Hacks | Diogo Gomes Blog

Posts Tagged Hacks

Although my Phd in Electrotechnics, I’m mostly a Software Engineer. Trying to put things straight, I’ve picked up a personal project with a bit more hardware

The idea is to build something resembling this or this without leaving my pocket empty, and in the time between build something with my bare-hands.

So today I set things in motion by visiting InMotion in it’s office in Oporto where I met Filipe Valpereiro. There I picked up an Arduino Duemilanove and an Ethernet Shield to go with. Tomorrow I hope to drop by the local electronics shop to pickup a photodiode and an IR LED. That should account for all the hardware I need in this project.

After that I will need to learn a bit about the IR encodings used by the remote controllers in the household (TV + Home Theater + STB). Luckily I’ve an oscilloscope lying around from the days my father did real electronics, which should come in hand to debug everything.

As soon as I get something working I’ll post it here.

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Nokia 7100 Supernova plug-in for iSync

December 28, 2008 English

This xmas I got my wife a new cellphone a Nokia 7100 Supernova which although not a 3G phone fits perfectly her needs. It has a slick design, a good enough camera (1.3 megapixel), GPRS/EDGE, support for the usual suspects (MMS, Java MIDP) and Bluetooth.

Nokia 7100 Supernova

Now comes the catch:

I completely forgot to check if it was supported by iSync.
So after the gift unwrapping I was faced with an unsupported phone with no plugin available either by Nokia nor anyone in the internet (as far as my google search is concerned).
Faced with this situation, I decided to go ahead and develop the plugin myself with Apple’s iSync Plug-in Maker. This utility is available in your system in case you have installed the developers tools in your OSX DVD. You can find it under /Developer/Applications/Utilities/.

The tool is very easy to use, and quickly enough I produced the desired plug-in, and my wife was able to sync her contacts with the phone over bluetooth. I did not test it with the USB cable (which I don’t had at the moment) nor did I test Calendar sync.

It therefore doesn’t constitute a finished work but I leave it here for any one to pickup and improve.

Download iSync Plug-in for Nokia 7100 Supernova
Download iSync Plug-in Maker Document

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DISTCC + AVAHI

August 21, 2007 English

When considering a project involving a large number of source files, compilation time is always an issue.
DistCC is in these cases a very good solution.
From DistCC site:

distcc is a program to distribute builds of C, C++, Objective C or Objective C++ code across several machines on a network. distcc should always generate the same results as a local build, is simple to install and use, and is usually much faster than a local compile

My problem was how to keep the $DISTCC_HOSTS variable updated, since computers in my lab never seam to be left alone (after all… this is a lab ).