It is not my favourite tool but it does get the job done (eventually). Previously I have upgraded my main Windows build to Code Composer Studio 10 so I know (in theory) it should work on Debian as the system is available for Ubuntu. I tried to get this working on day 1 but failed to get the setup to do anything sensible with my project. Partly because Code Composer Studio is...hard to use. Partly because all the setup is dependent on windows paths when you start a project on Windows and it's tough to find all the places you need to make changes. I mean, it's almost impossible to move a CCS project to a different directory on the same machine, so shifting it to a different operating system is a lot more work than I had planned for. Ins...

Setup: QEMU sparc VM running Solaris 2.6. HotJava doesn't do much with SSL so it's proxied through WebOne Yeah a total waste of time but it amused me after I had set up a bridge on the host so that the VM has to dhcp an address and now looks like it's sitting on the network like a big boy. QEMU might be the greatest fun, hobby, timewaster ever invented.

Installing wget First I needed a better way of transferring files into the VM than using HTTP. A suggestion from Hacker News was that tftp is simple, well supported and would probably work with a tftp server installed on Debian. I installed tftpd-hpa Once that is installed, it makes a default directory in a slightly odd spot (/srv/tftp) but no matter. Start dumping your files into that directory. Minimal packages required from tgcware gcc-2.95.3-2.tgc-sunos5.6-sparc-tgcware.gz gettext-0.19.8.1-1.tgc-sunos5.6-sparc-tgcware.gz gzip-1.5-1.tgc-sunos5.6-sparc-tgcware libgcc_s1-4.3.6-2.tgc-sunos5.6-sparc-tgcware.gz libiconv-1.15-1.tgc-sunos5.6-sparc-tgcware.gz libidn2-2.3.2-1.tgc-sunos5.6-sparc-tgcware.gz libssp0-4.3.6-2.tgc-sunos5.6-sparc-tgcware.gz libstdc++6-4.3.6-2.tgc-sunos5.6-sparc-tgcware.gz openssh-8.8p1-1.tgc-sunos5.6-sparc-tgcware.gz openssl-1.0.2u-6.tgc-sunos5.6-sparc-tgcware.gz pcre-8.42-1.tgc-sunos5.6-sparc-tgcware.gz perl-5.28.1-1.tgc-sunos5.6-sparc-tgcware.gz prngd-0.9....

You can never go home A big chunk of my professional career in the 1990s was spent with a Sparcstation on my desk. Before that the 68000 Sun2 and Sun3 floated past my sticky fingers but the Sparc machines quickly superseded those. I don't remember too much about which ones: pretty sure there was at least one IPX, one Sparcstation 5, a Sparcstation 10 and then the last one was most likely an Ultra 1 or maybe even an Ultra 5. It was a long time ago. Every now and again I think about how productive those machines were and do a little Ebay digging on how much one would be worth to have around. Except I don't have the room for more machines and the idea of trying to revive 25 year old hardware from that era is well beyond my electronic capabilities. Never fear, QEMU is here. Following these excellent instructions from Adafruit , you too can install Solaris 2.6 and have your very own emulated machine. Note that there is one instruction in there I am not sure you need. A...