And so it was that I started looking at processor boards out there to make use of the popular Arduino design. I say design, the basic Arduino is really very little more than a manufacturer’s minimum setup – but the important thing is the volume of support software out there – in particular Ethernet software making it possible to create Internet-enabled devices such as my “EtherStat” Ethernet-and-infra-red-controlled unit which has now been on test for the past couple of weeks without a hitch and which will soon end up running Hollyberry Cottage.

None of the boards out there are without issue and so three of us collectively decided we’d have our own board and I took on the design job.

Armed with Eagle PCB package with which I’m well familiar (though I had some catching up to do) and a little imagination I set off putting this together from scratch -  I should at this time thank friends Jonathan and Aidan for the encouragement and also the latter for checking my work and generating the “Gerber” files etc.

The result – here it is..I nicknamed it ”UberBareBoard” as it has everything except the kitchen sink in it (feel  free to zoom in on any of these images which should expand or “lightbox” if you click on them).

The board follows the same form factor as the original Arduino though that was only by chance as I spotted an open-source version of the board outline and connectors. Having put several commercial boards together into various test projects, I came across the same problems every time – not enough power connectors, regulator getting hot, parts too close together, same pins used multiple times- and so what you see here is fairly simple but with sufficient extra pins to make life easy for lash-ups.

In the bare-board image above you’ll see on the front-left a 10-way connector – that’s for the cheap Chinese radio boards. Lower left there’s a 6-way connection – that’s pretty standard as are the outer connectors giving access to the 19 I/O pins and power and ground. Note top left the regulator is mounted flat on plenty of copper board (both sides) to dissipate heat and there’s room for a standard power connector (standard that is unless you’re Maplins who have a HOPELESS and hopelessly over-priced selection of connectors).

At this point it’s probably better to look at the populated board. Front right you’ll see a LED which is attached to D13, a far better place than making a power led as you can see the board working on power up (it flickers). Over on the right I’ve left room for a 3-pin infra-red receiver and a LED to go with that. Top right is the reset button, left from there the standard programming connector and left again (ie upper middle) you’ll see a power (+5 and GND) connector and a 2-pin battery connector. Relevant diode and charge resistor are fitted. The empty socket is for a 24c256 chip (64K EEPROM) and centre front you’ll see 2 diodes, they’re to drop the 5v supply sufficiently to use with the radio or Ethernet modules.

Mass production? No, we scoured the web for cheap UK prototype suppliers and ended up sending off to China for a set of 10 prototypes at a reasonable price – somewhat over a fiver each – and this for fully tinned, masked, cut to size prototypes of production quality. I’ll be using these guys again – turnover was little over a week.

I’m happy to say that apart from not having sufficiently small 1k resistors to mount them horizontally (that’s what I get for using standard library parts and not checking) and getting the mounting hole layers wrong (hence no mounting holes, quickly corrected with a drill) the boards work perfectly – and I have lots of plans for them.

I’ve quite a few articles on related subjects at my Scargill Tech site and on the Willow Design site.

American culture is sick, and secularism is the cause. Such is the contention of religious conservatives such as Rick Santorum, who insist that feminism, sexual freedom and gay rights have undermined traditional morality. The argument has “the virtues of clarity, simplicity and plausibility”, says Steve Chapman, but it has one big flaw: it is refuted by pretty much all the evidence. As America has grown more secular over the past 20 years, “most indicators of moral and social health have got better, not worse”. Crime levels, for instance, have plummeted, while teen pregnancy has fallen by 39%. What’s more, the parts of the US with the worst social problems today are the Bible Belt states, not the supposedly sin-ridden blue states, with their dangerous “moral relativism”. Mississippi has the nation’s highest rate of church attendance, with 63% of people saying they go “weekly or almost weekly”, but its residents are also “far more likely to be murdered than other Americans”. Liberal Vermont’s murder rate, by contrast, is a quarter of the national average. Meanwhile, Massachusetts, the first state to legalise gay marriage, has the nation’s lowest divorce rate. So much for the theory that religiosity promotes virtue and the decline of religious faith “goes hand-in-hand with vice”.

Here’s a simple piece of coding – almost too simple – it uses the JQUERY library (not shown) to simplify cross-browser coding.

<script language=”javascript”>
function alertMsg()
{
    var gm=”/admin/ajax_keepalive.asp”;
    $.get( gm, function(data) { $(“#myTimer”).html(data); } );
    var t=setTimeout(alertMsg,10000);

}
alertMsg();
</script>

This simple piece of code works as follows…

The purpose of the code is to put an incrementing number into my web page… that’s all – but the number is coming from another page.. and the purpose of this is to stop session timeouts by making sure that even when the user is idle – something is happening.

The function alertMsg() sets up the address of a web page which returns nothing more than an incrementing number. Every time you call the page, it returns  an incremented number – and the jQuery then forces that number into a SPAN on my web page.  You’ll note that the following line sets a 10 second timeout to call the same routine, over and over.

Finally the routine is called – which puts up the display and sets the timer to call the routine in 10 seconds – ad-infinitum.

Except that it works a treat in Firefox – and doesn’t work at ALL in Internet Explorer. 

There are TWO unrelated issues here – showing the differences between the browsers.

Firstly in Internet Explorer, the routine is never called (alertMsg()) in the first place – because the DOM is not ready when the routine runs – so the timer never gets set.  It would not matter anyway because Internet Explorer CACHES the call to ajax_keepalive() – and so it would  return the same value instead of an incrementing value – EVEN THOUGH calling this page directly in either browser WORKS a TREAT.

Here’s a version that works for both (differences show in orange)…

<script language=”javascript”>
function alertMsg()
{
var gm=”/admin/ajax_keepalive.asp?r=” + Math.random();
$.get( gm, function(data) { $(“#myTimer”).html(data); } );
var t=setTimeout(alertMsg,10000);

}
$(document).ready(function()
{
alertMsg();
});
</script>

Note that I’ve added a random number onto the end of the page call – as a parameter which never gets used – but it prevents cacheing… also I’ve wrapped the function call in a jQuery document ready function that makes sure this code (AlertMsg()) does not run until the DOM is ready.

Firefox does not need any of this stuff – Internet Explorer does – and we’re not talking old rubbish here – we’re looking at Firefox 7.01 and IE 9 !!!

That’s all history now, Orange have been kicked into touch in favour of the vastly superior THREE company and I now share unlimited 3G with my various devices.. When I moved up to the iPhone 4 I really could not see the point of jailbreaking the phone – but the Apple TV2 is different.  One of the biggest uses for Apple TV is to watch movies and guess what – you’re stuck with iTunes on your PC and Apple format movies.

Neither of the above is a problem for me – but converting movies to Apple format is not something your average person has much time for (couple of hours per video)… and so I took the plunge and had the thing jailbroken using the latest Sn0wbreeze (yup, that is spelled correctly).

The process is easy enough and takes a matter of half an hour including setup but the results are spectacular. Now I can watch movies and listen to music in a variety of formats. Not only that but I also have access to a NetGear ReadyNas Duo, an inexpensive and rather neat network backup device which just happens to be able to stream to the Apple TV – which means no more need to leave a computer on to access movies, pictures and music on the Apple TV. Between the low cost of Apple TV2 (sub-£100) and the Duo ~(sub-£100 excluding disks) – and the nature of the Duo which means with 2 disks you have redundancy (both store identical content – so if one disk goes down you continue on as normal) I now have a reliable solution for handling media at home without using a PC and without lengthy media conversion to suit Apple. It just so happens that software is available for both iPad and iPhone to handle this scenario also.

So is it worth jailbreaking the Apple TV2?  Most definitely – but if it turns your box into a stone – you are of course on your own – follow the Sn0wbreeze instructions carefully.

The image above is not doctored AT ALL – it is merely a panorama – several shots stitched together. This was taken early evening in Galera in Andalucía near the end of August this year – the weather was changing from the normal super hot summer to a brief storm. I don’t think I’ve ever seen colours like this in the sky before!

To put this in perspective here is a panorama from roughly the same spot, somewhat different angle the day before…both are taken from around 3,000ft above sea level.  More imagery at www.facebook.com/cavehome  and www.bedrock.es

On Friday we set off from Galera to see friends Angie and Dennis down to the area around Cuevas Del Almanzora, near VERA, in Almeria. One of the problems with Spain is… it’s big and in rural areas there are simply not that many main routes – so you might be looking at the map on the right and thinking “surely there’s a straight line from A to B – well, no.

However, the route is pretty much motorway except for a short stretch at either end.

Arriving mid-afternoon Friday we all promptly went off to the beach and then after coming back to their place for a chat and a dip in the pool (remember we’re talking upper 30s temperature here – water’s pretty much part of the day’s entertainment) ended up in a nice little nightspot area nearby for drinks.

The following day we went back to the beach and after a battle with the (not insignificant) waves in which I ended up peddle-dashing my knee on the rocks – after fighting to get back on my feet without getting a mouth-full of salt water, I discovered I’d lost my specs in the sea – hardly a good start to the weekend as you can imagine.

Thinking about it, writing this blog isn’t much fun without specs – so guess where we’re going tomorrow – well today as it’s 1.45am already Monday morning. Anyway, we ended up in a really nice restaurant Saturday night to finish off a very pleasant weekend break. We spent most of Sunday morning driving back up to Galera, but managed on the way to find a great market near Vera (and temporary sunglasses for me – I normally wear reactolite varifocals). Spanish rural markets are much of a much-ness – you see the same Indian guys selling fake watches and fake sunglasses, but the quantity and variety of fruit and veg is worth seeing and in this case there was quite a large covered-over area selling plants, much to Maureen’s delight.

We got home mid-Sunday afternoon and as it was too hot to do anything outside, I finally got my two new remote cameras working…lots of improvements over earlier models – these allow 2-way audio as well as quite decent imagery, though being cheap Chinese IP cameras the audio is nothing to write home about…. at least now I’ll be able to keep an eye on both the UK and Spain on the iPhone… handy given the increasing unemployment rate in both countries!!

Oh, so there’s this puppy who seems to have adopted ourselves and our neighbours…he’s cute as well until he craps in the garden and starts barking at 1.30am – just after some “caller unknown” has rang twice on Skype and THREE have left YET ANOTHER stupid message saying how cheap calls are in Spain (despite being instructed verbally 3 times not to ever send me a text again). It’s going to be a long night…

Don’t forget you can see larger versions of most images by clicking on these smaller ones. More pics here on Google Albums or keep up with our Bedrock Facebook page

Now why did I put the date in there – because every time I went looking for help about Facebook APPS – it was out of date!  All I have to do now is get the number of LIKES up so I can have a decent name for the page.

If you follow our Bedrock pages and you’re on Facebook- here’s an easier way! Just press the LIKE button below. Sometime I’ll do a write-up on how I did this. Click on the mess below and you’ll get a Facebook LIKE button.

Essentially what you’re looking at on the Facebook page is an embedded blog. This is hosted separately, not on Facebook – and I used a pretty standard PHP APP framework to start the ball rolling and get it on my site – from there on it’s just a specially adapted template to fit into the rather restrictive Facebook page space.

If you want to know more, try the contact page on the App.