User talk:DavidCary

Armus board

Hi! Very glad at least one guy did show some enthousiasm about the project! Currently, as the project was left (and will probably stay....): Hardware is all good. The board with gerbers can be sent to most major Fab House and you will receive a functionnal design. Proto1 was tested and around 5 glitches have been found and corrected for Proto2, wich was never tested but should be 100% functionnal.

The Firmware of the 4 DSPics is symetrical, and is "complete". It interface to Servos and DCs. The input encoder, if I recall, is not done, but the code is there and all C, so it should be easy to just copy-paste a snippet from somewhere else into the project. The Firmware for the multi-IO PIC18 is complete, and you will be able to play with all IO. The Drivers to communicate to the PIC and DSPIC from the kernel is done and documented. Ah, yeah, we have drivers for Ethernet/CAN/Sound. We also have a complete compiled kernel ready to load onto the board with various "demonstration" mode.

Most of the work left is polishing here and there, as the firmware/driver part was done is haste. Most of the things work 100%, and will need no touch, but some functions (like the Quadrature encoders) are plain missing.

The part where more work is to be done is on the Integrated Devellopment Environment (IDE). Shure, you can use KDevellopp, Eclipse, or any cross compiler out there. You could even download some dev.boards' software and load it onto ARMUS and compile natively from there. We had in mind (read the article) to creat a simple and easy IDE for 1st year undergrads, so maybe it's not necessary for you :P

If you want the =WHOLE= project CVS for you to enjoy, I have it and could send it to you trough FTP or any other way you prefer. I guess I could also just mail a DVD. It weights around 700MB, and there is ton of french comment and files (as the team, in Quebec, was native french) but I could translate any part you feel is critical for specific applications.

If you want to work on this "on your own", most of the board is based on atmel's AT91RM9200EK and AT91RM9200DK . Their demonstration Kernels should run as-is with the same procedure as Atmel's.

Just to say: what do you plan to use the board for? Thanks for your interest! -Jerome Marchand

Wow. This is too cool to stick on a shelf a let it gather dust. I want to see projects like this "ratchet forward". I want to allow people to build off last year's work rather than starting all over again from scratch -- so in a few years we can finish amazingly cool projects that are far too complicated for one team to finish in a year.

I think this ARMUS Embedded Linux Board might be perfect for a CNC machine. The LinuxCNC software runs on Linux, so it ought to run on this Linux board. And the DSPics should be able to drive the power transistors that run the motors on the CNC machine, and track the position of the routing head.

And not just a single CNC machine -- a series of open-source CNC machine designs. Designs that anyone can build, improve, and then share those improvements with the next builder.

Yes, please do send me the project files. These are all "public domain" or "creative commons" or "open source", with no warranty, right?

Do you think that perhaps http://SourceForge.net/ or GNU Savannah might be a more appropriate place to host this software than Opencircuits?

Alas, I am embarrassed to admit that I barely speak 5 words of the lingua franca, the French language.

--DavidCary 19:16, 3 November 2007 (PDT)

Programmable Chip EEG

Why don't you help finish my programmable chip eeg project and then use what you learned and the results to then create your own project. Programmers like to reuse working modulas instead of reinventing the wheel.

The pceeg has gone through a major revision streamlining its design and I am working on the father board a digital computing board for the project. I will be cleaning up the page.

Thank you. I hope the Programmable Chip EEG project becomes wildly successful. --DavidCary 10:01, 19 July 2007 (PDT)

a talk through Wiki Howto

Hi DavidCary
Thank you very much you create this wiki to let us to share electronic projects.
I want to merge the "RS232 Dev Board" and "RS232 RS485 USB Converter Board", so want to discuss to the author, Tkb, of "RS232 Dev Board". However, i cannot find out the talk page like i talk to you by this way. Can you point me how to do it?
thanks
yan

If you have a question or comment specifically about the "RS232 Dev Board", please leave a comment on the RS232 Dev Board page or its "discussion" page. You can click on "User talk:Tkb" to leave a note on Tkb's user talk page. Since there are more people watching the "RS232 Dev Board" page than Tkb's page, you'll probably get a quicker response if you post to the "RS232 Dev Board" page than to Tkb's page. --DavidCary 20:00, 29 December 2006 (PST)

Chazegh created this "Open Circuits wiki". I am flattered that you think I had something to do with it. But since Chazegh seems to be too busy to spend much time here, it's up to you and I (and whoever else we can recruit) to create content here. --DavidCary 21:08, 29 December 2006 (PST)

5.7.2007 Joe Silva: Hi David, great site! I've taken the liberty to remove some SPAM links from the pages. Yeah we sure do need an anti-valdalism bot. Also maybe not allow anonymous editing.

---

Aloha David, Roger here, I'm still puzzeled as to how to create a new article. I uploaded an image file for the 723 regulator (my article subject). This went into an "Image File page" automatically, OK. I added it to the Voltage Regulators section of Components/Integrated Circuits, OK. But I couldn't figure out how to make a document like there is for LT1528 OO. I put the info I have into the discussion page for the image, but that is only a temporary solution.

How does one create a new article page that isn't a "talk" page for something else? Beside the info on the IC, I have a couple of documents that are in-depth on using the device. These should be near each other as well as near the info document above. How would I go about setting up a "723" sub-chapter of "Integrated Circuits"? I guess that's as clear as I can make the question.

I would also like to suggest a modification to the linkage. I'm reading the synopsis on the LT1528, I want to find oout more, so I click on the image, but instead of taking me to an in-depth article, it takes me to the image file page. There I have to look at the Links to find the article (which is only identified as LT1528). I'd like to be taken to the article instead of the image. Take me to the image only if there is no article. Of course this may be more difficult to make happen--I don't know how the site is structured. My web programming is very basic. Still, I think this makes sense from a user's POV.

Thanks in Advance, RAF 17:26, 22 May 2007 (PDT)

Aloha, Roger. You're doing great.

I agree that it would be nice if clicking on the picture of the LT1528 took you directly to the article about the LT1528. I don't know how to fix it.

Do you see the "Help" link in the navigation bar on the left side of every page? I think the page it brings up needs a few more tips. But I want to keep it short and simple. If I explained every detail, it would become a bloated 100-page document that nobody would read.

There are already far too many bloated 100-page documents about electronics.

I hope that you, dear reader, and other volunteers will make Open Circuits into a place where people can learn to do amazing things. A place that avoids forcing people to learn 100 irrelevant details before learning the one thing they need to know before they get back to building their robot (or whatever). A place that never makes people throw away good ideas, because we never confuse people into believing that it would be far more complicated and expensive to build than it really is.

p.s.: Picking the name of a page is a bit of an art. Since we want to refer to a page a lot, that's easier when the name is very short. People new to wiki always pick names that are too long, or have too many capital letters. Fortunately, it's very simple to rename pages. You rename pages by clicking on the incorrectly-named "Move this page" button. (I don't know how to fix that, either). --DavidCary 10:15, 23 May 2007 (PDT)

making links

Speaking of linkage, making links is one of the most important parts of this wiki.

Whenever you find one article mentioning some other article, you can click on that word to get more detail.

If that word is not already clickable (underlined and colored), please make it clickable. To make a word clickable, hit the "edit" button at the top of the page. Then add double brackets "[[" and "]]" around that word. (Some people recommend only making the first mention of that word clickable).

The cheatsheet ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Cheatsheet ) calls this an "internal link".

Here's the trick: you can add those brackets to any word, making it into a link. Some of those links will go to pages that don't exist yet.

What happens when you click on one of those links to a page that doesn't exist yet?

I'm not going to tell you what happens. Go find out for yourself. You can practice in the meta:Sandbox.

--DavidCary 10:15, 23 May 2007 (PDT)

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Aloha David, Roger again; I want to thank you for the info and hints. I'm catching on. I got my component description linked to the caption under the image on the Components/Voltage Regulators page. And I created a "New Article" which I then "moved" to the title of my article. And my article has a link to the description and that has a link to the article, so I'm getting the hang of it. I have several schematics and PC artwork images to upload and link to my article, plus a second article I want to publish (I didn't write it, but I've been unable to find it on the internet--I have a xeroxed copy from 1986 or so and that is the only existing one as far as I know). That article also has several images that go along with it. I wondered about the feasability of uploading a .pdf file (I made one of it) to this site. Would that work? Should I even try? I don't want to screw anything up, but wouldn't that be a lovely thing if we could upload .pdf files? Just a thought.

Again, Thanks very much, I've made some progress.

RAF 19:48, 23 May 2007 (PDT)

Aloha, Roger. You are welcome. Have you tried creating a link to an article that doesn't exist yet, just to see what happens when you click on that link? For example, the switching regulator page that I'm going to start in a few days.

I don't know about this article that you didn't write. If the original author wants people to post it widely, and doesn't mind us editing it, then great, let's post it (and give correct attribution). But some writers go a little crazy when they see that someone random stranger has copied their stuff and posted it to the internet. (That's why there's that "DO NOT SUBMIT COPYRIGHTED WORK WITHOUT PERMISSION!" note at the bottom of each Edit page).

I wouldn't mind you posting a .pdf file (that you wrote) temporarily. It's better than nothing. But I would expect someone to eventually convert it to text-and-images. That makes it much easier for the next person to improve the it.

Thank you again for adding useful information to Open Circuits. I hope you won't mind people "improving" the things you post here.

--DavidCary 21:26, 23 May 2007 (PDT)

Aloha David, Sorry for the delay, I had a loonng job and then our cable modem failed. At least they swapped us a new one free (hooray RoadRunner). But I want to explain the article: "The Many-Talented 723" by Glenn Prescott. I came across this as a xerox copy sometime around 1985. It was evidently published in a magazine for radio enthusiasts--there are some ads on the last page for radio gear. But the name of the magazine isn't on any of the pages. I Googled for the article and got no returns. I think it is a very good article as far as describing the IC and how to use it. It helped me when I was a beginner, so I want to share it. However, I don't want anyone to get into trouble over it. I just did another search on Google and all the returns refer to my mention of it here on Open Circuits. Like I said, this is a copy that I have, no clue as to the magazine that published it, no copyright date, no nothin'. But I will leave it to your judgement if it is a risk. I still have my own article to get uploaded along with images. I will concentrate on getting mine done before doing anything with the copied article.

RAF 20:27, 26 May 2007 (PDT)

Unless the author has given permission to publish it, I think a better idea would be to write your own article, citing the one you're talking about further details. Ideas are not copyright, but the expression of them (i.e. the text of the article) is, or so I understand. Autarch 10:22, 13 June 2007 (PDT)

spammers

I think I know how to dramatically reduce the amount of linkspam on the website i think if the administrators on this site protect pages that are frequently spammed such as Open Circuits talk:Community Portal that will reduce the amount of spam on this site because the spammers will not be able to edit those pages.--71.234.233.163 08:21, 2 June 2007 (PDT)

I just signed up a few minutes ago and noticed that there seems to be a lot of linkspam being placed by unregistered users. I don't want to exclude folk, but would only allowing registered users to edit cut down some of the spam? Autarch 09:53, 13 June 2007 (PDT)

You are right.

Certainly that is one way to cut down on spam, and perhaps I will be forced to do that soon.

Another way, as you can see from Special:Ipblocklist, I've been banning a bunch of anonymous spammers.

But is there another, better way to reduce spam?

I want to avoid a problem I am starting to notice.

Sometimes I see a tiny little typo or technopropisms or some other tiny little thing that I could easily fix

( http://communitywiki.org/WhyWikiWorks ).

But someone has built a huge barrier that prevents me from helping.

We want a system in a way that makes it very easy for anyone to help us.

Certainly too much spam is leaking through just now, but I don't want to go to the opposite extreme and make people go through a big complicated procedure in order to improve a schematic or fix a typo.

--DavidCary 21:39, 21 June 2007 (PDT)

That's a very noble way of thinking. I also like to be able to edit anonymously... There are enough sites you have to register for already. --SebDE

I know how to greatly reducethe amount of spam without stopping anomyomus ips from editing you can install a spam filter like the one at my website EvoWiki we usually dont get much spam at EvoWiki because we have a spam filter.--71.234.233.163 15:01, 22 June 2007 (PDT)

Indeed, a black list based on words is the way to go here. BTW this seems to be an extension you need to install from there

And an easy way to monitor for spam can help, too. The spam cops around here might want to check out those wiki editing tools ;) --SebDE

Bummer, they recently moved the BalckList Extension to the Extension namespace http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:SpamBlacklist

Anyways, if you've problem with installing that or in doubt of maintaining - I run several mediawikis for private use and am quite advanced with regexes, although only very simple ones are needed for the BlackList.

--SebDE

Well I just digged through the code of the Extension and spotted a spam filter option that is already there in the MediaWiki software. It would involve edititing the configuration for any new spam pattern, tough. --SebDE

Anonymous Edits? Aloha from Honolulu David, I just got an email saying my page had been edited by an anonymous user. I don't know who this is, there is nothing his/her page. I would not be complainig if the edits had improved things, but all they did was delete information. Perhaps it is their sense of humor. I am glad there is the record of changes made, so I can try to recover what was removed. Just to let you know that apparently spammers are not all you have to worry about.

Roger RAF 05:58, 9 July 2007 (PDT)

P. S.

I just finished replacing what had been rmoved. Again, I'm grateful for the changes records. I also left a note to whoever did it. I think possibly it was unintentional. I hope that's the case.

It occurred to me that perhaps editing should not be allowed by anonymous users. Perhaps there could be a special page that allowed anonimity, but require identification from anyone who wants to perform edits on pages that others have posted.

I don't know how you'd acomplish it. I'm just a bit po'd that this can happen. He could have easily deleted the whole page. I'm glad it was easy to repair, but I will be moving come the middle of August and I may not have email for a week or two, possibly longer. So if something like this happened then, I would not know for some time. Then it would be a problem. Forgive my rant, but see my point? I'll leave it at that and check back later.

RAF 06:23, 9 July 2007 (PDT)

I'm sorry that your page was damaged. Certainly, blocking "ip users" would have stopped this particular problem. But is there a better solution? One that doesn't force people to go through a "identification process" before fixing a little typo? --DavidCary 14:45, 9 July 2007 (PDT)

Yes, there is, I already posted this. http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:SpamBlacklist

4 simple steps:

• Create an article for spam phrases -- I'll pop up more often (even create an account) and help maintaining this list ;)
• Protect this Article against anonymous edits
• Install the Extension
• Configure the extension to use the just created Article (in this example spam blacklist):

require_once( "$IP/extensions/SpamBlacklist/SpamBlacklist.php" );
$wgSpamBlacklistFiles = array(
   "DB: $wgDBname spam_blacklist",
);

--SebDE

OpenCircuits Guideline

Here is a rewritten guidline as per your request. It may need some polishing:

... moved to We love volunteers ...

User_talk:Freqmax

Start the page Guideline ..?

I think that's great. We might want a "guideline" page someday, but for now I'm going to stick it over into "We love volunteers". --DavidCary 00:44, 3 August 2007 (PDT)

Delete object

Can you delete this? Freqmax 05:50, 31 July 2007 (PDT)

Spam

Do you have adminstrative priviligies?, anyway I have summerized the spammers ip here and noticed, that the same networks. And esp same edit comment and content tend to stay the same. It would benefitial to be able to block these rougue networks and aswell block submission of any page that contains these phrases in their edit summary. Or spammer links.

I'm a "sysop" now. I've banned a bunch of individual IPs, but I hope that fine-tuning the "$wgSpamRegex" will not only save me time, but also avoid annoying people sincerely trying to help. (Please use the Sandbox to post words/phrases/URLs that ought to go into the "$wgSpamRegex").

Amen to that.

And I see that someone recently installed the Special:Contributions/Spam cleanup script on 30 July 2007. I'm guessing that's the same script that Tim Starling wrote. --DavidCary 01:23, 3 August 2007 (PDT)

Well, as with the banning of IPs, the spam problem could be adressed earlier, so it not even appears in the history. $wgSpamRegex is the better choice in my opinion. I'll come up with a regex somewhen this weekend or so ;)

I suggest that ip blocks (see Spammer ip) like 217.141.249.0/24 (Interbusiness Italy) are used for any ip that spam on sight. And that users from such address blocks are blocked from doing any edits. But may create a user account and then edit. This is due that most spam is made from accountless ip addresses. This will allow everybody to still edit while preventing most spam. Maybe it could be made possible for people without sysop access to add ip-ban? Freqmax 11:55, 12 August 2007 (PDT)

Did it came to your mid that this might not be the ultimative solution to a spam problem? Did it ever occur to you that the same kind of spam comes from (regional) totally independent IP ranges? Have you noticed that spam can origin virtually everywhere? Do you want to block every IP in the internet? :)

I have noticed that certain countries like China, Russia, Italy etc.. tend to be overrepresented. And ofcourse one should block ranges not individual IPs. Other than that pattern matching (regex) is proberbly the way. Most spam seems to contain full qualified links to domains that tend to reoccour. My hope is we can improve such that we don't need spend so much time on cleaning up.

Wow, this spam is getting quite nasty. I'm all for openess and such, but perhaps it's time to change the settings so only verified users can make edits. I'd rather spend my time designing a nifty new circuit than removing spam. Spam me if I've suggested the unthinkable.--Yzf600 17:25, 28 August 2007 (PDT)

Indeed, if you want to enable anonymous editing, you have to use advanced spam fighting methods. This site is of no use in the current state. --SebDE

Yes, this spam is nasty. The $wgSpamRegex seems to be broken today -- sorry. I hope this gets fixed soon. --DavidCary 23:31, 30 August 2007 (PDT)

I have written a quick guide on how to remove spam How to delete spam to help people avoid deleting good edits. Freqmax 17:33, 8 September 2007 (PDT)

Thank you, Freqmax. --DavidCary 22:29, 22 September 2007 (PDT)

Aloha from Oviedo, Florida Yesterday I changed my email in My Preferences, to reflect my current address. I waited for the confirmation email, but it didn't arrive for several hours. I tried re-sending it a few times, but eventually stopped watching for it. So of course, this morning there were several confirmation emails sitting in my inbox. Most had expired, but one was still valid and so I am confirmed. I found a message that my Talk page had changed. Someone had replaced your first reply with a bunch of gay porn sites. I was able to get the proper text back in place and noticed you had been doing the same over the last several weeks. I just wanted to thank you and say I hope to be able to do more of my own weeding in this area. I guess I should check the rest of my posts.

Keep up the good work.--RAF 07:55, 24 October 2007 (PDT)

Thank you. I hope to get better spam filters installed Real Soon Now. Meanwhile, I hope we can get a bunch of volunteers to scare away spammers by using the How to delete spam technique. --DavidCary 16:43, 24 October 2007 (PDT)

---

Just looking around again to suggest an other extension. You know, since there is not much effort to maintain the software around here there might be a one shot thing to get rid of spam. Seems to work nice on the WPKG wiki... Extension is: ConfirmEdit Not as userfriendly as a spam blacklist, but what do I care anymore? :) --SebDE

Thank you for the suggestion. Yes, annoying. But certainly better than what we have now. Let me look into it ... --DavidCary 08:30, 29 October 2007 (PDT)

The Spam on this site is out of control (in three days i've done about 200 edits to delete spam) the captcha is really necesary, or any other system that stop machine editings (they dont get tired, never) Garrocha 03:29, 30 December 2007 (PST)