Jul 28, 2012

My new remote control (as a prototype so far)

Hi.


Moving on with my Arduino experiments I decided to experiment with the infrared library (I said in the original post that one should be able to find a library for almost any piece of hardware he/she want to connect to Arduino) :).


After some research I found this library which worked almost out of the box. The only problem with this library is that it don't have the definitions for my TV (Samsung) so the only option would be to use "raw" data which is not as convenient as the "sendXXX()/decodeXXX()" methods. After a little bit more research I was able to find this post which describes how to change the IR library to work with Samsung TVs).


So here is the prototype for my new remote control. 




So far it is pretty limited (only turn on/off the tv) but I have big plans for it :)


Happy programming.


Adriano

Jul 24, 2012

Arduwhat ?

Hi
Since I was 5 ~ 8 years old I was interested in mechanics, electronics and how things worked in general - my mother has some interesting histories about me disassembling all sort of devices (and usually not being able to put them together again); one in particular in which I got a saw as a "gift" (I was only 6 or 7 and someone gave me a real saw, not a toy, plastic one!) and went to put it into good use sawing some furniture :).

Even though having a high interest in electronics I ended up in the computer software field (just to make it clear: I do enjoy being involved in such fast changing, challenging industry :) and since then I've been having lots of fun (and some frustrations also).
As anyone involved with IT knows, keeping up to date with such a fast changing field requires a lot of effort and over time I put my electronics pretensions to rest (after all there are enough fun stuff in the computer world to play with to keep me busy for a long time...).
But about one year ago this started to change as I started to play with some basic (really basic) electronics stuff again (just for fun) and I stumbled on a small but very interesting piece of hardware: a small board with a microcontroller and a lot of software support with some nice characteristics (at least from my point of view ;) :
  • Open Source Software / Hardware
  • Inexpensive (will not cost you an arm and a leg :)
  • Simple to work with, at least not as complex as the other options I had seem before (no complex, expensive tools required)
  • Easily integrated with the "external" world (through sensors/actuators).
  • Extensible (shields, breakout boards and virtually anything you want)
  • Well supported
  • Large community
which perfectly describes this nice board called "Arduino" (since the name Arduino is trademarked most probably you'll  find compatible devices under some generic brand named with a "duino" suffix).
At this point you may be wondering what can be accomplished with such beautiful piece of hardware... well, I guess it is fair to say that you can find an Arduino C/C++ library for virtually anything you can come up (of course this is not completely true, but it is not too far from the truth). IMO, the important  question is not "is it possible to connect X to Arduino" but instead "how hard is to connect X to Arduino" and based on the list bellow (which I wrote based on information I found) I conclude that, excluding more exotic hardware, it does pretty well job on this topic (note that almost all items in the list bellow requires extra hardware): 
  • Sensors
    • Temperature, Pressure, Gas, Light, Distance, Color, Humidity, Accelerometers, etc.
  • Communications
    • Bluetooth, TCP/IP, UDP/IP, Serial, GPRS, Infrared, etc.
  • Storage
    • EEPROM, SD cards
  • Actuators/Output
    • Step Motors, Servos, DC Motors, LCDs, etc
As you can see it is quite flexible, and more importantly, all of the hardware above have at least one Arduino library ready to be used.

This post is not intended to be an Arduino introduction / course / tutorial. Instead it is meant to be only a teaser so if you want to learn more, you can find lots of information in the internet. Personally there are some sites I highly recommend you to give a visit:

Also, if you want to buy Arduino related hardware you can go to your favorite search engine and search for it and I am sure you'll be able to find lots of stores that sell them. But if you don't want to search, bellow you can find a list of sites in which you can buy Arduino parts (ps: I have no affiliation with any of them :).


Finally, some electronics interesting tools:


Well, that's it. Now let me get back to play with my just arrived Arduino!

In the next post I hope to shed some light about my current projects related to Arduino (both soft and hardware).

Hope you found this post interesting.

Jul 7, 2012

Did you know (Part II) File / Registry virtualization on Windows 7 / Vista

Hi

In this post I discussed some issues I faced regarding software running on Vista 64 bits. Well it ended up that all my troubles was happening because my program (64 bits) was launching IE 64 bits (instead of the 32 bits) and I had not installed Silverlight plugin on it! Solution: just switch my program to 32 bits and it worked as expected!

In this post I want to discuss some pitfalls when running software on x64 bit versions of Windows (most of the discussion applies equally well to Vista x64 ,Windows 7 x64 and probably to newer versions also - haven't tried it with Windows  8 but I bet that the behavior is the same).


Keep in mind that when talking about the reasons that lead Microsoft to add a specific feature I am just speculating, so take every word with a grain of salt :)


On previous Windows versions, to many (almost every single?) developer used to login as
admistrator into their workstations1 so there were way to many applications that relied on being able to change system resources (such as to create files/fonders under "Program Files"), after all they always succeed doing that since developers had the rights to do so (remember, administrator...).

At Vista launch time MS had a tough issue to deal with: how raise the bar for system security / stability without breaking such ("legacy") applications?


AFAIK a compromise was settled so Windows development team decided that for
some 32 bit applications such requests would not fail, but instead, Windows would lie to the calling process and would just create the file somewhere else (the same principle apply to registry access): this feature is known as file virtualization (the rules that governs whether file/registry will be enabled or not for a specific process can be found here)

Note that this feature is meant to allow
legacy applications2 to run on the new platform (at that time, Windows Vista) so Microsoft plans to remove it (as soon as your application gets compiled as 64 bits, virtualization will be disabled anyway).

If you are running the 64 bits version of Windows 7 (or Vista for that matter) y
ou can try it right now by downloading the test application source3 and running it with something like:

FileSystemVirtualizationTest.exe -e %windir%\test.txt "adriano's test"
For now, just run it with the arguments shown above and take a closer look in the produced output:

Virtualization ENABLED.

Virtualization is ON

14 bytes writen to C:\Windows\test.txt
It seams that the application succeed in creating a file under %windir% (which it should obviously not be allowed to) but how can we confirm that? Easy, just run the application again now providing only the file name (the application will try to read the file and dump its contents):
FileSystemVirtualizationTest.exe %windir%\test.txt

Virtualization is ON

adriano's test
and there it is! But wait! Let's open Windows Explorer and try to locate the file. Hey! I can't find the file anymore! Windows search can't find it either:

But the application does succeeded opening the file! how can that be? Launch Windows Explorer again on %windir% folder but this time paying attention to the little button: "Compatibility Files":

Ok, now that you noticed this button, press it and Windows Explorer will open a folder that looks like the one bellow:


Wow! Windows just created the file under %localappdata%\VirtualStore\Windows folder (which is a per user folder). 

This way Windows let applications believe they had successfully updated files / folders / registry keys when actually they didn't (preventing possible global system corruption). Clearly avoiding system corruption is a fair reason to support this functionality, but now, developers (and IT admins) must pay attention to scenarios with mixed 32 / 64 bits applications interacting in such ways that they need to observe changes from each other (since the first ones may be writing to the virtual store and the last ones will not see the virtual store).

Last, but not least :), make sure your application do not depend on registry/file virtualization; these mechanisms were introduced sonly to raise the likelihood of legacy applications to run without problems on Windows versions with stricter security settings (Vista, 7, etc). So if you have an application that does writes to protected file system areas, please do your users a favor: update it to write to a more appropriated location (%appdata%, %localappdata%, etc).

Bellow you can find some links if you want to read more about file system virtualization:


Have fun!

Adriano


[1] I am guiltily of doing the same thing :(
[2] Basically all applications developed for previous Windows OSs are handled as legacy by Vista
[3] In the first drafts of this post I used Notepad++ to write to %windir% but it looks like they added a manifest in the latest versions so it will not work for our demonstration purposes. Even in my sample application I was required to remove the manifest explicitly (VS 10 included one that disabled virtualization)

Jul 5, 2012

Little handy presentation tool

Hi


Yesterday I stumbled over a really nice tool for producing screen casts (called zoomitthat allows you to zoom, draw and write directly on your desktop. If you do screen casts (or any kind of demonstration with a computer connected to a projector) I highly recommend  it (BTW I highly recommend all the Sysinternals stuff :).


Hope you find that useful.