Richi's blog

Category: Projects

  • Running debian on a nas dongle [updated]

    I used a nas dongle from ARP for a while to share an USB harddisk, and I always wondered about what’s inside. It’s a nifty little device that works reasonably well. It needed a reboot from time to time, and it had some issues with the filesystem. Because of the FAT filesystem it couldn’t store […]

  • Refurbishing our VW Bus camper van

    Refurbishing our beloved VW Bus camper van that served us so well on our great adventure in south america was long over due. After lots of offers and some setbacks, it’s finally going to happen before the rust wins. Last week, I spent two days tearing everything appart.Removing bumpers, windows, lights, mirrors, trims, bike and […]

  • Rendering Text in WebGL

    Just like OpenGL and most rendering engines that I know of, WebGL has no builtin support for text rendering. And on top of that, I can’t use the approach we use in PointLine at the moment. PointLine gets the outlines for the characters from the Windows GDI. So I was looking for something cross platform. […]

  • PointLineWeb research prototype

    Google employees can spend 20% of their working time for their own projects. We at cubx (The CAD development department recently split from BORM) have now something similar. We get to spend every second friday afternoon for some projects of our own. The only restriction is that it has to do with computer graphics. I […]

  • RepRap Mendel Part1

    My wive wanted to give me the first kit for a RepRap Mendel for Christmas. She was really sorry that the kit didn’t make it under the tree, as it was sold out. I was excited about the Project for more than a Year, but it was too expensive to just give it a go. […]

  • Why I gave up on voip (for now)

    Voip used to be a big hype, but nowdays you don’t hear a lot about it. I thought that was because it gained wide adoption. But maybe not. At least in the company I work, we went back to a regular telephony system after having constant trouble with the voip installation. From time to time, […]

  • openwireless.ch in Brunnen

    I heard of mesh networks before,  be it from the OneLaptopPerChild or the German Freifunker community. But the recent episode of ChaosRadio about the MeshPotato got me interested enough to give it a try. The meshing community here in Switzerland is organized at openwireless.ch. Sure, I could buy a compatible router and install the provided […]

  • Arduino code to interface the MS5607B Intersema barometric pressure sensor through i2c

    It was not quite as easy as I anticipated to interface the MS5607B sensors that I had sitting around for quite some time now. Sure, wiring them up is a lot easier. Although I still don’t like soldering SMD. In the end, it worked out, and the code can be downloaded with the links below. […]

  • My first Android App

    Yesterday, my first Android App hit the Market. Just search for flightpred and you should find it. It should run on any device running Android 1.5 and above. The App doesn’t do a lot so far. Essentially, it downloads an xml file from the flightpred server and displays the predictions for how many kilometers it […]

  • missing env variables when running from cron

    Today I solved another problem that bugged me for a while. Namely, I wanted to run the free flight prediction runs automatically from cron. When I ran it from the commandline or a script, it worked well, but when I tried to run it directly or through the same script from cron, it always failed […]