I had a 5.25in DVD/RW drive externally connected to a virus-infected Windows laptop via USB (running ClamAV if you’re interested).

For some unfathomable reason, I moved the drive with my hand while it was spinning, imparting just a little tilt to it. Even as I did so I knew the result which was about to happen. The CD was already tilting off it’s normal axis of rotation with relation to the drive, trying to maintain it’s original orientation in space due to gyroscopic precession. The inevitable grinding noise indicated that the CD had run out of room to maneuver and collided with the optics / drive internals.

The level of vibration which continued until I yanked out the power was rather impressive; I was glad of the aluminium casing containing the fast moving disc and motor.

I managed to pull the CD tray out and took hold of a CD which was now quite hot around the edges and promptly cut myself on the ground-down and sharpened rim. The drive itself, of course, had ceased to function as a drive of any usable sort.

The moral here is: “Don’t break your own rules”

(Or just don’t be an idiot )

They also make some rather impressive bipedal robots which can be seen in videos all over the internet accomplishing impressive feats such as running and tackling stairs. They do, however, seem to have a slightly odd gait which looks as if it was borrowed from a ‘dog-walker’ as the feet and knees preceed the robot noticably as it moves. Apart from Hubo, there have been few attempts at turning the ‘robot’ into an ‘android’

Now, researchers at AIST (National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology) have produced a biped Android (or more correctly a Gynoid) known as HRP-4C.

The robot has the broadly realistic human proportions correspondent to a Japanese woman and also comparable weight. The simulation of human likeness only extends to the face which has some level of animation and the hands which I am yet to see change pose during a demonstration. The rest of the body appears as if in a fitted suit of armour.

Apparently she Linux in the form of an AIST developed platform known as ‘Actual Time Linux’ (ART-Linux2.6).  Although difficult to decipher from the translated text, it appears that much of HRP-4C’s development revolves around and contributes to open projects.

The walking gait is rather more natural in appearance than an Asimo unit but could still do with more damping as there is an obvious jarring in the step. Thus far I have only seen the gynoid perform basic walking and a short bow. On examination of a translation of the japanese information page, it seem that the unit is designed for entertainment or fashion modeling. An odd choice of target market to my mind but the size/weight constraints probably prohibit any industrial uses.

The HRP-4C stands about 1.6m tall and weighs approx 50kg.

Click here to view the embedded video.

If they could increase the abilities of an android of this scale, I reckon it could play a critical role in caring for Japan’s ageing population. I’ll be really impressed but don’t doubt that I will soon see a biped android powerful enough to lift a human safely.

In the mean time, I’m saving up for my RX-78NT1 Gundam

Bascially, the device is the size of a regular plug-in power adaptor and does just that; it plugs into the mains socket and runs. It’s power consumption is supposedly about 5 Watts.

• 1.2Ghz ARM CPU
• 512MB RAM
• 512MB Flash storage
• Gigabit wired ethernet
• USB 2.0 socket
• SDIO Expansion

Marvell already claim linux distributions to be running on the device and the possibilities for utilisation seem endless.

The $99 “development kit” is effectively a pre-release model and I’m really tempted to order one in to see what I can make of it.

Unfortunately, Slashdot got hold of this before I did so you will be able to see the Marvell SheevaPlug over at Linux Devices when their server stops smoking

You also be able to order the SheevaPlug devkit directly from Marvell

Firstly, the scanner has sane support but requires a ‘non-free’ (as in speech) driver element.

Thinks you need:

Make sure sane and sane-utils are installed:

sudo apt-get install sane sane-utils

Then you will need to ‘borrow’ libltdl3 from Ubuntu 8.04. You can find it here: http://packages.ubuntu.com/hardy/libltdl3

And finally, you need iscan and the esci driver as DEB pacakages from AVASYS. You need to go through the form-driven system here: http://www.avasys.jp/lx-bin2/linux_e/scan/DL2.do

Once you’ve installed that little lot, you need to add a line  to one of your sane config files:

sudo gedit /etc/sane.d/dll.conf

Add epkowa to the list of drivers found there.

You should now be able to use Xsane or any program which calls Xsane (such as GIMP) for scanning.

I’ll readily admit, it’s a really clunky installation process. It seems largely Epson’s fault. The do provide the Linux driver but it’s a binary and doesn’t appear to be licenced in a way which would enable it to be bundled with a Linux distribution. It would either require Epson to release the sourcecode for their V300 driver or for someone to successfully reverse-engineer the scanner software interface for this to become easier ie: direct sane support.

References:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=6297403
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=978407

One option I considered was replacing two NOVA-T cards with a single NOVA-T 500 which has two tuners. The glaring problem with that approach is that I have no means of knowing before-hand whether the NOVA-T 500 doesn’t just draw twice as much power as a normal NOVA-T.

The other alternative I’ve considered is a NOVA-T USB Stick. It’s a really simple device involving a USB connector at one end and an aerial connector at the other. In theory, the limitations of the USB system should dictate that one of these sticks will not require more than 2.5 watts (more likely no more than 2 watts).

If so, I would be limited to one stick per USB slot but that’s no great hardship as I have at least four USB slots to play with.

There is a catch though, having done some reading out on the intertubes, it appears there is a problem with tuning on the NOVA-T sticks and the current version of Mythbuntu (which I have used to configure MythTV systems up until now)

As well as the expected web interface, the Vigor 2600 (as with many other Draytek routers) also includes a telnet server with a suite of command line tools.

To telnet to the router from both Windows & *nix systems you use the command:

telnet <router ip or hostname>

You will then be prompted for a password. This password is the same as the web interface password.

Once logged in, you can type ‘?’ and expect to be presented with a set of available commands which may look roughly like those below.

% Valid commands are:
upnp         ddns         exit         ip           ipf          ddos
urlf         p2p          log          quit         srv          show
mngt         sys          vpn          wan          port         wol

The ping command is a subcommand of ‘ip’ so to use it we type:

ip ping <host ip address>

The router will then send five pings to the target host and display a report of each ping, latency and packet loss.

I hope this comes in handy for others

Naturally, on a laptop you don’t want to be running you CPU at full-chat all the time as the fan can be noisy and the flesh on your legs may burn. By default, Ubuntu didn’t work out how to step down the speed of the CPU which is unusual.

I could swear that I’d had this laptop throttling it’s cpu frequency before and with a little brain wracking and internet searching, I [re]found the solution.

You need to activate the p4-clockmod module using the command sudo modprobe p4-clockmod. Once this is done, you can activate the Gnome panel cpu frequency applet (right-click panel>Add to panel>CPU Frequency Scaling Monitor)

You should now be able to choose a speed from 1.7Ghz down to 212Mhz from the list or select one of the automatic speed governors.

You still need to make sure that the kernel module is loaded every time at boot time. To do this, use sudo gedit /etc/modules and add the line p4-clockmod.

Now, every time your machine starts, the cpu governors will be activated and you’ll hopefully have a quieter and cooler experience.

Speculatively, I’ve been looking at an old AMD Athlon 2500 XP Barton which I’ve had knocking around here for who knows how long. The system was well specced as a desktop in it’s day with an Abit NF-7 (non SATA) motherboard, 1 gigabyte of OCZ PC3200 RAM, a DVD/RW, a Seagate Barracuda and a GeForce 6800 AGP with 128MB RAM.

The power supply was a high-end (at the time) Antec True-control 550.

Abit NF7 motherboard

Just briefly going off my own topic: The NF7 had/has a minor ‘overheating’ problem. In the middle of the CPU socket, there is a temperature sensor. If it does not make physical contact with the underside of the CPU die, the BIOS thinks the CPU is overheating and shuts the machine down. The simple remedy is to carefully bend the sensor upwards until it stands just fractionally proud of the socket, thus ensuring good thermal contact when the processor is installed.

Also present due to past presentation were a Pinnacle TV encoder card and a PCI Firewire card.

To kick off the experiment, the BIOS settings were set to their defaults which saw the system drawing about 138 watts idle and 150 watts under load (not taxing the video card). I used burnK7 from the package ‘cpuburn‘ to apply a load to the processor. Cpuburn is also available for Windows. I metered the current drawn using my handy digital plug-in meter (Kill-a-watt style device)

Initial BIOS config giving 138 Watts idle / 150 Watts load

• External Clock       166Mhz
• CPU multiplier       x11
• FSB                             333Mhz
• CPU Core volts      1.65v
• RAM volts               2.6v
• Chipset volts          1.6v

Not one to mess around, I quickly worked out the lowest speed I could run the CPU at on the principal that lower clock speeds would draw less power and also allow me to run lower voltages. My Barton core was a non-mobile post week-40 chip so it was hard-locked at 11x multiplier. Therefore I had just the FSB to play with. Happily, reducing the FSB to just 100Mhz gave a CPU speed of 1100Mhz.

I then hunted around for the lowest stable voltages for each of the CPU core, Northbridge and RAM power options.

As it happens, the RAM is specced for 2.6v and the BIOS did not offer any options for going lower than this so the RAM voltage was duly ignored. Next up, the Northbridge power allowed settings down to 1.4v and that is where it went. The CPU took a little more figuring out and thus far, it has been stable at 1.15 volts. A significant drop from the stock 1.65 volts.

This configuration gave an impressive power consumption reduction; about 80W at idle and 90-95W under full load (excluding graphics load)

BIOS config giving 80 Watts idle / 95 Watts load

• External Clock       100Mhz
• CPU multiplier       x11
• FSB                             200Mhz
• CPU Core volts      1.15v
• RAM volts               2.6v
• Chipset volts          1.4v

Still, there was quite a bit plugged into the system itself so I went hunting for more power savings. I couldn’t ignore the fact that there was a hulking great Nvidia Geforce 6800 in the AGP slot, presumably taking up lots of power. There was also an old encoder card and the firewire card in there.

I managed to root out an old PCI ATI Rage Pro card with a stonking 8Mb of video ram so out came the Geforce and in went the card from the ark. The encoder card, firewire card and DVD/RW drive came out too and the system was rebooted. In it’s new, leaner configuration, I was pulling about 20 Watts less, 64 Watts at idle and 75 Watts under full load.

Ati Rage Pro - Note the memory module taking it from 4Mb version to 8Mb!

By this point, I was already using lm_sensors to monitor the system temperatures and voltages. I was pleased to see that, when idling, the CPU temperature was a trivial 28′C and even under full-load this was only rising to 33′C A note here: The cpu was fitted with a huge slab of copper and aluminium pretending to be a heatsink with a noisy (at 3000RPM) or ear-splitting (at 5000RPM) fan.

A quick tip: To see the output of the ’sensors’ tool in real-time, use the ‘watch’ command ie: watch sensors

Being a bit of an adventurer, I decided to disconnect the case fan and the cpu fan and boot the system to see if it fried.

Inside the box showing the cooling arrangements (or lack thereof) Note the big copper slab and attached prongs over the CPU socket

Happily, it didn’t fry. In fact, the idle temperature only rose to 38′C with passive cooling. There was still a bit of airflow afforded by the power-supply fan. However, running cpuburn for 20 minutes or so saw the temperature rise to over 65′C which I considered was pushing it a bit. I think that the CPU would be fine with one of those slim/low noise 80mm fans attached in place of the high-speed monster which it currently wears.

Checking the power meter, I now had just 58 watts idle / 70 watts under load. Interesting that the fan wanted so much current but like I say, it’s hardly an ordinary fan.

I also made a quick experiment in putting the hard drive into ’suspend’ mode using hdparm -y /dev/hda1 this produced a further 4 Watt drop in current draw

Bits removed to save energy, DVD/RW, GeForce 6800, Firewire and TV cards

Of course, it wouldn’t be much use as a MythTV backend server without any encoder cards so there would be three going into the PCI slots. I’ve previously tested some Hauppauge WinTV Nova-T cards and they seem to draw about 9 Watts each in almost all conditions. With three cards in and a smaller CPU fan installed, I’d expect a further 28 Watts of power draw bringing me up to about 86 Watts idle and ~96 Watts load.

Although the only DVB encoders I have to hand are Nova-Ts, I’d like to see what the current draw is on one of the Nova-T 500 twin encoders and if any savings can be made by employing one of those instead of two of the single encoder versions.

All in all, I’m quite happy with the energy saving. It actually draws less power than my old laptop although I do conceed that the laptop has an integrated display to power.

As far as I can tell, the ‘for business’ version denotes the package rather than any difference in the camera itself. The package was a minimalistically small box with the camera, a compact disk and a manual tucked inside. The exterior motif was simple, just a picture of the camera, a ‘certified for Vista’ logo and a product code panel. This is the sort of packaging that really makes sense, the box is no bigger than it needs to be and doesn’t waste materials which will ultimately be disposed of.

The included software (this may be the distinction of the ‘for business’ moniker) is Logitech’s Quickcam for Enterprise on a CD. Presumably, the consumer oriented version of the S 5500 package would come with different software. Unfortunately, from the point of a review, I left the software in the box untested as I would be connecting this camera to a Ubuntu 8.10 system with which the software would be incompatible.

The camera itself is just a bit bigger than a golf-ball with a ‘poseable’ foot/mount and a slide-down lens cover. The sensor is a true 1.3 megapixel unit having a native resolution of 1280×1024 pixels. The USB lead which conveys both video and microphone audio from the camera is about 2 meters long and comes with a thoughful tag near the USB connector which identifies the device to make it easy to find it when unplugging it from a USB hub.

Having connected the device to a Ubuntu 8.10 box, ‘lsusb’ reports:

Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 001 Device 004: ID 046d:09a1 Logitech, Inc.
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub

The two ‘hub’ entries are also apparently generated by the camera.

If found the camera to be working quite literally ”out of the box’ with xawtv. The camera complies with the “USB Video Class” webcam standard and is already supported by the Linux UVC drivers. Sadly, the included luvcview application which allows finer control of the cameras features wasn’t working with the S5500 so I ended up pulling the trunk sources from their git repository and building them myself. This got luvcview working and allowed manual control of the cameras exposure settings.

Logitech includes what they call “Rightlight Technology” with this camera. Put simply, the camera varies it’s exposure duration automatically depending on the available light. For instance in broad daylight, the camera will perform at 30fps. With only the light of the computer monitor on my face in a darkened room, the camera will continue to produce a good quality image at a much lower frame rate (typically 5fps). When changing the exposure manually, you are directly changing the frame rate. The sensor still captures a suprising amount of detail when deliberately set to underexpose.

The field of view is reasonably wide although not excessively so. You could confortably sit two people at a reasonable distance from the screen in front of the camera and have them in frame. The picture is generally quite sharp and well focused – the lens appears to be fixed focus – but there are some minor abberations at the edge of the image presumably caused by the size and type of lens in use. It’s still an extremely good quality image for a webcam.

Again, in the true tradition of being the most annoyingly lax reviewer ever, I neglected to test the integrated microphone which appears to sit just below the lens. The bezel touts “Rightsound Technology” so perhaps this microphone provides automatical level seeking.

There is also a button on the left side of the camera which would provide call activation/cancellation features in some Windows software but doesn’t have a default purpose on most Linux based software.

From the end user perspective, it’s ever so slightly early days for UVC cameras on Linux. Ubuntu 8.10, while supporting the Logitech S5500 has some shortcomings. For instance, Ekiga, the packaged software videophone doesn’t support UVC cameras in the shipped version. I reckon it’ll all be pretty much plug-and-play by the time Ubuntu 9.04 comes around in April though. The latest versions of Ekiga which will be packaged with Jaunty Jackelope  already supports UVC.

Finally, the packaging reduced ‘for business’ version of this camera that I bought was actually a bit cheaper than the consumer counterpart.

I’m definitely recommending this product as a quality webcam. Naturally, I don’t intend to use it as a normal webcam but rather I intend to try using it as a security camera in conjunction with Zoneminder.

The article speculates that this system will still be able to interact with LAN/PAN devices while ‘asleep’. This definitely runs into ‘believe it when I see it’ territory for me. It’s not that I don’t want Fujitsu to have accomplished this; computers definitely need to draw much less power when idle, but it’s a hell of a technical mountain to climb.

The whole notion of a NIC being able to respond without power only when polled intentionally just seems ever so slightly far fetched.

If you’re going to CeBIT on 3-8 March 2009, you’ll probably be treated to a demo of just how this works. Still I hope they demonstrate the device as coupled up to a proper metering device. I wouldn’t want to think that this is all just marketing and spin