Richi's blog

A blog about personal projects and experiences

  • 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 […]

  • Powered paragliding

    After a long time I did some paramotoring again. We swiss poeople have to leave the country to do so. Paramotoring is forbidden in only two countries in the world. One is North Korea, and guess which is the other… But it looks promising that the new electric engines might get approved in Switzerland. Anyway, […]

  • Android Phone

    Last week I got my new phone. A Samsung Galaxy 9000 with Android 2.1 (soon 2.2). So, the Openmoko Freerunner was my main phone for less than a year. I tried many different distributions on it. Namely OM2008, SHR, Hackable, Android 1.5 but the one I like most is QtMoko. The freerunner is still the […]

  • debian/postinst froze when restarting apache2

    With my flugbuch2 and flightpred projects I had a problem for a while in the debian packages. Namely the installation froze after restarting apache2, while the installation seemed to have succeeded as the websites were accessible. When I reloaded apache instead of restarting, the installation ran through but the websites could not be found. After […]

  • Arduino Code for the MS5534C Intersema pressure sensor

    After receiving personal messages on the arduino forum asking for the code for the Intersema pressure sensor, I paste my code here. It is based on the code from Hari Nair for the open source solar vario that I bought from him.

  • Back from Holidays

    We’re back from our family holiday on the French atlantic coast. We were at the Dune du Pyla, europ’s biggest sand dune. It’s a big playground for children as well as adults hanging below a paraglider wing. Conditions were good on three days to fly on the big dune. So I trained touching the flat […]

  • Receptiongreet basic functionality working

    Today I did important progress in another toy project. It’s name is receptiongreet and you can find out more on SourceForge. Basic functionality was running today for the first time! The app starts up, reads all the face images provided in a sub directory and trains them. It then observes the area with the web […]

  • Weatherstation problem

    The plan was to build a mobile weather station with an arduino, two old windspeed sensors from the local paragliding school, a temperature sensor, a solar panel and an old cellphone. As the first part I wanted to read the anemometers. I got them for a bargain from Touch&Go. Only I couldn’t figure out how […]

  • Handheld 2.4GHz Spectrum Analyzer

    Finally I got my Spectrum Analyzer to work. At first I was curious if I could use the display from an old Nokia cellphone I disassembled in conjunction with the Arduino. So I was looking for anything that could help me in doing so. Then I stumbled across Miguel A. Vallejo’s Handheld 2.4GHz Spectrum Analyzer. […]

  • Paragliding magazine cover

    Lately I learned that I was on the front page of a japanese paraglider magazine: My ex boss visited his parents in law in Japan and brought me an issue. I was puzzled to learn that Japanese magazines are read from back to front. order form