Made by Mikal – Page 15

Trail run: Lake Tuggeranong to Kambah Pool (return)

Post author:mikal
Post published:May 18, 2019
Post category:Trail run

This wasn't the run I'd planned for this day, but here we are. This runs along the Centenary Trail between Kambah Pool and Lake Tuggeranong. Partially shaded, but also on the quite side of the ridge line where you can't tell that you're near the city. Don't take the tempting river ford, there is a bridge a little further downstream! 14.11km and 296 vertical ascent. Be careful of mountain bikers on this popular piece of single track. You're allowed to run here, but some cyclists don't leave much time to notice other track users. [kml: 20190511-1]

Trail run: Barnes and ridgeline

Post author:mikal
Post published:May 18, 2019
Post category:Trail run

A first attempt at running to Barnes and Brett trigs, this didn't work out quite as well as I'd expected (I ran out of time before I'd hit Brett trig). The area wasn't as steep as I'd expected, being mostly rolling grazing land with fire trails. Lots of gates and now facilities, but stunning views of southern Canberra from the ridgeline. 11.11km and 421m of vertical ascent. [kml: 20190502-1]

Trail run: Pine Island South to Point Hut with a Hill

Post author:mikal
Post published:May 18, 2019
Post category:Trail run

This one is probably a little bit less useful to others, as the loop includes a bit more of the suburb than is normal. That said, you could turn this into a suburb avoiding loop quite easily. A nice 11.88km run with a hill climb at the end. A total ascent of 119 metres. There isn't much shade along the run, but there is some in patches. There are bathrooms at Point Hut and Pine Island. Be careful of mountain bikers on this popular piece of single track. You're allowed to run here, but some cyclists don't leave much time to notice other track users. [kml: 20190220-1]

Trail running guide: Tuggeranong

Post author:mikal
Post published:May 18, 2019
Post category:Trail run Tuggeranong trail run

I've been running on trails more recently (I'm super bored with roads and bike paths), but running on trails makes load management harder -- often I'm looking for a run of approximately XX length with no more than YY vertical ascent. So I was thinking, maybe I should just write the runs that I do down so that over time I create a menu of options for when I need them. This page documents my Tuggeranong runs.

Trail run: Cooleman Ridge

Post author:mikal
Post published:May 18, 2019
Post category:Trail run

This run includes Cooleman and Arawang trig points. Not a lot of shade, but a pleasant run. 9.86km and 264m of vertical ascent. [kml: 20190425-1]

Ignition!

Post author:mikal
Post published:May 5, 2019
Post category:Book

Whilst the chemistry was sometimes over my head, this book is an engaging summary of the history of US liquid rocket fuels during the height of the cold war. Fun to read and interesting as well. I enjoyed it.

Using a MCP4921 or MCP4922 as a SPI DAC for Audio on Raspberry Pi

Post author:mikal
Post published:April 11, 2019
Post category:Gang Scan

I've been playing recently with using a MCP4921 as an audio DAC on a Raspberry Pi Zero W, although a MCP4922 would be equivalent (the '22 is a two channel DAC, the '21 is a single channel DAC). This post is my notes on where I got to before I decided that thing wasn't going to work out for me. My basic requirement was to be able to play sounds on a raspberry pi which already has two SPI buses in use. Thus, adding a SPI DAC seemed like a logical choice. The basic circuit looked like this: Driving this circuit looked like this (noting that this code was a prototype and isn't the best ever). The bit that took a while there was realising that the CS line needs to be toggled between 16 bit writes. Once that had been done (which meant moving to a different spidev call), things were on the up and up. This was the point I realised that I was at a dead end. I can't find a way to send the data to the DAC in a way which respects the timing of the audio file. Before I had to do small writes…

1-Wire home automation tutorial from linux.conf.au 2019, part 2

Post author:mikal
Post published:April 8, 2019
Post category:HomeAssistant

For the actual on-the-day work, delegates were handed a link to these instructions in github. If you're playing along at home, you should probably read 1-Wire home automation tutorial from linux.conf.au 2019, part 1 before attempting the work described here. Its especially important that you know the IP address of your board for example. Relay tweaks The instructions are pretty self explanatory, although I did get confused about where to connect the relay as I couldn't find PC8 in my 40 pin header diagrams. That's because the shields for the tutorial have a separate header which is a bit more convenient: I was also a bit confused when the relay didn't work initially, but that turns out because I'd misunderstood the wiring. The relay needs to be powered from the 3.3v pin on the 40 pin header, as there is a PCB error which puts 5v on the pins labelled as 3.3v on the GPIO header. I ended up with jumper wires which looked like this: 1-Wire issues Following on the tutorial instructions worked well from then on until I tried to get 1-Wire setup. The owfs2mqtt bridge plugin was logging this: 2019-04-08 19:23:55.075: /opt/OWFS-MQTT-Bridge/lib/Daemon/OneWire.pm:148:Daemon::logError(): Connection to owserver failed: Can't connect…

1-Wire home automation tutorial from linux.conf.au 2019, part 1

Post author:mikal
Post published:April 8, 2019
Post category:HomeAssistant

I didn't get much of a chance to work through the home automation tutorial at linux.conf.au 2019 because I ended up helping others in the room get their Orange Pi is booting. Now that things have settled down after the conference, I've had a chance to actually do some of the tutorial myself. These are my notes so I can remember what I did later... Pre-tutorial setup You need to do the pre-tutorial setup first. I use Ubuntu, which means its important that I use 18.10 or greater so that st-link is packaged. Apart from that the instructions as written just worked. You also need to download the image for the SD card, which was provided on the day at the conference. The URL for that is from github. Download that image, decompress it, and then flash it to an SD card using something like Balena Etcher. The tutorial used 32gb SD cards, but the image will fit on something smaller than that. hassos also doesn't put anything on the Orange Pi HDMI port when it boots, so your machine is going to look like it didn't boot. That's expected. For the tutorial we provided a mapping from board number (mac…

Introducing GangScan

Post author:mikal
Post published:April 5, 2019
Post category:Gang Scan

As some of you might know, I am a Scout Leader. One of the things I do for Scouts is I assist in a minor role with the running of Canberra Gang Show, a theatre production for young people. One of the things Gang Show cares about is that they need to be able to do rapid roll calls and reporting on who is present at any given time -- this is used for working out who is absent before a performance (and therefore needs an understudy), as well as ensuring we know where everyone is in an environment that sometimes has its fire suppression systems isolated. Before I came along, Canberra Gang Show was doing this with a Windows based attendance tracking application, and 125kHz RFID tags. This system worked just fine, except that the software was clunky and there was only one badge reader -- we struggled explaining to youth that they need to press the "out" button when logging out, and we wanted to be able to have attendance trackers at other locations in the theatre instead of forcing everyone to flow through a single door. So, I got thinking. How hard can it be to build…