From qi-hardware at daveball.org.uk Sun Feb 1 00:09:32 2015 From: qi-hardware at daveball.org.uk (Dave Ball) Date: Sun, 01 Feb 2015 00:09:32 +0000 Subject: Anelok: the art of window-making In-Reply-To: <20150131135902.GN18990@ws> References: <20150131135902.GN18990@ws> Message-ID: <54CD6EBC.5000806@daveball.org.uk> Looking great Werner! On 31/01/15 13:59, Werner Almesberger wrote: > Conclusion > ---------- > > While I prevailed in the end, the process requires way too much > improvising for my taste. Would another option be to paint part-way through the milling? I.e. make the front case without the screen depression, paint and dry, then cut away the extra mm or so that the screen fits into? This is a really great project! (not that there was ever any doubt!) Dave From qi-hardware at daveball.org.uk Sun Feb 1 00:13:38 2015 From: qi-hardware at daveball.org.uk (Dave Ball) Date: Sun, 01 Feb 2015 00:13:38 +0000 Subject: Anelok: meanwhile, making development a little easier In-Reply-To: <20150127133357.GL18990@ws> References: <20150127133357.GL18990@ws> Message-ID: <54CD6FB2.3020600@daveball.org.uk> On 27/01/15 13:33, Werner Almesberger wrote: > So much good stuff here, I thought I would have a quick play with the sim. Unfortunately I fell at the first hurdle getting the build dependencies installed (might just be sdl?) are there instructions somewhere I missed? Cheers! Dave From werner at almesberger.net Sun Feb 1 00:52:15 2015 From: werner at almesberger.net (Werner Almesberger) Date: Sat, 31 Jan 2015 21:52:15 -0300 Subject: Anelok: the art of window-making In-Reply-To: <54CD6EBC.5000806@daveball.org.uk> References: <20150131135902.GN18990@ws> <54CD6EBC.5000806@daveball.org.uk> Message-ID: <20150201005215.GE11334@ws> Dave Ball wrote: > Would another option be to paint part-way through the milling? Yes and no. Yes, because if can be done in principle. No, because positioning would be painful. Plus, there are some other issues. > I.e. > make the front case without the screen depression, paint and dry, > then cut away the extra mm or so that the screen fits into? One problem with this would be that the window needs a lot of polishing before it becomes transparent. I have another ~100 not-yet-published pictures on polishing alone. The steps are: 1) even out any coarse steps left from machining with fine sandpaper, 2) polish with Dremel and Jeweler's Red Rouge (polishing paste), 3) remove Rouge residues with a brush and kitchen cleaner. This process is not very precise in terms of what gets polished and is almost guaranteed to damage any paint that's in the area. There would also be the issue that my mill doesn't maintain height very well, so I would have to add some extra thickness just to avoid cutting into or through the case's ceiling. > This is a really great project! (not that there was ever any doubt!) Thanks ! :) - Werner From werner at almesberger.net Sun Feb 1 01:19:06 2015 From: werner at almesberger.net (Werner Almesberger) Date: Sat, 31 Jan 2015 22:19:06 -0300 Subject: Anelok: meanwhile, making development a little easier In-Reply-To: <54CD6FB2.3020600@daveball.org.uk> References: <20150127133357.GL18990@ws> <54CD6FB2.3020600@daveball.org.uk> Message-ID: <20150201011906.GF11334@ws> Dave Ball wrote: > So much good stuff here, I thought I would have a quick play with the sim. Whee ! :) > are there instructions somewhere I missed? For the simulator ? Not yet :) > Unfortunately I fell at the first hurdle getting the build > dependencies installed (might just be sdl?) Most likely, yes. You need SDL 1.2 and SDL_gfx. On Ubuntu, the packages are libsdl1.2-dev and libsdl-gfx1.2-dev There are a few more things you need for generating the fonts: XTerm, ImageMagick, and NetPBM; packages imagemagick, xterm, and netpbm I did a quick test build and fixed a couple more bumps in the road, so please "git pull" first. - Werner From werner at almesberger.net Sun Feb 1 01:57:55 2015 From: werner at almesberger.net (Werner Almesberger) Date: Sat, 31 Jan 2015 22:57:55 -0300 Subject: Anelok: the art of window-making In-Reply-To: <54CD2352.1040002@gnu.org> References: <20150131135902.GN18990@ws> <54CD2352.1040002@gnu.org> Message-ID: <20150201015755.GG11334@ws> hellekin wrote: > I was thinking, maybe you could use some silicon instead of tape, so > that it would keep liquid from creeping through. You mean the kind used for sealing things ? May be tricky to get that one off again :) > Or some paste of the > blue-tak style that you would put in place with the (inverted) mask, A putty, like this ? http://articulo.mercadolibre.com.ar/MLA-543561968-masilla-tack-camuflajes-con-aerografo-maquetas-148-172-_JM That looks interesting. If it's soft enough, that may indeed be an option. There are probably plenty of variations of the theme at hardware stores or art supply shops. They love it when I come looking for some odd stuff, ignorant of the correct Spanish word for it - let alone the local slang term, describing it from first principles ;-) > BTW, it would be nice to start going through the mailing list archive > and make a blog of the experiments from the beginning. The fund-raising > campaign would be better for it. Yes, I think blogerizing things from the list would be a good idea. I also have all the original images, i.e., in higher resolution (most of the ones I post are reduced to 25%) and without editing (I usually crop, adjust the color curve, and then scale. Sometimes I also rotate them.) The more recent ones (since about January 30, 2014) have an image comment (identify -verbose whatever.jpg | grep comment: or simply strings -12 whatever.jpg | grep 'From ') with the name of the original. Unfortunately, I didn't think of doing this earlier, so the older ones would be more difficult to associate. Maybe the Exif date would help in these cases. What might also be nice to have is a graphical timeline showing the evolution of the project, with the first "brainless" board, the design with wheel, Y-Box, etc. > I'm going to make a campaign for a > device soon. > Will be happy to pay you a visit and have a chat. Heh, your surveillance cams must have spotted me filling the fridge with beer ;-) Let's coordinate on IRC. - Werner From werner at almesberger.net Fri Feb 6 21:19:42 2015 From: werner at almesberger.net (Werner Almesberger) Date: Fri, 6 Feb 2015 18:19:42 -0300 Subject: Anelok: battery results, and problems Message-ID: <20150206211942.GO18990@ws> I made a first attempt to run Anelok from a CR2032 cell. The good news it that this time it did at least power on :) Further good news is that the capacitive sensor worked somewhat. It was a bit "nervous", probably reflecting oscillations in the supply voltage, but I'm quite happy that it responded at all, because this means that running on battery affects self-calibration and the thresholds only lightly. The not so good news is that things degraded quickly afterwards, with battery voltage rapidly declining and the resulting voltage difference between MCU and OLED breaking communication between the two after a minute or so. I first suspected that the battery was just too old. It's been sitting in a drawer for maybe five years. The expiration date is 2018, but who knows if that considers the Buenos Aires climate ? So I set up an experiment to verify the discharge profile of the battery (a new one, from the same batch), based on the profile published by Energizer: http://data.energizer.com/PDFs/cr2032.pdf Load resistance is 15 kOhm (+/- 5%, I will measure the exact value when the experiment is done), ambient temperature about 25-35 C. This is what the result look like after the first ~115 hours: http://downloads.qi-hardware.com/people/werner/anelok/tmp/cr2032-115h.png The green lines are - an approximation of the nominal profile for an Energizer cell fresh from the factory, - corrected for 5 years of age (capacity loss 1% p.a.), - corrected for my battery being a Sony with a nominal capacity of only 220 mAh instead of Energizer's 240 mAh http://www.sony.co.uk/electronics/primary-batteries/lithium-coin/specifications The batteries I have don't say "CR2032B1A" anywhere and the nominal capacity isn't indicated anywhere on the package. So I'm just assuming that Sony CR2032 cells don't differ too much from each other. The blue line is the battery voltage under load, i.e., with the 15 kOhm resistor connected. The up and down swings follow the ambient temperature, with a higher temperature raising the voltage. After witnessing the initial steep drop from 3.3 V down to about 2.9 V I thought I had my smoking gun, but then the voltage stabilized and until now the battery has delivered about 10% of its nominal capacity and it doesn't look as if it was about to quit. The red lines indicate what Anelok will find comfortable: - the lower line is at 2.64 V, which is the minimum Vih of the OLED, i.e., the minimum voltage the MCU must deliver for a signal to be recognized as "high" by the OLED, - the upper line adds the expected voltage drop of the CR2032 for a 20 mA load, assuming that the inner resistance of the battery is a constant 20 Ohm. As one can see, that threshold is above the nominal voltage of the battery and maybe the only thing that makes this work at all is that a new battery overshoots its nominal voltage a bit. The mistake I made is that I underestimated the voltage the OLED would need on its signal lines, and somehow missed this when going through the data sheet. A Vih 80% of the supply voltage is quite high, and most chips are happy with 70% or even less. Alas, not this one. I hope this can be solved by just rewiring the output of the boost converter such that it feeds the MCU(s) as well and not only OLED and memory card. When the boost converter is disabled, it outputs the input voltage, i.e., the battery voltage, which should be quite sufficient for the few things Anelok does while the display is off (mainly sleep). If this works, it will result in a slight overall increase of power consumption, and a possibly significant increase of momentary peak current. I'm a little worried about the latter, but we'll have to see what this means for real-life device performance. For now, I'll keep watching the battery discharge. That will also tell me whether I can still trust my stash of CR2032 cells, and if not, it may mean that I should also test any supposedly fresher replacements. - Werner From werner at almesberger.net Sat Feb 14 13:35:08 2015 From: werner at almesberger.net (Werner Almesberger) Date: Sat, 14 Feb 2015 10:35:08 -0300 Subject: Anelok: rework plan, battery update, left-shift, Anelok in China Message-ID: <20150214133508.GH11334@ws> Just a few minor items for this week: - I made a plan for reworking existing Anelok boards to make the whole system run at 3.3 V: http://downloads.qi-hardware.com/people/werner/anelok/tmp/boost-rework.pdf More details: https://gitorious.org/anelok/anelok/source/aeaccf8b538ae2f46c894dea5afe7037b7359ce6:doc/boost-rework/README This looks reasonably simple. Losing the Vsys pad isn't nice but not really a problem at this stage. In the boost-rework branch, I changed the schematics and the layout to reflect the modifications, and they still agree with each other. I haven't actually implemented the rework yet, so there may still be surprises, such as the idea not working at all. - meanwhile, the battery is busy discharging and has just passed the 300 hours mark: http://downloads.qi-hardware.com/people/werner/anelok/tmp/cr2032-300h.png Not sure if the slight drop towards the end is a first sign of weakness or whether this merely reflects the cooler weather of the last couple of days. We'll see next week or so. The effect of temperature is noteworthy. If we assume that the difference between highs and lows is about 10 K, that would mean a temperature coefficient of roughly 5 mV/K. This may not seem like much but the voltage change caused by a temperature difference of 10 K would then be the same as that caused by a current difference of 2.5 mA or 20+/-10% of the expected idle current (display on, LED off, not doing much else). - items on the screen are now arranged in a more logical way in left-handed mode. Here is an illustration: http://downloads.qi-hardware.com/people/werner/anelok/tmp/handed.pdf On top is the usual right-handed configuration. So far, switching to left-handed simply rotated the entire screen content. This caused the position marker (the little white blip) and the icon bar to end up far from the finger, which looked a bit counter-intuitive. The bottom drawing shows what it looks like now: position marker and icon bar get moved to the left and the main display area starts after them. - last but not least, the folks at Canaan Creative (Xiangfu et al.) have made a few Anelok boards. Some first impressions: http://downloads.qi-hardware.com/people/xiangfu/anelok/tmp/brd-with-UBB-front.jpg http://downloads.qi-hardware.com/people/xiangfu/anelok/tmp/brd-with-UBB-back.jpg http://downloads.qi-hardware.com/people/xiangfu/anelok/tmp/Anelok-booting.jpg Looking great ! Plus, it proves that the available design information is sufficient to build working devices from it, i.e., that I didn't hold back or simply forget something. - Werner From spencer at fabricatorz.com Sat Feb 14 16:44:16 2015 From: spencer at fabricatorz.com (Spencer Young) Date: Sat, 14 Feb 2015 11:44:16 -0500 Subject: Anelok: rework plan, battery update, left-shift, Anelok in China In-Reply-To: <20150214133508.GH11334@ws> References: <20150214133508.GH11334@ws> Message-ID: Unsubscribe, please. On Sat, Feb 14, 2015 at 8:35 AM, Werner Almesberger wrote: > Just a few minor items for this week: > > - I made a plan for reworking existing Anelok boards to make the > whole system run at 3.3 V: > > > http://downloads.qi-hardware.com/people/werner/anelok/tmp/boost-rework.pdf > > More details: > > > https://gitorious.org/anelok/anelok/source/aeaccf8b538ae2f46c894dea5afe7037b7359ce6:doc/boost-rework/README > > This looks reasonably simple. Losing the Vsys pad isn't nice but > not really a problem at this stage. > > In the boost-rework branch, I changed the schematics and the layout > to reflect the modifications, and they still agree with each other. > I haven't actually implemented the rework yet, so there may still > be surprises, such as the idea not working at all. > > - meanwhile, the battery is busy discharging and has just passed the > 300 hours mark: > > > http://downloads.qi-hardware.com/people/werner/anelok/tmp/cr2032-300h.png > > Not sure if the slight drop towards the end is a first sign of > weakness or whether this merely reflects the cooler weather of the > last couple of days. We'll see next week or so. > > The effect of temperature is noteworthy. If we assume that the > difference between highs and lows is about 10 K, that would mean > a temperature coefficient of roughly 5 mV/K. > > This may not seem like much but the voltage change caused by a > temperature difference of 10 K would then be the same as that > caused by a current difference of 2.5 mA or 20+/-10% of the > expected idle current (display on, LED off, not doing much else). > > - items on the screen are now arranged in a more logical way in > left-handed mode. Here is an illustration: > > http://downloads.qi-hardware.com/people/werner/anelok/tmp/handed.pdf > > On top is the usual right-handed configuration. So far, switching > to left-handed simply rotated the entire screen content. This > caused the position marker (the little white blip) and the icon bar > to end up far from the finger, which looked a bit counter-intuitive. > > The bottom drawing shows what it looks like now: position marker > and icon bar get moved to the left and the main display area starts > after them. > > - last but not least, the folks at Canaan Creative (Xiangfu et al.) > have made a few Anelok boards. Some first impressions: > > > http://downloads.qi-hardware.com/people/xiangfu/anelok/tmp/brd-with-UBB-front.jpg > > http://downloads.qi-hardware.com/people/xiangfu/anelok/tmp/brd-with-UBB-back.jpg > > http://downloads.qi-hardware.com/people/xiangfu/anelok/tmp/Anelok-booting.jpg > > Looking great ! Plus, it proves that the available design information > is sufficient to build working devices from it, i.e., that I didn't > hold back or simply forget something. > > - Werner > > _______________________________________________ > Qi Hardware Discussion List > Mail to list (members only): discussion at lists.en.qi-hardware.com > Subscribe or Unsubscribe: > http://lists.en.qi-hardware.com/mailman/listinfo/discussion > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sucotronic at gmail.com Mon Feb 16 17:45:48 2015 From: sucotronic at gmail.com (Felix) Date: Mon, 16 Feb 2015 18:45:48 +0100 Subject: Anelok: rework plan, battery update, left-shift, Anelok in China In-Reply-To: <20150214133508.GH11334@ws> References: <20150214133508.GH11334@ws> Message-ID: > > - meanwhile, the battery is busy discharging and has just passed the > 300 hours mark: > > > http://downloads.qi-hardware.com/people/werner/anelok/tmp/cr2032-300h.png > > Not sure if the slight drop towards the end is a first sign of > weakness or whether this merely reflects the cooler weather of the > last couple of days. We'll see next week or so. > > Nice and simple idea to test it, but... wouldn't be more accurate to put a constant current load to test it better? -- Felix -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rjeffries at gmail.com Mon Feb 16 18:03:35 2015 From: rjeffries at gmail.com (Ron K. Jeffries) Date: Mon, 16 Feb 2015 10:03:35 -0800 Subject: Anelok: rework plan, battery update, left-shift, Anelok in China In-Reply-To: References: <20150214133508.GH11334@ws> Message-ID: Werner, It's not clear to me whether the test is running with anelok in active state (doing something, eg waiting for input), or is the device just resting, waiting to be awakened? What do you DESIRE (hope for, dream of...) as number-of-months-between-battery-replacement-if-password-lookup-20-times-per-day? LOL --- Ron K. Jeffries 805-567-4670 On Mon, Feb 16, 2015 at 9:45 AM, Felix wrote: > > >> - meanwhile, the battery is busy discharging and has just passed the >> 300 hours mark: >> >> >> http://downloads.qi-hardware.com/people/werner/anelok/tmp/cr2032-300h.png >> >> Not sure if the slight drop towards the end is a first sign of >> weakness or whether this merely reflects the cooler weather of the >> last couple of days. We'll see next week or so. >> >> > Nice and simple idea to test it, but... wouldn't be more accurate to put a > constant current load to test it better? > > -- > Felix > > _______________________________________________ > Qi Hardware Discussion List > Mail to list (members only): discussion at lists.en.qi-hardware.com > Subscribe or Unsubscribe: > http://lists.en.qi-hardware.com/mailman/listinfo/discussion > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From werner at almesberger.net Mon Feb 16 18:15:22 2015 From: werner at almesberger.net (Werner Almesberger) Date: Mon, 16 Feb 2015 15:15:22 -0300 Subject: Anelok: rework plan, battery update, left-shift, Anelok in China In-Reply-To: References: <20150214133508.GH11334@ws> Message-ID: <20150216181521.GI11334@ws> Felix wrote: > Nice and simple idea to test it, but... wouldn't be more accurate to put a > constant current load to test it better? I could try to make one. Not sure if it would be more accurate, though. Also, I would then have to develop a detailed battery model and translate the results. The battery performance is specified by Energizer precisely as a discharge into a 15 kOhm resistor. A setup that differs significantly from this would produce different behaviour, which that model then would have to correct. And since I just want to know whether my battery is still healthy, and don't quite plan on writing a thesis on CR2032 chemistry and physics, I took the easy approach of just duplicating the reference setup and be patient :) - Werner From sucotronic at gmail.com Mon Feb 16 18:30:04 2015 From: sucotronic at gmail.com (Felix) Date: Mon, 16 Feb 2015 19:30:04 +0100 Subject: Anelok: rework plan, battery update, left-shift, Anelok in China In-Reply-To: <20150216181521.GI11334@ws> References: <20150214133508.GH11334@ws> <20150216181521.GI11334@ws> Message-ID: > > Felix wrote: > > Nice and simple idea to test it, but... wouldn't be more accurate to put > a > > constant current load to test it better? > > I could try to make one. Not sure if it would be more accurate, > though. Also, I would then have to develop a detailed battery > model and translate the results. > > The battery performance is specified by Energizer precisely as > a discharge into a 15 kOhm resistor. A setup that differs > significantly from this would produce different behaviour, which > that model then would have to correct. > > And since I just want to know whether my battery is still > healthy, and don't quite plan on writing a thesis on CR2032 > chemistry and physics, I took the easy approach of just > duplicating the reference setup and be patient :) > > Oh, shit! Blame myself, I forgot about that :S -- Felix -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From werner at almesberger.net Mon Feb 16 18:43:22 2015 From: werner at almesberger.net (Werner Almesberger) Date: Mon, 16 Feb 2015 15:43:22 -0300 Subject: Anelok: rework plan, battery update, left-shift, Anelok in China In-Reply-To: References: <20150214133508.GH11334@ws> Message-ID: <20150216184322.GJ11334@ws> Ron K. Jeffries wrote: > It's not clear to me whether the test is running with anelok in active > state (doing something, eg waiting for input), or is the device just > resting, waiting to be awakened? No, there's no Anelok in this. It's just the battery and a 15 kOhm resistor. The purpose of the test is to determine how this somewhat old (5real-life battery performs compared to what I found in data sheets. Specifically, the nice diagram on the first page of http://data.energizer.com/PDFs/cr2032.pdf E.g., if I should see that this battery only lasts for half the time, then I wouldn't have to worry if experiment with Anelok also show a comparably short run time. The experiment so far has already established that the battery does not have any catastrophic defect, which is one of the things I initially suspected. The observed output voltage is about 50 mV below what I would have expected from the data sheet, which may mean that the battery behaves as if it was about 200 hours further into the experiment than it really is (taking into account aging and nominal capacity). That's unexpected. But it's still too early to draw conclusions. Things will get more interesting when the battery enters its final steep decline. > What do you DESIRE (hope for, dream of...) as > number-of-months-between-battery-replacement-if-password-lookup-20-times-per-day? Ah, this question sounds familiar :) The answer is still the same, about two months: http://lists.en.qi-hardware.com/pipermail/discussion/2014-January/010448.html - Werner From werner at almesberger.net Mon Feb 23 09:47:41 2015 From: werner at almesberger.net (Werner Almesberger) Date: Mon, 23 Feb 2015 06:47:41 -0300 Subject: Anelok: battery, display errors, evolution update Message-ID: <20150223094741.GA9829@ws> Assorted items: - not to belittle the pure joy and excitement of watching paint dry, but monitoring a battery's epic journey towards inevitable doom is so much more rewarding: http://downloads.qi-hardware.com/people/werner/anelok/tmp/cr2032-510h.png So last week's drop was caused by the cold weather, not the battery showing first signs of weakness. Now that summerly temperatures are back, so is the battery voltage. To be continued ... - then there is an ugly truth I hadn't revealed yet: sometimes, the display of Anelok would look like this: http://downloads.qi-hardware.com/people/werner/anelok/tmp/chaotic-display.jpg I thought that this may have been caused by timing issues in the communication between MCU and OLED, but I was a little worried by me already having verified the timing some time ago without finding any problem - which would then suggest a more fundamental flaw. Well, while playing with the slider, I noticed that this sort of pattern would reproducibly occur at the same positions when scrolling. As we know, if you can reproduce it, you can fix it. So I did ... It turned out to be a missing sanity check in my bit blit function, which allowed it to attempt to draw things that were completely off-screen. With that fixed, I haven't seen any more such corruptions, and I sleep a lot better now :) Note that this is different from the signal integrity issues caused by voltage mismatch between MCU and OLED. That still needs solving, but it's pretty clear what's happening there. - I've updated the hardware evolution diagram: http://downloads.qi-hardware.com/people/werner/anelok/tmp/evol-hw-201502.pdf The previous version (April 2014, how time flies) is here: http://downloads.qi-hardware.com/people/werner/anelok/tmp/evol-hw.pdf The differences: - CPU: added the "dual processor" (KL16+KL26) combo as future development possibility. - USB device: added using a Micro B receptacle (instead of Micro AB) as something to consider. - slider: while a bit more tuning will be needed, it looks good enough nowadays that I think we can safely bury the wheel. - RF-kill: the brute simplicity of shorting RF VDD to ground shall be the way to go. So this leaves testing operation on CR2032 as the last major open issue. - meanwhile, Xiangfu sent these pictures: http://downloads.qi-hardware.com/people/xiangfu/anelok/tmp/Anelok-3-brds.jpg http://downloads.qi-hardware.com/people/xiangfu/anelok/tmp/Anelok-led-on.jpg The second one shows that the capacitive slider now works on these boards, too. - Werner