It's More Complicated Than That!

Nothing amazing to report

Sometimes linux kernel work is pretty rockin’ but a lot of the time it’s just janitorial stuff. I’ve been doing a lot of that sort of work off and on over the last few months, and am finally almost at a milestone - review of a large set of patches which were mostly backports from later kernels, into one of the Ubuntu variants.

The fear at the outset was that there were patches which we had failed to send upstream. After careful review of hundreds of patches, I found four that needed to be sent upstream. Today I formatted and sent up two of those.

Housekeeping. Never fun but necessary.

NYC Resistor Visit

As part of our week messing around in NYC, Susan and I decided to drop in at NYC Resistor to check it out and meet some fellow makers/hackers. There was some public event scheduled for Wednesday evening, so we dropped in early, and met a bunch of very busy and very friendly hackers, including Bre Pettis, Adam Mayer, Zach Smith, Rose White, and others that fell into my usual black hole for names.

When we arrived, there were a couple of people using MakerBots to print 3d items in plastic, and one working with a “frostruder” - a MakerBot set up for programmable application of frosting. These devices are amazing, and after seeing them in action, I think that they are a must-have device for anyone making things. Even more profound was to see the construction of the MakerBots, the acrylic laser cut parts for them, and other projects in the space that used the Epilog laser cutter at NYC Resistor. At well under $1000 for the MakerBot 3d printer, it’s a no-brainer. The laser cutter is a harder sell because of the higehr cost, but it’s easy for me to see the added productivity and ability to get things from thought to physical form very quickly. I’ve ended up ordering a MakerBot kit for Antitronics, and I already have things queued that I want to make with it. Less than an hour into the visit, and I could see how these tools could radically expand my project horizon.

The public event had been changed, and ended up being a presentation by Rich Gibson, who works for the Intelligent Robotics Group at NASA-Ames/CMU-West. He showed the Gigapan robotic camera mount, and some of the resulting images. The camera mount is a fairly simple device which handles the pan, tilt, and shutter trigger to autogenerate the images needed for a large tiled image. gigapan has a back end that presents these in a zoomable interface that allows you to navigate the resulting image. Here’s the image Rich took as a demo during his presentation.

That would be enough for an amazing evening, but Susan and I noticed a knitting machine on a shelf. Knitting machines have been something that we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about over the last year or so. Susan now has two, and I’ve been tossing around for the best way to automate the hook movement needed to operate one under computer control. This knitting machine (Brother brand) is already microprocessor controlled, and amenable to simple interfacing instead of having to invent all the mechanical bits. This machine was Bre’s, and we arrived at suitable terms and will have it at Sew Brilliant at the Flying Monkey. I’m certain that there will be updates about our adventures as we fire it up.

Thanks to everyone at NYC Resistor for the hospitality!

The Linux Box

As promised, here’s the first article I’ve written for the Huntsville Amateur Radio Club (HARC) newsletter.

Welcome to the first article in a series about the Linux operating system and, more specifically, the amateur radio software applications available for Linux. I’m Steve Conklin, AI4QR, and I’ve been using Linux and developing applications on it for over ten years.

The majority of radio amateurs using Linux use either the Ubuntu or the Fedora distributions. I’m partial to Ubuntu, in part because I’m employed by Canonical (the company committed to developing, distributing, and promoting Ubuntu Linux). Either distribution will work, but I have more current knowledge of Ubuntu than I do of Fedora.

Some of the applications I will discuss can also be run on Windows, but I’m not going to address Windows use in these columns. I will, however, try to mention whether a Windows version is available, but in most cases I can’t tell you how to set it up or run it.

Get Linux

The first thing you’ll have to do to follow along with this series is to run Linux. Nowadays, this is really easy to do – you won’t even need to install it on your computer. First you’ll need what’s called a live CD, and both Ubuntu and Fedora supply live CDs of their distributions. The fastest way to get one is to download disk images (or .iso files) provided by the distributions (see Note 1, following this article) and burn a CD yourself using InfraRecorder or similar software. Ubuntu will even send configured live CDs by mail, but you’ll have to wait for the postman.

If you want to experiment on your present computer without overwriting anything on it, live CDs are the way to go. By installing the entire operating system to a temporary RAM disk held in system memory, live CDs operate without touching any data on your computer’s hard drive. This is convenient, but it does have a few drawbacks – the number of applications you can install is limited by the amount of available RAM, the amount of RAM available to those apps is reduced, and you lose all your installed apps and configuration every time you reboot. This means have to reinstall and reconfigure them each time you run Linux. Booting from CD-ROM is also much slower than booting from your hard drive. Still, for first-time users, live CDs offer a great way to try out Linux and see if you want to do more.

If you have an unused or little-used computer to devote to experimenting with Linux, I encourage you to do that. This allows you the freedom to experiment without any risk to important data, and gives you a chance to install and try out each distribution. Intalling and reinstalling Linux is very fast (much faster than Windows), so it’s easy to do several times in your experimental phase, when you don’t have much to lose. You’ll find that Linux runs well on computers that don’t have enough processor speed, disk space, or memory to run Windows.

Get it Running

Once you’ve got a live CD, simply reboot your computer with the CD in the CD-ROM drive. If it doesn’t boot Linux, you may have to change the boot device order in your BIOS setup. Both distributions will give you the option to permanently install Linux to your computer. Don’t do this unless you have a machine dedicated to running Linux.

If you do decide to install the operating system, you will have to create a username and answer some questions. These are pretty straightforward for both Ubuntu and Fedora. Be sure to memorize or write down any username or passwords you create.

Now that you’re up and running, get a bit more familiar with the desktop. Then try installing an amateur radio application. To start, let’s try xlog. Xlog is a logging program, easily available in both Ubuntu and Fedora, that saves your logs to text files. To install in Ubuntu, select “Add/Remove Applications” from the Applications menu on the desktop, then search for xlog and install it. In Fedora, navigate from the System menu to Administration → Add/Remove Software. As in Ubuntu, just search for xlog and install it. Note that Fedora will also install an application called hamlib as a dependency of xlog (more about hamlib later).

An Actual Amateur Radio Application

Now start xlog (in Ubuntu: Applications → Accessories → Terminal, then type “xlog” in the terminal window; in Fedora: Applications → Other → Xlog). Xlog should start, and I’ll leave it to you to explore the built-in documentation and to play with it. One thing to notice: if you look at the preferences (Settings → Preferences), you’ll see a tab labeled “Hamlib”. This is disabled in Ubuntu because we didn’t install hamlib. Hamlib is another Linux application that I’ll cover it in a future column. It interfaces with radios that support software control through a serial or USB port. If hamlib is installed, it can talk to your rig to read the current frequency, mode, and split – and then xlog can take that information from hamlib and put it directly into your log.

I hope this is a good start for you. There are a lot of great applications out there for Linux, including logging, antenna modeling, VHF/UHF propagation using terrain models, digital sound card communications, APRS, and satellite pass prediction. We’ll get to those. If you have comments or questions, you can enter them as comments under the copy of this article located at my weblog at www.illruminations.com.

Note 1: Ubuntu disk images are located at www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download.
Fedora disk images are located at fedoraproject.org/en/get-fedora.

Preparedness and amateur radio

We’re very lucky in Madison County and in the entire state of Alabama to have a capable group of radio amateurs who are involved with the emergency and disaster response planning at both state and county levels. We train and work with these agencies, and have a good working relationship with those agencies. Post-Katrina, radio amateurs from Alabama provided valuable service for months in the disaster areas.

Recently, there was a full scale statewide interoperability test. Here’s a good article about it. This test was designed in part to test integration of amateur radio operations with the state’s extensive communications capabilities.

My participation was limited to checking my station, making sure my generator would start, and checking in as available for service. That doesn’t sound like much but when you consider that hundreds of other people across the state are doing the same thing, you can see how quickly communications can be established after a disaster, even if everything is down. Everything. Power, telephones, cell phones, and internet.

Practical arts

I’m part of an artist’s cooperative - The Flying Monkey Arts Center. Susan and I share a space there - her stitch lounge and my fledgling electronics space, Antitronics, which my brother and I are starting. More on Antitronics in later posts.

We’re trying to get a handle on utility bills at the monkey. It’s safe to postulate that a large part of the consumption is air conditioning (we’re in Alabama) and lighting. The lighting is fairly efficient flourescents, but they are switched in large areas so that in order to light one artist’s space, you have to turn on a lot more than you need.

One of the things we’re planning to do at Antitronics is teach some workshops on topics including arduino projects, basic electronics, etc. It turns out that from a previous project, I already have three precision 600 Amp clamp-on ammeters, and a conditioning board so that they can be read by simple A/D converters. So naturally, this has become a project to help monitor our power use and demonstrate what’s possible with a few available component parts. I have all the parts now, and will start lashing them together as I have time. They are:

• An Arduino Diecimila
• An Adafruit Xport shield
• A Lantronics XPort module
• My custom signal conditioner board
• (3) Fluke clamp on current probes
• A power supply (TBD)

Disclosure - soon we’ll be selling some arduino and related kits at Antitronics.

So what we’re going to end up with in an industrial-strength three phase tweet-a-watt.

I haven’t used the XPort devices before, and I had a good look at the manuals tonight. It’s an impressive device, and I can see more projects in the future using them.

I’ll post some photos and schematics of the signal conditioner board as soon as I can. It was built as a one-off project and I’ve lost the schematics, but it’s simple and I can reverse engineer it in a few minutes. As I recall, it requires -5V and +12V supplies, but that doesn’t matter so much. I’m just going to have to package it all well enough that the building electricians don’t balk when I ask them to add it to the panel feeding our floor.

I expect that it will be possible to tell pretty easily where we’re using a lot of power. The activities in the cooperative are pretty scheduled, and the A/C is only run on certain days, so I can correlate a lot of that manually. And it just occurred to me that the air conditioning units are near the power panels, so perhaps I’ll add a temperature sensor in the outlet of the A/C.

Since it’s an art space, I also plan at least one realtime display, to raise awareness of power consumption.

I’ll post updates here as I progress. This is a ‘as I have time’ project, so it may take a few weeks.

Ubuntu and NGOs

Service to others is valuable. I’m not sure whether there’s more value to those served or to those performing the service. I’ve seen this in many settings - Service to the American Red Cross, Service providing emergency and disaster communications, and as a board member serving non-profit organizations.

A lot of people understand that part of the open source model is to help others. Even if developers aren’t actively and directly serving others, their work is available for others to use, and this enables a lot of people to do a whole lot with very little investment, either in time or money. For a lot of open source developers and community members, this is abstract and doesn’t matter to them a bit. That’s fine - one of the great things about open source is that the helping part happens whether you actively drive it or not.

I’m a proponent of service. I try to communicate with people about the ways in which they can provide service. I have a talk I’d love to give at an open source conference someday titled “Exception handing in meatspace”, about why you should think about being part of the exception handling for disasters. I also meet a lot of people through open source (and recently through the Ubuntu community) who are dedicated to service. These meetings are exciting because we generally talk about the sort of meta-issues, such as how to connect more service organizations with better resources, or how to help the organizations be more effective.

Now and then there’s a meeting that stands out as having the possibility of marking something bigger - the beginning of a chapter that’s not written yet. I had one of those meetings the last night of the Canonical all-hands meeting in Barcelona. I knew Daniel Holbach. I knew who he was, and had even talked with him about a few things during previous Ubuntu sprints (intense development meetings). We had just never connected on the topic of service. I’m not sure how we got there, conversationally, but we found a common interest. Daniel was going to give a talk on Ubuntu and NGOs, and start connecting people with an interest in using Ubuntu and open source to help NGOs and non-profits do more for less. Daniel has formed the Ubuntu in NGOs group and is off to a running start.

If you are interested in this type of service, please sign up and contribute. There’s a lot to do, including reaching out to find people who can contribute to this and who can benefit from it.

New Monthly piece on Linux and Amateur Radio

I’ve committed to write a monthly article for our amateur radio club newsletter on Linux and amateur radio. I’ll be posting them here also. The first one is an introduction to how to run linux from a live CD or to install it.

I’d like to expand this so that I’m writing more often here, and then consolidating those pices for the newsletter, and also take the chance to get more information into the Ubuntu wiki pages for amateur radio.

Ubuntu Amateur Radio Team

While in Barcelona for the Canonical all-hands, I met several fellow amateur radio operators. I know that there are a lot of amateurs who use Ubuntu, but there wasn’t a gathering place for us to discuss common issues. While at UDS I created a team on Launchpad, located here.

I was caught by surprise when membership grew to more than 20 in four days, but the massiveness of the Ubuntu community often surprises me.

I’m excited about the possibilitites for this team.

We hang out in #ubuntu-hams on freenode.