Author: bib

Piloting servo motors using Arduino. Update

Hi there, sorry long time not spoken about this.

I am about to be finished with this project. I am awaiting a motor for the camera rotation as my first one’s was alittle flimsy (a rotisserie motor bah). The kit’s all fitted and test runs worked well.

I still need to enable a web interface to pilot the servos and we should be all good to go.

Thanks for reading…

Ipod on Kubuntu 11.04

Suffering with Ipod on Kubuntu? Me too!

This is the receipe to sync an Ipod Nano (second generation) with Kubuntu:

Create a playlist with Amarok

Load playlist into banshee and sync the IPOD

If “0” songs on Ipod after sync:

Check Ipod with gtkpod and save changes…

Hopefully by this time all should be where it should Yell

It does for me.

Can we have Amarok ablility to copy a playlist on an Ipod please?

Kmail migration – for the record

Transfer mail and settings to another computer (or another user account on the same machine)

Solution: The messages are typically in ~/.kde/share/apps/kmail/. For very old installations of KMail, the messages can also be in ~/Mail. Note that KMail uses hidden sub-directories inside that directory, so you need to make sure to copy hidden directories as well.

For settings you will need to copy the following files:

  • ~/.kde/share/config/kmailrc,
  • ~/.kde/share/config/mailtransports, (since KDE 4.0)
  • ~/.kde/share/config/emaildefaults and
  • ~/.kde/share/config/emailidentities .

Your address book is usually stored in ~/.kde/share/apps/kabc/. Calendar data is in ~/.kde/share/apps/korganizer

Be aware that some distributions use ~/.kde4 instead of ~/.kde/ for their KDE configuration data.

From version 4.4 you may have some Akonadi-controlled entries that also need to be kept. Add to the above list –

  • Everthing under ~/.local/share/
  • Everything under ~/.config/akonadi/.
  • ~/.kde/share/config/nepomukserverrc
  • Everything under ~/.kde/share/apps/nepomuk/ (KAddressBook stores contact groups in Nepomuk.)

Piloting servo motors using Arduino.

New project on the rails, a system to control a webcam movement using motors and servos to switch them on and off…

As a reference I have found  here.

Here are the step used to make the servo work, on an (K)ubuntu machine:

  1. Install arduino repository:
    sudo add-apt-repository ppa:arduino-ubuntu-team
  2. Install arduino:
    sudo apt-get install arduino
  3. Start arduino in the command line:
    > arduino
  4. Select the correct port in Tools> Serial Port (tick the box)
  5. Copy/paste the code, compile and upload it
  6. Install pyserial (you may need to install easy_install with sudo apt-get install easy_install* python-setuptools:
    easy_install -U pyserial
  7. cwd to the servo.py path and call python:
    python
    >>>import servo
    >>>servo.move(1,0)
  8. Your servo should move

I will update when I have done more work

* apparently apt-get install python-setuptools is enough, don’t insert “easy install” in the cmdline

Network manager not enabled on Kubuntu 10.04

For some unknown reason, kubuntu network manager caked on me, the way to restore it is to do the following:

sudo service network-manager stop
cd /var/lib/NetworkManager/
sudo rm NetworkManager.state
sudo service network-manager start

After these commands, the network manager was back on. Now why would this be needed? This is the one thing that really gets me to think that Windows might be bloated but it always kind of “works”

New Blog

I have decided to move the Blog from a free host (blogspot) to my own hosted solution, I am not comfortable with someone else looking after my stuff…Wink