Wii Sensor USB mod

So a friend of mine, Chris, asked me if I could make a Wii sensor bar work off USB so that he can use it on his computer with a GameCube/Wii emulator.
It's a very basic mod but a fun one none the less.

Basically the Wii sensor bar consists of 6 IR LED's on offset angles that are then picked up by the micro camera in the Wii Remote. This is how the bulk of the tracking is done. The same thing can be done with two candles as they emit IR. This is also how you can have problems if your TV is setup in front of a big bay window and you have the curtains open while playing.

The mod consists of just replacing the existing Wii connector & wire with a USB cable. The bar itself is set to run off of +5/Ground, so using a straight USB cable
All was needed was to just take it apart, desolder the existing cable, snip one end off the USB cable and solder it in place.

Here are some shots of the new USB cable in place and the finished closed up unit.

I love pot.... lights

I finally got around to putting in the pot lights for the basement last night.
I have a little bit of wiring to clean up, cable staple some of those lines down and make it look neat and tidy and find a cap plate for that old junction box and it'll be ready for the drop ceiling.
In that junction box i found some very old, very messing wiring along with a line that went to nowhere that was live and electrical taped off on the end. Once I took it out i looked at it and all it would have taken is a bump the wrong way for it to short out and start a fire. Good thing I pulled it all out.
This house has proven to be a wiring nightmare. When I started the reno's the house was on all of 5 breakers, now the panel is full and I could really use another side panel for more lines.
Doing things properly is the way to go.

Elephants and Elephants and Elephants, Oh my!

Here are a couple of quick snapshots of Amelia all dressed up for Halloween.

Little orange monsters.

I'm not much of a Halloween guy, but I do love the pumpkin carving.

Amelia snapshots

Here are some snapshots of my little monkey in her daily life.

I think she is trying to tell me what she thinks of her dinner.

This was apparently the most entertaining thing to do.

A Sunday morning monkey!

Basement and other progress

Hi again, a large part of the delay in any posting is in part due to life in general and home reno's.
There is the usual daily grind of work, making dinner, cleaning and getting Amelia fed and in bed.
The occasional night when I'm not exhausted from all of this, there are the home reno's. The good part of this is I have the basement almost done.
All of storage tubs have been emptied out and put in the entertainment cabinets that are now fully built and stocked with all the books and nik-naks, My bookshelf has also been moved in and restocked just the way I like it.
I only have the hallway drop ceiling to install, light to put in and 3 doors to install and hang, plus the trim in the hallways and down the stairs.
The ceiling was started this past Saturday and should be done this week with the light installed and then it's just a matter of getting the doors made and hanging them.

I've also been extensively researching how to build an electric car. I had previously been looking into it but had mainly been looking at the car itself, which I now have realized is actually the easy part.
It'll be a whole lot easier having all of the electronics working on the test bench and ready to install and then finding a decent car and doing the conversion vs. doing it the other way around.
Basically the goal is to assemble and test everything and have a "conversion kit" ready to go that I have made.
A few ads were posted up on Kijiji.ca looking for forklift parts and I have found a few leads on some motors, controllers and parts. I also got a great lead on some sealed gel-cell batteries for free! They will be available whenever I am ready to pick them up and a great solution until I can afford some better lighter more powerful ones. It'll be a HUGE help in the cost of the conversion, saving me hundreds to thousands of dollars in getting a working car on the road.

I have an agreement with Jackie that I won't start a car until the whole basement is done and I'll stick to it.
So it's time to get cracking on it and get it done!

More info to come soon and I'll get some pictures up this week on the finished ceiling.

-Colin.

3 Years of love

3 years ago today I married the best girl in the world. It's been a great 3 years, here's to another 133 years baby!

Love you.

Colin.

Goodbye Charlie.

Today was a sad day where we said goodbye to Charlie. He was taken far too soon and will be missed by all who knew him.
Love goes out to Patricia and the families.

Charlie, you'll be missed.

Colin.

Harmony

I just got a harmony 550 remote in the mail. Purchased via ebay for $20 including shipping, it's the best $20 I've spent in a ling time.

They updidy up up they go down didy down down

This past Sunday my dad amd I went flying to Brantford for lunch, then popped into the fly in at the warplane museum.
It was a nice relaxing day of flying.
I managed to snap a few photos along the way.
The orange and white plane is the Stampe, my dads plane. When we were leaving Brantford someone taxied in, in a late 60's British trainer.
When we landed at the museum I took some shots for some new desktop images.
Also at the museum they had the engine's off the Lancaster as well.
Without further adieu here they are.

Bionic leg man!

Horray!
Today I got rid of the big bulky leg brace and got a hinged knee brace.
I can mow walk without crutches and I can drive a car now. This is fantastic!

If I had a million dollars.

I've realized that I really need to make more money. I have too many idea's and projects and having to go to work hinders all of it.
Lottery, crazy rich aunt I don't know about, anything really will do.
That being said, I'm getting very close to finalizing on my mk.2 CNC machine.
I'm hoping once it's done I can start using it to make a few extra bucks along the way.
Not asking for much, just a million or so, so i can live off the interest.

Enough griping for now, time to go act.

-Colin.

Little robots

So this long weekend my phone decided to completely act up. Everything wanted to install to the internal storage and I was constantly out of cache space and RAM.
Time to format and redo the whole thing.
I started by researching 2.3 ROM's and finding a recommended one on the xda developers site.
I decided to go with the Mokee 2.3 ROM and from the get go I was immediately impressed.
The whole installation was very smooth and flawless.
The stripped down, highly customized version is second to none. By far the top advantages of this distribution are the speed, ability to install apps directly to the SD card by default and to tune background processes and eliminate all the boot appsand animations.
I'm very very impressed.

So in short if you are using an old HTC Desire and want something new or something that has more options without the bloat of the stock or other ROM's them take a good look at the Mokee 2.3 ROM.

-Colin

The Hobble-it

Well it turns out I don't need surgery on my knee, which is good. The bad part is that it'll be 3-4 weeks more of this leg brace due to me popping my knee out again. Fun.
That also means the bulk of my projects have been offset because I can't really do much but sit.
The plus side to this is that I've been doing a lot more research for the CNC redux that Adam and I are working on. Rails, chain drive, large cutting bed size, 3D print head as well. This thing is going to be amazing!
The other plus is that being off my feet has given me some more time to spend learning sketchup.
Not much of an update but that's all there is for now.
-Colin

Ball Joints and Patella's

Well, somewhat of a delay in posting and basically doing anything of any sort except a bit of surfing and couch guarding due to a fantastic dislocation of my right knee.

I see a specialist on Tuesday coming up to fully asess what the damage is. All I can say is it hurts like a BA$T4RD!
Setting it back myself had the added bonus of what sounded like a championship level pool break.

Now I get no workshop time and no time in the basement finishing off the reno's, trim, etc...

Well the positive side is that I can do some more research on the CNC machine and work on some designs for an open source controller.

That's all for now, more to come once I have a little more to share.

-Colin.

Back to CNC, not the music factory

So my buddy Adam came by tonight, he's recently been bit by the CNC bug and he wanted to check out my build. It was great to hear all the ideas for improving on my initial design.
We've decided to go and finish off my machine enough to cut two better, more accurate machines.
Just a short update for now but we are hoping have it working within a month or two and then we can get to the best part. Cutting parts for projects.

-Colin

Melting Ice cream, put it back in the freezer!

So after installing the latest ROM I found that it wasn't really 100% compatible with my phone. There were basically constant failures with the android keyboard, which meant that because it's a critical part of the system it would fail, quit and reload about every 5-6 seconds with a pop up error message you had to confirm. Quite annoying.
Then wifi would not connect any more out of the blue and no amount of tinkering would make it work.
Reload time and it failed horribly
.I had to completely wipe the phone and reload a stock bootloader and ROM and then start from scratch again.
I used unrevoked3 to do this on my mac. http://unrevoked.com/
Before I did this I had to put on a version 2.0 ROM to get it to a state where it could be reloaded. I can't remember what 2.0 ROM is used but a quick search will net you about two dozen samples to try.
Unrevoked3 is a very simple program. Put the phone in debug mode, plug in the USB cable and start up the program. It'll detect the phone and start the process, reboot the phone for you and install the new ROM.

It worked very well and got me back to a usable state.
From there I loaded a new ROM onto the SD card and rebooted the phone into recovery mode, VolDown+ Power, selected the new ROM and let it load.
I decided to go with BCM RC4.1 Update 2 ROM modded by DK-Zero-Cool. http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1403113
It's a CyanoGen ROM customized for first gen Desire's and it works very very well.

So far I haven't had any problems with this ROM, so if you are looking for something to try on your rooted android then give it a shot and see what it's like.

-Colin.

Ice cream Sandwiches!

Today I ditched my good old reliable custom ROM on my phone, MIUI, and upgraded to the latest dev release of ice cream sandwich by MildWild for my HTC Desire.
The link can be found here.
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1453287

The installation was pretty smooth and to play it save I backed up all my information to my main micro SD card and used my spare old card to do the installation.
I'd recommend this for anyone doing a ROM flash. If you don't have a spare, micro SD's are cheap these days so go pick one up.
$8 CAD for an 8GB card at http://www.canadacomputers.com/

Well worth it.

I had my phone already rooted and had previously had hboot installed. If you don't have them done, you'll need to do both before installing your custom ROM.
I'd suggest checking out the All things Desire root guide over at android forums for info on how to do this.
http://androidforums.com/desire-all-things-root/503471-desire-all-things-root-guide.html

It's actually a pretty simple upgrade.
Root your phone.
Download the ROM.
Put the spare SD card in your phone.
Format the SD card while in the phone.
Mount the phone for USB storage.
Drag the new zipped ROM over to your phone.
Reboot the phone with Power+Vol-Down
Choose install from zip from SD
Choose the zipped ROM and go.
Wait for it to install, reboot and you are done.

All in all it took about 10 minutes to do and now it'll be hours of playing with the phone to see what's new and to tweak it and customize it.

If you've got a phone that is out of warranty I'd highly recommend trying it, but as with everything that is not a factory install. Use at your own risk.
That being said, I've flashed about a dozen custom ROM's onto my phone to try them out and have never once had a problem.

-Colin.

Basement pictures

Hi all, This is the image heavy post, Basement pictures! I wish I could find the originals from when I moved in. Wood paneling, orange shag carpet, very creepy bar. Glad it's gone.
I've just finished off the last of the ceiling tiles in the living room and only have a few things to finish off to call it done.
-Box in the electrical pannel
-Run some new cable & ethernet lines where the main tv will be
-Install trim
-Fix a piece of drywall around an outlet.

The hallway needs
-Doors hung
-Lights installed
-Ceiling installed
-Trim

After that it'll be done and move in ready.

Here are some pictures of how it looked durring construction and how it currently is, at the bottom.