Robopanda's Continuing Epic Voyage Through Time

To send an SMS...

2012-02-11T22:20:00.001-08:00

Well in my previous entry about my current project for school I was discussing our currently futile attempt to use an AT&T Sim card to send texts so we decided to go with T-Mobile instead. Getting the card from ebay turned out great. I just had to type in the codes online and everything was good to go. I am pretty happy with how easy that was. Unfortunately, I was not happy with how it still didn't connect.
Before I can really expound on that I need to first tell you a story.

When we first designed the circuit we were going to build, we decided to regulate our voltage with a zener diode and resistor. At first the current draw on the zener was too much and we blew it out. So we were like, lets put them in parrallel. LOL.
You can't do that because one of them will decide that it is the best and blowup. Then the next one will. and so forth... So we were able to get one big enough finally and a resistor that is rated for 4W because that is what was needed. It never occurred to me that this was a bad setup... even though the very consept of a 4W resistor should have been an indicator. But it worked: we have our 9 volt source for our motor, and 4.2 for our microcontroller. Awesome. Well flash forward to the present.
So now I am plugging in my newly activated TMobile Sim card and then connecting to the uart over bluetooth. As a side note i am really glad that we have this bluetooth module... we never would have been able to debug anything with out it... much better that compile and pray.
anyway after connecting to it over uart the cell module tells me to f-off. No service. No service. No service.
Well even if we aren't on a network we should get signal.
At+csq 99, 99
Bullshit there is no signal. My cellphone works... ya it will be roaming but...
#mwi 1,1,0
Wait... what does that mean, cell module?
Well that above message randomly showed up. A lot. Turns out that means "message wait indicator". It is supposed to keep track of messages that are pending to send and recieve. It is also supposed to show up at boot after the first AT... not randomly and intermittently. Oh and a lot of the time when typing in at commands it will cut out, inexplicably. No idea why. We made sure that the band was set correctly. But the connect commands still didn't work. Not to mention that cops returned nothing. It was all pretty annoying.
At about this point my friend is like, ima look at your vcc on the oscilloscope. Turns out our 4.2 volt line kept dropping out to about 3 every now and then. Suddenly all the information started to come together. When we sent the boot sequence at the beginning I didn't know why but we were needing to hold the line low, or it would turn off randomly... because power sagged. And while it was held on it couldn't connect because power kept sagging. And our commands were cut off because while typing, the device resets, because of power sag.... so to test this theory we floated the whole power circuit and connected vcc to a power supply and suddenly EVERYTHING WORKED. Ya. I still haven't tried with the at&t card since fixing everything else... for all I know that might actually work fine now.
I'll have another post later tomorrow prolly about getting our microcontroller to correctly send texts, Cuz that also sucked.
Anyway... power regulators are good. And if you see this kind of crap check power it may not be what it should be... :p

Edits:minor grammar fixes and unautocorrects. (it was sent from my kindle fire, which is also why my i's are cap'd, i wouldn't capitalize them myself.)

Nisemonogatari 5

2012-02-04T16:16:00.000-08:00

first of all i suppose i should say that Nisemonogatari is the only anime i am watching this season, and i wish i didn't know it was airing right now so that i could watch it all at once, HOWEVER, after watching Bakemonogatari 6 times then finding out that they were going to do the sequel, there was no way i could live knowing i haven't seen all there is to see.

the *monogatari series is pretty darn good, and if you haven't seen Bakemonogatari, then i highly suggest you get on that, if you are one of those anime loving types. shortly put it is the adventure of a half-vampire highschool student who makes friends with people by riding them of supernatural problems. essentially.

Nisemonogatari is the second season, based on the third book of a light novel series. Kizumonogatari was the second book, and will be airing as a movie later this year. I am kind of annoyed that it is coming out after Nisemonogatari, because it describes the events that took place to make the main character a half vampire, and that stuff kind of plays a role in this season... i feel it is spoilerish. I already read the book (which was fan translated) so i don't feel like i am getting spoiled but if the anime is all you know, then i would be annoyed. or maybe it will just bring up more questions. whatever.

Kaiki: One big, money loving, bastard.

All in all i am happy with this episode, alot of the story is finally coming together, for instance we finally learn what happened with Karen, Koyomi's sister, and Kaiki. I suppose i am getting to a point where i feel the fan service is kind of getting in the way of the story... like i have accepted it, Bakemonogatari had lots of it and it was still fine, but it has been getting pretty... um... alot like episode 2 with Kanbaru and the previous episode with Shinobu.

This scene added nothing.

This scene lasted the whole episode.

i mean... i can live with it... but i feel like this current story is far more dark the the previous ones, and the contrast is slightly distasteful.

i was really hoping that Koyomi would go out and look for Kaiki at the end of this episode, but it seems he is currently more concerned with making sure his sister is safe, which i suppose is more rational.

i am still confused with why Hitagi chained up Koyomi after the mention of Kaiki, it seems like she was trying to protect him, but at the same time it seemed like she was doing it because Hanekawa was trying to keep him out of what she and Koyomi's sisters were doing. Well i guess i have to wait another week to find out more...

Kiss your little sister... That will make it better.

also. i feel like Koyomi really needs to learn to explain his angle to people more... he could probably avoid a lot of akward moments that way. like who walks into a room then proclaims to their sister "I am going to kiss you"?

More of the same (or the lamentations of me)

2012-02-02T18:55:00.000-08:00

Well isn't it interesting how when everything is going bad, it can always get even more fun. It can. Totally.
So in the last post i discussed needing to get a T-Mobile SIM card so that i could send text messages from the cell module in the project. Apparently the website wants to make it as hard as possible to do this, because only the most devout of believers can enter into the sacred T-Mobile network.

Pretty much immediatly after my posting i had my friend attempt to order one (he is on the project with me) and come to find out they won't let him. The website allows him to go all the way through the process enter in the creditcard info, then asks him to answer some security questions to confirm his identity. He previously had a T-Mobile account so i guess they are entitled. He answers the questions, and then it blocks him. He has crappy internet, so he tries again on my internet, thinking that maybe the connection died. Same thing. The next time he trys it doesn't even get that far before failing, so he calls them up. After asking for his SSN and other identifying information they said that they can't do anything about it, they are "trying to protect his identity". So i'm like "Well fine, i'll try". lol
I have pretty much the same experiance, except i don't get asked probing personal questions, as i have never had an account with them. Instead it returns an error claiming that i entered my credit card information incorrectly. I highly doubt that this is the case, i was in fact sure i entered it correctly. There was a chance however that my bank didn't like me buying 2 cellphones in one week, so i checked to see if it showed anything on my account information. Low and behold there was a charge for the card and shipping, then a refund, not a blocked charge, they took my money, then gave it back. I tried again just to be sure and sure enough the same thing happened. At this point i was afraid to try again because my bank would probably think it was fraudulent if i continued, so i asked another friend to try. Same thing.
Then i called my mom and asked her to try. Same thing.
I tweeted T-Mobile and they just pointed me at their website to the same SIM card page, and the find a store tool. There are no T-Mobile stores near here, at least not so close i could go there on a week day.

The answer to all this?
ebay

On ebay i was able to find the same card un-activated for less than on the site. No hassle. No work.

our working theory is that they have a black list on this region because there is only one tower near here, but why would that matter... i mean i might be buying it because i plan on moving to a place that does have lots of T-Mobile towers and want a phone for while i am there, or something. Anyway... i think it is BS.

Other than our nice little cell module project i have a plds verilog project i am working on for a class. This week we were supposed to implement a mux'd 7seg display with 3 number fields. I wanted to just be able to check it off at the begining of lab so i could work on other things, so i stayed up last night doing it. I build the code, and loaded it up, and it seemed to be right, the RTL looked fine i mean ya, i wish i could get rid of that mux in front of my FF, but my pld doesn't have any enabled flipflops, so it is kinda impossible.

And i think it is silly that my counter/priority encoder has muxs acting as... ... um... delays...

But generally i looked good. I mean, everything was functionally the same as what i wanted. So when i programmed the PLD you can imagine my surprise when it didn't work. Nothing showed up on my 7Seg. i would have thought that if it was going to be broken it was going to display at least something, but no. I looked it over, poked at various parts of the code, did various things, but nothing was wrong with it that i could see. After about an hour of this i tryed to hard code a value to display, and IT WORKED. so that meant that my switch code was wrong. Well if that is what you thought too, you'd be wrong just like me. I eventually checked the physical state of the switches with a multimeter. They are wired with pullups so when open it reads 5v and when closed it reads 0, well... they never read 0. Turns out the wire wrap wire broke while wrapping ground, so it floated until driven high, then stayed there. I am actually surprised i didn't damage the pld while programming, (i had the switches closed so *theoretically* they wouldn't be driven during programming. rewrapped it, and yay! it displayed crap. i accidently indexed a->g instead of g->a on my 7Seg, and it was very obvious that that is what i did, so one more compile and it worked great.

Moral of the story... ima check my hardware first from now on... :p
also buy your sim card online, save a headache.

JP of the Heavens Continues!

2012-01-31T00:01:00.000-08:00

Well it has been a while since i have last posted. as you may recall from my last entry the cell phone module i picked for our project was probably not a great choice. And guess what! It was even a worse choice than i previously thought! YAY!

But seriously. i want to make it perfectly clear, if you are going to do any kind of cell module hobby project, or hell even prototype, just get this

ADH8066 GSM Module
(SparkFun - images are CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 )

and then get this

ADH8066 GSM Breakout
(SparkFun - images are CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 )

or i guess if you wanted to be super extra fun you could get this

ADH8066 GSM Evaluation Board
(SparkFun - images are CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 )

i personally think that the eval board is more than anyone should need.. but i guess it would be really simple to use because that usb acts as a com port on your computer and you can just connect to it with a terminal like PuTTY. The reason beyond the fact that you wont have to solder any .5mm pitch socket on to a breakout board that you took a combined 40+ man hours to find on the internet, that made the cell module that you got more expencive than the other more reasonable options is that you won't need to wire no less than 3 transistors to some control device (uC, button, robot monkey, etc) and you won't need to Any way. That is just one thing in hindsight i wish i could have done.

The next thing is the sim card.

we were originally going to get this

T-Mobile prepaid SIM card

look at that beautiful thing. It is pretty great honestly, and it is cheap! 3 bucks online, with free shipping. *sigh* well. We called T-Mobile to ask them if it would be possible to get like 100 identical, which would be what we want the most. After talking to a small business rep/adviser we were told such a thing is not really feasible, which isn't too bad, it just means that each box would have it's own number. The database is setup such that that would work fine, so it isn't a big deal. I should have bought it online like weeks ago, but i didn't, i thought it would be better to go to a real store and buy one. well. Turns out there are no T-Mobile stores here... and the only cell phone i could get cheap was an AT&T goPhone. So that is what i done got.

I didn't know at the time, but it turns out that these phones are quite notorious for their closed-ness. People have problems putting the card in even other goPhones let alone other AT&T phones. I have heard of no embedded project that worked with an AT&T goPhone SIM. ugh. So ya.

Apparently it can work. But you have to activate it in the cell module your project uses. because the guy at the store did the activation it was locked into that phone. also apparently if i wait 180ish days it will auto unlock and i can then use it in my cell module... good thing i have to get it sending texts like... today... :/

anyway. ya.

The good news.

We are able to use the uart to send AT commands to the module, so we know that isn't broken. Theoretically we know everything to send SMS messages reliably. The problem is we have to present this week, and there is almost no way that we can get a good SIM in time. The AT command sequence is really pretty mundane. i mean. (assuming you can connect to the friggen provider) it should be a simple command

to do it:

AT+CMGF=1

AT+CMGW="+some number"

text goes here then send a '^Z'

i mean easy.

o wells.

MORALE OF THE STORY:
Don't use a gophone SIM card, just because they are cheap. (T-Mobile is cheaper anyway...)
pay a little bit more to get the breakout-able module of anything, ever. it is worth the time saved.

JP of the Heavens - Part 1

2011-10-28T00:57:00.001-07:00

Well i think i said something about doing another post on russian, but that's going to hafta wait i suppose... i don't have the time really to do that... why not you may be asking. Well that is a good question and i have an answer for you, JP!

so it is my Junior year at Oregon Institute of Technology and that means Junior Project. JP is a team project where we plan design and build something all out of pocket. The projects have a minimum level of complexity, but can be as complicated beyond that as the team wants. Invariably many teams try to do something that is far too complicated for their skill set, and end up failing to complete the project.

Anyway. For our project my team decided that we want to make a box. A box that dispenses paper. A paper dispensing box. yup. :D

Well that is probably being a little too turse. It is actually one of these(with modifications).

Anyway... this isn't so much about the actual project as how we are making it.

We started with nothing 4 weeks ago and now we actually have quite a bit. We are going to be using an Atmel ATMega644PA microController, and a Telit GC864-Quad-V2 cellular module. This later thing brings us to our first awesome fun times.

Here is what the cell module looks like

You may notice that connector on the side there... that is about 2 cm long... there are 40 pins. Those pins are exactly .5mm apart... i don't know if you have ever messed with .5 mm pins before... because it was for sure my first time having to do anything with them... and surface mount was the only way to go. here is an early atempt at doing this... and honestly it was a good try.

Solder Bridges. many many solder bridges. by the way that breakout board is a story for another time, don't let me forget ya hear? anyway after a few attempts and actually getting it on once but then breaking it off because SOMEBODY wanted to connect the cell module on to test it, but it was too strong for the solder points and it ripped off the board... we finnaly got it on, and then super glued it.

isn't it beautiful. it almost brings a tear to my eye.

if you didn't really follow what is going on here that is fine i guess... the moral is really: "if you are doing prototypes, pay a little extra and get something already with a breakout"

for real. i think we would have saved 20$ in time and effort if we just would have went with a pre-brokenout cell module, but i didn't check the package completly and thought we could get a cable that attached, then we could break the cable out... but no, i was wrong... at least it all worked out, and we were actually able to solder it with no bridges, and all connected.

Hello! (aka. Russian For Today! Part2: Hard vs. Soft)

2011-08-13T17:55:00.000-07:00

Hi! welcome to part 2 of my wonderful ongoing series on Russian (something i almost know something about, maybe)
where is part one? don't be silly it was the last post!
-what... it isn't here...
O SNAP. that is because i moved from wordpress to blogger just now, huh...?
well it was over there.

anyway on to business.
Hardness versus Softness.
this is a pretty important topic in the Russian language. Nothing can make you sound more foreign than not being able to effectively make consonants hard or soft when they should be. So first thing, is what can indicate hardness or softness? from our last lesson we learned that vowels can idicate hard or softness, thusly.

Hard	Soft
А а	Я я
Э э	Е е
О о	Ё ё
У у	Ю ю
Ы ы	И и

Each row on the table represents a specific vowel sound: ah, eh, oh, oo, i. the left and right differ in whether they pass softness to the preceding consonant. it doesn't change the vowel. Pretty simple right? if only...

there are certain consonants that can only be hard, or soft. and it doesn't mater what comes after them... that softness just dissappears or is there regardless.

the letters Ч, Щ, Ж, and Ц are always soft... with the exception of Щ you can't say these sounds hard anyway... so it is pretty easy... just remember to not try to make it hard.
the letters Х, and Щ are always hard.
these letters (along with К and Г ) listed are a special class of letters to which spelling rules apply, so keeping them in mind as special will kind of help.
i guess at this point i should mention again that it is important that softness is attached to consonants. the word "Нет" is not 'n-yet' but 'ny-et'.

i kinda want to talk about how the consonants are related a bit... but it is boring and not really important to learning russian... untill you start dealing with when sounds deform in certain conjugation patterns... ... the same relationships exist in english to. t-d, b-p, n-m, l-r.. but in russian it makes a little more sense. anyway, part 1 was really long, so i guess i am fine with this one being shorter.