Recently I was intrigued by a Hack A Day post regarding a low-cost development platform for their MSP430 line of microcontrollers. I’ve long wanted to toy with an Arduino, but with many other projects currently under my belt, I’ve jut not had the time. When I heard the Launchpad was only $4.30, I figured I might as well pick some up for future use.

To make the shipping worthwhile, I ordered 3 of the boards from DigiKey. Unfortunately they were on back-order, but less than a month later – I got my purchase in the mail:

A couple Texas Instruments MSP430/Launchpads.The 3rd I gave to my brother

Each box contains the Launchpad Development board, USB cable, pin headers, a crystal, and two MSP430 chips. The online wiki contains links to a couple IDEs for use in the Windows world – and Hack A Day has a good writeup on using the msp430-gcc compiler in the Linux world.

Acting like an impatient kid, I put schoolwork and other projects on hold for a couple days to dig into the Launchpad. First mission – the basic “RC Car modification”.

Only modify full sized Police Cars.

To disassemble a real police car, first remove a couple tires.

After mapping out the pins on the H-Bridge of the RC Car, I decided to do something I’ve always wanted to do – buy a Radio Shack Electronics Learning Lab and brush up on what little I know.

The RadioShack Electronics Learning Lab. This circuit is a pacemaker for the human heart (from page 32)

This is something I should have had by the time I was in high-school – if not by 5th grade. The Electronics Learning lab contains 2 lab manuals (one covering Basic Electronics, the other Digital Logic), about 20 ICs, a handful of transistors, numerous resistors and capacitors, and jumper wires (among a few other things). The console itself has numerous built in potentiometers, LEDs, a relay, a transformer, a buzzer, speaker, DPDT switch, and many other components ready to use. Each of the built-in components uses springs to make contact. There’s also a built in breadboard.

The two included lab manuals.

Each lab manual contains background information on each of the various components, as well as example circuits that you can build. Each circuit contains a standard schematic, step-by-step instructions, as well as a checklist to help the user build an error-free circuit. The explanations on how many of the circuits work are lacking – requiring the user to do additional searching and reading to get a full understanding of what’s going on. (But seriously, that’s how it should be: You buy the lab to learn, doing additional reading should be encouraged)

If you look closely, you'll see an acrostic poem.

Which circuits you build and in what order you build them is entirely up to the user. Each manual is structured so that learning is incremental: You learn how resistors work, you learn how capacitors work, you learn many different ways in which resistors and capacitors can work together.

My goal is to work through each book page by page (I’m only just over halfway through manual 1). Each manual is about 96 pages long so this can easily be done in a long weekend (or a few in my case).

I really wish my high-school had offered an electronics class. My limited knowledge had been enough to get me by for basic projects, but the labs I’ve done so far have really bolstered what I know. And at $70, this is a real deal.

Next up: After completing all the labs, go back to the RC Car modifications and explore the possibilities of a TI Launchpad.

I get a lot of hotlink spam to this site, and normally I don’t particularly care. But when Mercado Libre (an online sales forum similar to E-bay) started using the pictures of one of the switches from my CCNA lab for a posting – I decided I’d try my hand as a sales person.

They could have at least resized the image – but here’s a snippet of what the posting looked like (note: since modern browsers cache imagery, you’ll likely have to hold down the shift button and hit refresh when looking at that post):

The actual switch is below the o-scope.

A few quick rewrite rules to tamper with that HTTP Referrer:

RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^.*articulo\.mercadolibre\.com\.ec.*$
RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg|jpeg|png)$ hotlinkers/computer-thermite.jpg [L]

And voila -

The perfect computer for arsonists.

I hope I get a commission off the huge volume of sales this generates.

Greg Sowell had a great link this week in his blog — such a great link that I’m passing it along here.

This is an impressive piece of work.

The book is freely available for download and covers a wide range of wireless topics – including using Solar Energy for power, OLSR for routing, and low-cost tools (including the WiSpy) that can assist in site surveys.

So far I’ve only had a chance to skim the work, but I’m definitely impressed. Now I have some weekend reading to look forward to.

Well, it took me long enough to get my ass in gear to do it – but I finally got around to taking the CCNA – and passed on the first attempt.

I’d been planning on doing so for as far back as my last few years in commercial radio, but a level of uncertainty (“What exactly is ON the exam?”) led to my procrastination.

Eventually I came upon the non-credit offering brochure of my local community college, and found they offered a class on what one needs to know and study to pass the CCNA.

The course was fast paced and had an impressive instructor (smart, rarely drifted off topic, had good studying suggestions, and a pretty good sense of humor). It also included a number of materials: Lab manuals, Cisco Certified Network Associate Study Guide (ISBN: 0470110082) by Todd Lamlee, and copies of RouterSim Network Visualizer 6.0 and CertSim. (There was plenty of hands-on lab time as well, including two Saturday workshops).

The  Network Visualizer software  is nice when away from the classroom lab – although I quickly found that I preferred using my home lab instead (something I’d pieced together via ebay over time).

A 2950, 2 1751's, a 26xx (and 2 2900's not pictured)

The home lab consists of a random number of bits: 2 1751′s with T1 CSU/DSU’s (got at a price of $39.00 together off Ebay), a 26xx ($60.00 off Ebay), 2 Cisco 2900XL’s (appx $70 together from Ebay), a 2950XL (about $80.00 off Ebay), 2 Quagga routers, an ImageStream Rebel Router, and a server dedicated to virtual servers (which I used to emulate 7204′s via Dynamips). Yes, a lot of the equipment is old, but it works great.

By the way – you CAN connect the T1 WICs back to back using a T1 crossover cable. Many other types of cards (ADSL cards for instance) don’t allow you to do this.

A T1 crossover cable (Integrated or external CSU/DSU is required)

When away from the house, I quickly become fond of  Dynamips (a Cisco Router emulator based off of QEMU). Only after the exam did I learn the beauty of GNS3, a great front-end for Dynamips that allows one to lay out a network graphically. (Which saves a lot of time as I was previously building everything by hand).

GNS3 - making network simulation easy

When using GNS3, I personally recommend also using PuttyCM to enjoy the use of tabbed Putty connections to your simulated equipment. I believe a youtube video from Train Signal is what ledme to PuttyCM (although it appears they may have been using something slightly different):

This is PuttyCM

As I mentioned, the course provided a few decent pieces of software – the first being Network Visualizer. The biggest pro to Network Visualizer is that it doesn’t require a copy of an IOS image to run a simulated router. It does cause CPU to ramp at times (of course Dynamips does the same thing emulating a device), and it is limited in IOS commands, but for an introductory piece of software, it’s not bad.

This is RouterSim

The real beauty in the RouterSim Suite is CertSim. CertSim is almost the exact same experience one has at taking the actual exam. I’m not sure how many questions are in the CertSim question bank, I only ever came across a very very small number of Simlets though. I should disclose that I actually worked with CertSim for about a day, as I’d not realized I had it:

A realistic simulation of what the CCNA exam is like.

Having plenty of PTO to burn, in the end I decided to schedule my exam on a Monday, and take off the previous Friday. 3 days of nothing but studying (well, I took  breaks here and there to play with my latest toy and grab more coffee) and Monday I got the cert.

Next up? The first of 3 exams for the CCNP.

I’m still amazed at the frequency in which I see someone in the IT field open up a M$ Word document or spreadsheet with all their passwords in it. What’s even more baffling is often times they’ll store this password file on a shared drive – shared with all members of the company or group.

For years, I used PWManager to store the hundred or so passwords I needed access to. Like most password managers, you have a database file with a master password.  The master password pretty much unlocks everything.

This was PWManager

I really liked PWManager. There were obvious things missing – most importantly a command line or NCurses based way to access your password database. Overall though – I always found it to be solid.

Unfortunately upgrades to my workstation in the last 12 months have rendered it practically useless. (Gentoo went to KDE4, unfortunately PWManager was written for the KDE3 libraries)

I’d searched for a while, evaluating a few open-source password managers before finally settling on KeePassX.

This is KeePassX

KeePassX is based on the QT4 library, has decent search features, and really expands upon what PWManager provided.  When I initially migrated to KeePassX, the one thing that bothered me was the missing “systray-like” ability to right-click on the minimalized application icon, manuever quickly to a group, then username – and copy the selected password into the clipboard.

<Dog learning new trick>In the end, the KeePassX search bar really does provide a quick way to accomplish the exact same thing.</Dog learning new trick>

When you’ve highlighted an entry (after searching for it),  CTRL-B copies the username to the clipboard, CTRL-C copies the password to the clipboard. You can also set expiration dates for passwords, associate URLs and comments to each entry, and select unique icons for various passwords.

Another benefit to KeePassX is its ability to import database files from other password managers. It should be able to import KWallet and PWManager files, although I found that import process didn’t work properly (“Compressed files are not yet supported” when trying to import from PWManager) . Thankfully a former co-worker already scripted the conversion of an exported PWManager CSV password file to a KeePassX XML file, which can then be imported with very little issue.

KeePassX also runs on OSX, Windows, and Linux. (I used to have issues occasionally where I’d have to reboot my dual-boot machine to grab a simple password from PWManager – but not anymore). The cross-platform support also means that I can now share a password database with my girlfriend (which makes paying online bills much easier)

I’d seriously recommend KeePassX to anyone saving their passwords in an easy to read text-file. It’s easy to use, pretty, and it gets the job done. Of course, I’m all ears if someone has a better password management system they’d like to recommend.