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ZeroPlus LAP-C 16032 Logic Analyser

When working with digital electronics, a Logic Analyser can come in handy to display and decode all these signals. I recently bought an entry-level Logic Analyser with 16 channels – more than enough for testing and debugging my future JeeNode projects. It offers a large selection of downloadable Protocol Analysers. These software plugins are installed on your computer, and aid in interpreting bus signals like RS232, I2C, CAN and SMI.

Software

The Zeroplus LAP-C 16032 comes with Windows-software. There is an Open Source project called “sigrok” that offers alternative software for the Zeroplus Logic Cube series of analysers. They also support Protocol [...]

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June 27th, 2011 | Tags: , | Category: Personal | Comments are closed

Tip: Fedora 14 and Dropbox

The current version of Dropbox does not behave nicely on Fedora 14 – the Dropbox update daemon attempts to execute code from stack. This is prohibited by SELinux (and rightly so).

There is a workaround (taken from the Dropbox Support forum):

/usr/bin/execstack -c ~/.dropbox-dist/_ctypes.so

Let’s hope that Dropbox releases a proper fix for this problem soon.

May 2nd, 2011 | Tags: , , , , , | Category: Work | Comments are closed

USB to Serial drivers

Serial ports, a.k.a. RS232 ports, are no longer available on new computers and laptops. Many devices still use RS232 for communication (network equipment, data acquisition boards etc.).

There are several USB adapters that provide a “Virtual COM Port” using a special “USBtoUART” or “USBtoSerial” chip. Conversion cables containing these chips can be found online – but the documentation rarely specifies which chip is used! The Prolific PL-2303 chip is very popular, but a number of other chips can be found. Some chips are supported by the OS, others need a special driver.

Manufacturer
Chip
Linux driver
Mac driver
Windows driver

FTDI chip
FT232RL
Included since 2.6.31 kernel
Download VCP driver
Automatically [...]

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April 23rd, 2011 | Tags: , , | Category: Personal | Comments are closed

Passed the RHCSA and RHCE exams!

My RHCE certification (RHEL 4) was no longer current so I had to re-take the exam with RHEL 6. I decided to take the 4-day course (RH300) as well as the exam (EX300) in one week but it turned out to be quite the obstacle-course:

Monday. The first day of the course: while waiting in Amsterdam for the trainer to arrive, we were informed that he had fallen ill – course canceled, no backup trainer available. Meh.
A couple of weeks later, the course finally starts with Sander van Vugt as trainer, someone else will proctor the exam (Friday). Things start to [...]

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April 20th, 2011 | Tags: , , | Category: Work | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
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