Tag Archives: linux.conf.au

linux.conf.au 2014

I’ve just returned from my annual pilgrimage to linux.conf.au, which was held in Perth this year. It’s the first time I’ve been over to West Australia, it’s a whole 5 hour flight from Sydney – longer than it takes to fly to New Zealand.

Perth’s climate is a very dry heat compared to Sydney, so although it was actually hotter than Sydney for most of the week, it didn’t feel quite as unpleasant – other than the final day which hit 45 degrees and was baking hot…

It’s also a very clean/tidy city, the well maintained nature was very noticeable with the city and gardens being immaculately trimmed – not sure if it’s always been like this, or if it’s a side effect of the mining wealth in the economy allowing the local government to afford it more effectively.

The towering metropolis of mining wealth.

As usual, the conference ran for 5 full days and featured 4-5 concurrent streams of talks during the week. The quality was generally high as always, although I feel that content selection has shifted away from a lot of deep dive technical talks to more high level talks, and that OpenStack (whilst awesome) is taking up far too much of the conference and really deserves it’s own dedicated conference now.

I’ve prepared my personal shortlist of the talks I enjoyed most of all for anyone who wants to spend a bit of time watching some of the recorded sessions.

Interesting New(ish) Software

RatticDB – A web-based password storage system written in Python written by friends in Melbourne. I’ve been trialling it and since then it’s growing in popularity and awareness, as well as getting security audits (and fixes) [video] [project homepage].
MARS Light – This is an insanely awesome replacement for DRBD designed to address the issues of DRBD when replicating over slower long WAN links. Like DRBD, MARS Light is a block-level replication, so ideal for entire datacenter and VM replication. [video] [project homepage].
Pettycoin – Proposal/design for an adjacent network to Bitcoin designed for microtransactions. It’s currently under development, but is an interesting idea. [video] [project homepage].
Lua code in Mediawiki – the Mediawiki developers have added the ability for Wikipedia editors to write Lua code that is executed server side which is pretty insanely awesome when you think about how normally nobody wants to allow untrusted public the ability to remote execute code on systems. The developers have taken Lua and created a “safe” version that runs inside PHP with restrictions to make this possible. [video] [project homepage].
OpenShift – RedHat did a demonstration on their hosted (and open source) PAAS platform, OpenShift. It’s a solution I’ve been looking at before, if you’re a developer whom doesn’t care about infrastructure management, it looks very attractive. [video] [project homepage].

Evolution of Linux

D-Bus in the Kernel – Lennart Pottering (of Pulseaudio and SystemD fame) presented the efforts he’s been involved in to fix D-Bus’s shortcomings and move it into the kernel itself and have D-Bus as a proper high speed IPC solution for the Linux kernel. [video]
The Six Stages of SystemD – Presentation by an engineer who has been moving systems to SystemD and the process he went through and his thoughts/experience with SystemD. Really showcases the value that moving to SystemD will bring to GNU/Linux distributions. [video]
Development Tools & The UNIX Philosophy – Excellent talk by a Python developer on how we should stop accepting command-line only tools as being the “right” or “proper” UNIX-style tools. Some tools (eg debuggers) are just better suited for graphical interfaces, and that it still meets the UNIX philosophy of having one tool doing one thing well. I really like the argument he makes and have to agree, in some cases GUIs are just more suitable for some tasks. [video]

Walkthroughs and Warstories

TCP Tuning for the Web – presented by one of the co-founders of Fastly showing the various techniques they use to improve the performance of TCP connections and handle issues such as DDOS attacks. Excellent talk by a very smart networking engineer. [video]
Massive Scaling of Graphite – very interesting talk on the massive scaling issues involved to collect statistics with Graphite and some impressive and scary stats on the lifespans and abuse that SSDs will tolerate (which is nowhere near as much as they should!). [video]
Maintaining Internal Forks – One of the FreeBSD developers spoke on how his company maintains an internal fork of FreeBSD (with various modifications for their storage product) and the challenges of keeping it synced with the current releases. Lots of common problems, such as pain of handling new upstream releases and re-merging changes. [video]
Reverse engineering firmware – Mathew Garrett dug deep into vendor firmware configuration tools and explained how to reverse engineer their calls with various tools such as strace, IO and memory mapping tools. Well worth a watch purely for the fact that Matthew Garrett is an amazing speaker. [video]
Android, The positronic brain – Interesting session on how to build native applications for Android devices, such as cross compiling daemons and how the internal structure of Android is laid out. [video]
Rapid OpenStack Deployment – Double-length Tutorial/presentation on how to build OpenStack clusters. Very useful if you’re looking at building one. [video]
Debian on AWS – Interesting talk on how the Debian project is using Amazon AWS for various serving projects and how they’re handling AMI builds. [video]
A Web Page in Seven Syscalls – Excellent walk through on Varnish by one of the developers. Nothing too new for anyone who’s been using it, but a good explanation of how it works and what it’s used for. [video]

Other Cool Stuff

Deploying software updates to ArduSat in orbit by Jonathan Oxer – Launching Arduino powered satelittes into orbit and updating them remotely to allow them to be used for educational and research purposes. What could possibly be more awesome than this? [video].
HTTP/2.0 and you – Discussion of the emerging HTTP/2.0 standard. Interesting and important stuff for anyone working in the online space. [video]
OpenStreetMap – Very interesting talk from the director of OpenStreetMap Team about how OpenStreetMap is used around disaster prone areas and getting the local community to assist with generating maps, which are being used by humanitarian teams to help with the disaster relief efforts. [video]
Linux File Systems, Where did they come from? – A great look at the history and development cycles of the different filesytems in the Linux kernel – comparing ext1/2/3/4, XFS, ReiserFS, Btrfs and others. [video]
A pseudo-random talk on entropy – Good explanation of the importance of entropy on Linux systems, but much more low level and about what tools there are for helping with it. Some cross-over with my own previous writings on this topic. [video]

Naturally there have been many other excellent talks – the above is just a selection of the ones that I got the most out from during the conference. Take a look at the full schedule to find other talks that might interest, almost all sessions got recorded during the conference.

linux.conf.au: day 5

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Final day of linux.conf.au – I’m about a week behind schedule in posting, but that’s about how long it takes to catch up on life following a week at LCA. ;-)

uuuurgggh need more sleep

I like that guy’s idea!

Friday’s conference keynote was delivered by Tim Berners-Lee, who is widely known as “the inventor of the world wide web”, but is more accurately described as the developer of HTML, the markup language behind all websites. Certainly TBL was an influential player in the internets creation and evolution, but the networking and IP layer of the internet was already being developed by others and is arguably more important than HTML itself, calling anyone the inventor of the internet is wrong for such a collaborative effort.

His talk was enjoyable, although very much a case of preaching to the choir – there wasn’t a lot that would really surprise any linux.conf.au attendee. What *was* more interesting than his talk content, is the aftermath….

TBL was in Australia and New Zealand for just over 1 week, where he gave several talks at different venues, including linux.conf.au as part of the “TBL Down Under Tour“. It turns out that the 1 week tour cost the organisers/sponsors around $200,000 in charges for TBL to speak at these events, a figure I personally consider outrageous for someone to charge non-profits for a speaking event.

I can understand high demand speakers charging to ensure that they have comfortable travel arrangements and even to compensate for lost earnings, but even at an expensive consultant’s charge rate of $1,500 per day, that’s no more than $30,000 for a 1 week trip.

I could understand charging a little more if it’s an expensive commercial conference such as $2k per ticket per day corporate affairs, but I would rather have a passionate technologist who comes for the chance to impart ideas and knowledge at a geeky conference, than someone there to make a profit any day – the $20-40k that Linux Australia contributed would have paid several airfares for some well deserving hackers to come to AU to present.

So whilst I applaud the organisers and particularly Pia Waugh for the efforts spend making this happen, I have to state that I don’t think it was worth it, and seeing the amount TBL charged for this visit to a non-profit entity actually really sours my opinion of the man.

I just hope that seeing a well known figure talking about open data and internet freedom at some of the more public events leads to more positive work in that space in NZ and AU and goes towards making up for this cost.

Outside the conference hall.

Friday had it’s share of interesting talks:

Stewart Smith spoke a bit about SQL databases with focus around MySQL & varieties being used in cloud and hosted environments. Read his latest blog post for some amusing hacks fun to execute on databases.
I ended up frequenting a few Linux graphical environment related talks, including David Airlie talking about improvements coming up in the X.org server, as well as Daniel Stone explaining the Wayland project and architecture.
Whilst I missed Keith Packard’s talk due to a scheduling clash, he was there heckling during both of the above talks. (Top tip – when presenting at LCAs, if one of the main developers of the software being discussed is in the audience, expect LOTS of heckles). ;-)
Francois Marier presented on Persona (developed by Mozilla), a single sign on system for the internet, with a federated decentralised design. Whilst I do have some issues with parts of it’s design, over all it’s pretty awesome and it fixes a lot of problems that plagued other attempts like OpenID. I expect I’ll cover Persona more in a future blog post, since I want to setup a Persona server myself and test it out more, and I’ll detail more about the good and the bad of this proposed solution.

Sadly it turns out Friday is the last day of the conference, so I had to finish it up with the obligatory beer and chat with friends, before we all headed off for another year. ;-)

They’re taking the hobbits to Isengard!

A dodgy looking charactor with a wire running into a large duffle bag.....

Hopefully not a road-side bomber.

The fuel that powers IT

Incoming!

linux.conf.au: day 4

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Another successful day of Linux geeking has passed, this week is going surprisingly quickly…

Some of the days highlights:

James Bottomley spoke on the current state of Linux UEFI support and demonstrated the tools and processes to install and manage keys and hashes for the installed software. Would have been interesting to have Matthew Garrett at LCA this year to present his somewhat different solution in comparison.
Avi Miller from Oracle did an interesting presentation on a new Linux feature called “Transcendent Memory“, which is a solution to the memory ballooning problems for virtualised environments. Essentially it works by giving the kernel the option to request more memory from another host, which could be the VM host, or even another host entirely connected via 10GigE or Infiniband, and having the kernel request and release memory when required. To make it even more exciting, memory doesn’t have to be just RAM, SSDs are also usable, meaning you could add a couple memory hosts to your Xen (and soon KVM) environments and stack them with RAM and SSD to then be provided to all your other guests as a memory ballooning space. It’s a very cool concept and one I intended to review further in future.
To wrap up the day, Michael Schwern presented on the 2038 bug – the problem where 32-bit computers are unable to keep time any further and reset to 1901, due to the limits of a 32-bit time buffer (see wikipedia). Time is something that always appears very simple, yet is extremely complex to do right once you consider timezones and other weirdness like leap years/seconds.

The end of time is here! Always trust announcements by a guy wearing a cardboard and robes.

The conference presentations finished up with a surprise talk from Simon Hackett and Robert Llewellyn from Red Dwarf, which was somewhat entertaining, but not highly relevant for me – personally I’d rather have heard more from Simon Hackett on the history and future expectations for the ISP industry in Australia than having them debate their electric cars.

Thursday was the evening of the Penguin Dinner, the (usually) formal dinner held at each LCA, this year rather than the usual sit down 3-course dinner, the conference decided to do a BBQ-style event up at the Observatory on Mount Stromlo.

The Penguin Dinner is always a little pricey at $80, but for a night out, good food, drinks and spending time with friends, it’s usually a fun and enjoyable event. Sadly this year had a few issues that kind of spoilt it, at least for me personally, with some major failings on the food and transport which lead to me spending only 2 hours up the mountain and feeling quite hungry.

At the same time, LCA is a volunteer organised conference and I must thank them for-making the effort, even if it was quite a failure this year – I don’t necessarily know all the behind the scenes factors, although the conflicting/poor communications really didn’t put me in the best mood that night.

Next year there is a professional events coordinator being hired to help with the event, so hopefully this adds value in their experience handling logistics and catering to avoid a repeat of the issue.

On the plus side, for the limited time I spent up the mountain, I got some neat photographs (I *really* need to borrow Lisa’s DSLR rather than using my cellphone for this stuff) and spent some good time discussing life with friends lying on the grass looking at the stars after the sun went down.

Part of the old burnt-out observatory

Sun setting along the ridge.

What is it with geeks and blue lights? ;-)

What is it with geeks and blue LEDs? ;-)

The other perk from the penguin dinner was the AWESOME shirts they gave everyone in the conference as a surprise. Lisa took this photo when I got back to Sydney since she loves it [1] so much.

Paaaartay!

[1] She hates it.

linux.conf.au: day 3

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Having reached mid-week, my morning wakeup is getting increasingly difficult from late nights, thankfully there were large amounts of deep fried potato and coffee readily available.

Breakfast of champions – just add cheese and it would be a meal.

Coffee Coffee Coffee Coffee Coffee Coffee Coffee Coffee Coffee

The day had some interesting talks, most of the value I got was out of the web development space:

Andy Fitzsimon did an interesting presentation on design and how to approach designing applications or websites and the terminologies that developers use.
Sarah Sharp presented on “vampire mice” – essentially a lot of USB devices don’t correctly obey the USB power suspend options, the result is that by enabling USB suspend for all your devices and disconnecting those that don’t obey, considerable power can be saved – one audience member found he could save 4W by sleeping all his USB devices. I also discovered that newer versions of Powertop now provide the ability to select particular USB devices for power-save mode.
There was a really good talk by Joel Stanley, probably one of the most interesting talks that day, on how they designed and built some hardware for doing digital radio transmissions using a radio circuit connected into an Android phone and the challenges encountered of doing hardware integration with Android.
We had an update on IPv6 adoption by Geoff Huston – sadly as expected, we’re dangerously low on IPv4 space, yet IPv6 adoption isn’t taking place particularly quickly either, with Internode still being the only major AU ISP with dual stacked addressing for consumers. On a side note, really awesome to see a former keynote presenter come back as a regular presenter and make a talk, having community engagement really adds to my respect for them.
My friend Adam Harvey did another awesome web development talk, this time presenting on some of the new CSS3 techniques including animation and transitions with some demonstrations on how these can work.

Open source radio reciever with Android phone coupled.

Open source radio receiver with Android phone coupled.

users: delighted, presenter: smug :-P

Spot the possum!

With all the talks this week, I’m feeling particularly motivated to do some more development this week, starting with writing some new proper landing pages for some of my projects.

Playing with new HTML5/CSS3 effects having been inspired to upskill my web development skills.

linux.conf.au: day 2

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The second day of linux.conf.au has been and gone, was another day of interesting miniconf talks and many geeky discussions with old and new friends.

Jethro: Booted, with the power of coffee!

The keynote was a really good talk by Radia Perlman about how engineers approach developing network protocols and an interesting talk of the history of STP and the designed replacement, TRILL. Great to see a really technical female keynote speaker at LCA this year, particularly one as passionate about her topic as Radia.

The conference WiFi is still pretty unhappy this year, I’ve been suffering pretty bad latency and packet loss (30-50%) most of the past few days – if I’ve been able to find an AP – seems they’re only located around the lecture rooms. Yesterday afternoon it seems to have started improving however, so it may be that the networking team have beaten the university APs into submission.

No internet makes sad Jethro sad. :'(

Of course, some of the projectors decided not to play nicely, which seems pretty much business as usual when it comes to projectors and functioning…. it appears that the projector in question would complain about the higher refresh rates provided by DVI and HDMI connected devices, but functioned correctly with VGA.

Someone did an interesting talk a couple of LCA’s ago on the issue, apparently many projectors lie about what their true capabilities are and request resolutions and refresh rates from the computer that are higher than what they can actually support, which really messes with any modern operating system’s auto-detection.

Lending my VGA enabled Thinkpad to @lgnome whist a @chrisjrn observes.

A startled @colmiga approaches!

Geeks listening intently to concurrent programming.

@lgnome pushing some crazy new drugs to all the kiddies

A few of my friends were delivering talks today, so I spent my time between the Browser miniconf and Open Programming miniconf, picked up some interesting new technologies and techniques to look at:

Adam Harvey’s PHP talks were great as usual, always good to get an update on the latest developments in the PHP world.
Francois Marier from Mozilla NZ presented on Content Security Policy, a technique I wasn’t aware of until now. Essentially it allows you to set a header defining which sites should be trusted as sources of CSS, Javascript and image content, allowing a well developed site to be locked down to prevent many forms of XSS (cross site scripting).
Francios also spoke briefly about HTTP Strict Transport Security, a header which can be used by SSL websites to fix the long standing problem of users being intercepted by a bad proxy and served up a hacked HTTP-only version of the website. Essentially this header tells your browser that your site should only ever be accessed by HTTPS – anything that then directs your browser to HTTP will result in a security block, protecting the user, since your browser has been told that the site should only ever be SSL from it’s previous interaction. It’s not perfect, but it’s a great step forwards, as long as the first connection is made on a trusted non-intercepted link, it makes man-in-the-middle attacks impossible.
Daniel Nadasi from Google presented on AngularJS, a modern Javascript framework suitable for building complex applications with features designed to reduce the complexity of developing the required Javascript.

After that, dinner at one of the (many!) Asian restaurants in the area, followed by some delicious beer at the Wig and Pen.

Either I’ve already had too many beers, or there’s a giant stone parcel in my way.

Onwards to delicious geekiness!

Delicious hand pulled pale ale.

The beetroot beer is an interesting idea. But some ideas should just not be attempted. :-/

Native Australian night life! This little fellow was very up close and friendly.

Linux.conf.au native wildlife. ;-)

Another great day, looking forwards to Wednesday and the rest of the week. :-)

linux.conf.au: day 1

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First proper day of linux.conf.au today, starting with breakfast and the quest of several hundred geeks to find and consume coffee.

Some of us went a bit overboard to get their exact daily coffee fix….

After acquiring coffee, we started the day with a keynote by the well known Bdale Garbee, talking about a number of (somewhat controversial) thoughts and reflections on Linux and the open source ecosystem in regards to the uptake by commercial companies.

Keynote venue.

Bdale raised some really good points, particularly how GNU/Linux isn’t a sellable idea to OEM vendors on cost – many vendors pay nothing for Microsoft licensing, or even make a profit due to the amount of preloaded crapware they ship with the computers. Vendors are unlikely to ship GNU/Linux unless there is sufficient consumer demand or feature set that makes it so good

My take on the talk was that Bdale was advocating that we aren’t going to win the desktop with a mass popularity – instead of trying to build a desktop for the average joe, we should build desktops that meet our own needs as power uses

It’s an interesting approach – some of the more recent endeavours with desktop developers has lead to environments that newer users like, but power users hate (eg GNOME 3), as a power user, I share this view, I’d rather we develop a really good power user OS, rather than an OS designed for the simplest user. Having said that, the nice thing about open source is that developers can target different audiences and share each other’s work.

Bdale goes on to state that the year of the Linux desktop isn’t relevant, it’s something we’re probably never going to win – but we have won the year of Linux on the mobile, which is going to replace conventional workstations more and more for the average use and become the dominant device used.

It’s something I personally believe as well, I already have some friends who *only* own a phone or tablet, instead of a desktop or tablet, and use it for all their communications. In this space, Android/Linux is selling extremely well.

And although it’s not a conventional GNU/Linux space we know and love and it still has it’s share of problems, a future where Android/Linux is the dominate device OS is much more promising than the current Windows/MacOS duopoly.

The rest of the day had a mix of miniconf talks – there wasn’t anything particularly special for me, but there were some good highlights during the day:

Sherri Cabral did a great talk on what it means to be a senior sysadmin, stating that a proper senior sysadmin knows how to solve problems by experience ( not guess work), works to continuously automate themselves out of a job with better tools and works to impart knowledge onto others.
Andrew Bartlett did a brief update on Samba 4 (the Linux CIFS/SMB file system implementation) – it’s production ready now and includes proper active directory support. The trade off, is that in order to implement AD, you can’t use an external LDAP directory or Kerberos server when using Samba 4 in an AD server mode.
Nick Clifford did an entertaining presentation on the experiences and suffering from working with SNMP, turns out that both vendor and open source SNMP implementations are generally quite poor quality.
Several interesting debates over the issues with our current monitoring systems (Nagios, Icinga, Munin, etc) and how we can fix them and scale better – no clear “this is the solution” responses, but some good food for thought.

Overall it was a good first day, followed up by some casual drinks and chats with friends – thankfully we even managed to find an open liquor store in Canberra on a public holiday.

Poor @lgnome expresses his pain at yet another closed liquor store.

linux.conf.au: day 0

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It’s time for the most important week of the year – linux.conf.au – which is being held in Canberra this year. I’m actually going to try and blog each day this year, unlike last year which still has all my photos in the “too be be blogged folder”. :-)

Ended up taking the bus down from Sydney to Canberra – at only around $60 and a 3 hour trip, it made more sense to take the bus down, rather than go through the hassle of getting to and from the airports and all the security hassles of flying.

Ended up having several other linux.conf.au friends on the bus, which makes for an interesting trip – and having a bus with WiFi and power was certainly handy.

I am geek, hear me roar!

Horrifying wail of the Aucklander!

The road trip down to Canberra wasn’t particularly scenic, most of the route is just dry Australian bush and motorways, generally it seems between city road trips in AU tend not to be wildly scenic unlike most of the ones I take in NZ.

Canberra itself is interesting, my initial thoughts on entering the city was that it’s kind of a cross between Rotorua and post-quake Christchurch – most of the city is low rise- 5-10 story buildings and low density sprawl, and extremely quiet with both the university and parliament on leave. In fact many have already commented it would be a great place to film a zombie movie simply due to it’s eerily deserted nature.

Considering it’s a designed city, I do wonder why they choose such a sprawled design, IMHO it would have been way better to have a very small high density tower CBD which would be easily walk-able and massive park lands around them. Canberra also made the mistake of not putting in light rail, instead relying on buses and cars as primary transport.

Neat fountain in town

The Aussies can never make fun of us Kiwis and sheep again… at least we don’t have THIS in our capital city O_o

Impressively large transmission tower for such a small city.

Once nice side of Canberra, is that with the sprawl, there tends to be a lot of greenery (or what passes for greenery in the aussie heat!) around the town and campus, including a bit of wildlife – so far I’ve seen rabbits, cockatoos, and lizards, which makes a nice change from Sydney’s wildlife viewing of giant rats running over concrete pavements.

Sqwark!

The evening was spent tracking down the best pub options near by, and we were fortunate enough to discover the Wig and Pen, a local British-style brewery/pub, with about 10 of their own beers on hand pulled taps. I’m told that when the conference was here in Canberra in 2005, the attendees drank the pub dry – twice. Hopefully they have more beer on stock this year.

First beer casualty from the conference – laptop being stood vertically to drain, whilst charging a cellphone.

Normally every year the conference provides a swag bag, typically the bag is pretty good and there’s usually a few good bits in there, as well as spammy items like brochures, branded cheap gadgets (USB speakers, reading lights, etc).

This year they’ve cut down hugely on the swag volume, my bag simply had some bathroom supplies (yes, that means there’s no excuse for the geeks to wash this week), a water bottle, some sunblock and the conference t-shirt. I’m a huge fan of this reduction in waste and hope that other conferences continue on with this theme.

Arrrrrr there be some swag me mateys!

The conference accommodation isn’t the best this year – it’s clean and functional, but I’m really not a huge fan of the older shared dorm styles with communal bathroom facilities, particularly the showers with their coffin-style claustrophobic feel.

The plus side of course, is that the accommodation is always cheap and your evenings are filled with awesome conversations and chats with other geeks.

Looking forwards for the actuals talks, going to be lots of interesting cloud and mobile talks this year, as well as the usual kernel, programming and sysadmin streams. :-)

linux.conf.au 2013 plans

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It’s nearing that important time of year that the NZ-AU open source flock congregate that important and time honoured tradition of linux.conf.au. I’ve said plenty about this conference in the past, going to make an effort to write a lot more this year about the conference.

There’s a bit of concern this year that there might not be a team ready to take up the mantle for 2014, unfortunately linux.conf.au is a victim of it’s own success – as each year has grown bigger and better, it’s at the stage where a lot of volunteers consider it too daunting to take it on themselves. Hopefully a team has managed to put together a credible bid for 2014, it would be sad to lose this amazing conference.

As I’m now living in Sydney, I can actually get to this year’s conference via a business class coach service which is way cheaper than flying, and really just as fast once taking the hassles of getting to the airport, going through security and flying into account. Avoiding the security theatre is a good enough reason for me really – I travel a lot, but I actually really hate all the messing about.

If you’re attending the conference and departing from Sydney (or flying into Sydney from NZ to then transfer to Canberra), I’d also suggest this bus service – feel free to join me on my booked bus if you want a chat buddy:

Depart Sydney, Sunday 27th Jan at 11:45 on bus GX273.
Depart Canberra, Saturday 2nd Feb at 14:00 on bus GX284.

The bus has WiFi and power and extra leg room, so should be pretty good if you want to laptop the whole way in style – for about $35 each way.

Leosticks are a gateway drug

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At linux.conf.au earlier this year, the guys behind Freetronics gave every attendee a free Leostick Arduino compatible board.

As I predicted at the time, this quickly became the gateway drug – having been given an awesome 8-bit processor that can run off the USB port and can provide any possibility of input/output with both digital and analogue hardware, it was inevitable that I would want to actually acquire some hardware to connect to it!

Beware kids, this is what crack looks like.

My background into actual electronics hasn’t been great, my parents kindly got me a Dick Smith starter kit when I was much younger (remember back in the day when DSE actually sold components! Now I feel old :-/) but I never quite managed to grasp all the concepts and a few attempts since then haven’t been that successful.

Part of the issue for me is I learn by doing and having good resources to refer to, back then it wasn’t so easy, however with internet connectivity and thousands of companies selling components to consumers offering tutorials and circuit design information, it’s never been easier.

Interestingly I found it hard to get a real good “you’re a complete novice with no clue about any of this” guide, but the Arduino learning resources are very good at detailing how their digital circuits work and with a bit of wikipediaing, got me on the right track so far.

Also not having the right tools and components for the job is an issue, so I made a decision to get a proper range of components, tools, hookup wire and some Arduino units to make a few fun projects to learn how to make this stuff work.

I settled on 3 main projects:

Temperature monitoring inside my home server – this is a whitebox machine so doesn’t have too many sensors in good locations, I’d like to be able to monitor some of the major disk bays, fans, motherboard, etc.
Out-of-band serial management and watchdog restart of my home server. This is more complex & ambitious, but all the components are there – with a RS232 to TTY conversion circuit I can read the server’s serial port from the Arduino and use the Arduno and a transistor to control the reset header on the motherboard to power-restart if my slightly flaky CPU crashes again.
Android controlled projects. This is a great one, since I have an abundance of older model Android phones available and would like a project that allows me to improve my C coding (Arduino) and to learn Java/Dalvik (Android). This ticks both boxes. ATM considering adding an Android phone to the Arduino server monitoring solution, or maybe hooking it into my car and using the Android phone as the display.

These cover a few main areas – to learn how to talk with one wire sensor devices, to earn how to use transistors to act as switches, to learn different forms of serial communication and to learn some new programming languages.

Having next to no current electronic parts (soldering iron, breadboard and my general PC tools were about it) I went down the path of ordering a full set of different bits to make sure I had a good selection of tools and parts to make most circuits I want.

Ended up sourcing most of my electronic components (resister packs, prototyping boards, hookup wire, general capacitors & ICs) from Mindkits in NZ, who also import a lot of Sparkfun stuff giving them a pretty awesome range.

Whilst the Arduinos I ordered supply 5V and 3.3V, I grabbed a separate USB-powered supply kit for projects needing their own feed – much easier running off USB (of which I have an abundance of ports around) than adding yet-another-wallwart transformer. I haven’t tackled it yet, but I’m sure my soldering skills will be horrific and naturally worth blogging about in future to scare any competent electronics geek.

I also grabbed two Dallas 1-wire temperature sensors, which whilst expensive compared to the analog options are so damn simple to work with and can be daisy chained. Freetronics sell a breakout board model all pre-assembled, but they’re pricey and they’re so simple you can just wire the sensors straight back to your Arduino circuit anyway.

Next I decided to order some regular size Arduinos from Freetronics – if I start wanting to make my own shields (expansion boards for the Arduinos), I’d need a regular sized unit rather than the ultrasmall Leostick.

Ended up getting the classic Arduino Eleven/Uno and one of the Arduino USB Droids which provide a USB Host port so they can be used with Android phones to write software than can interface with hardware.

After a bit of time, all my bits have arrived from AU and the US and now I’m already to go – planning to blog my progress as I get on with my electronics discovery – hopefully before long I’ll have some neat circuit designs up on here. :-)

Once I actually have a clue what I’m doing, I’ll probably go and prepare a useful resource on learning from scratch, to cover all the gaps that I found hard to fill, since learning this stuff opens up so many exciting projects once you get past the initial barrier.

Arduino Uno/Eleven making an LED blink. HIGH TECH STUFF ;-)

Push a button to make the LED blink! Sure you can do this with just a battery, switch and LED, but using a whole CPU to read the button state and switch on the LED is much geekier! ;-)

1-wire temperature sensors. Notably with a few more than one wire. ;-)

I’ll keep posting my adventures as I get further into the development of different designs, I expect this is going to become a fun new hobby that ties into my other two main interests – computers and things with blinky lights. :-)