Initially, like most other people, I was disappointed.  The specification – the limited OS.  These things aren’t ideal.  The only saving grace was the cost.  It’s affordable.  I was undecided about whether this new device could be a winner.

But, I started to think about it in a bit more detail a little later on, and while on my evening run – it struck me.

This device will be revolutionary – not for what it is now.  But for what it will lead to.  I’m certain of it.

Optimistically, I think this device represents a new way of living with computing.  At the moment – for most people – their experience of computing is something that’s an especially segmented activity.

Using the computer is an activity that usually breaks the flow of our other activities…  “I’m just going to go on the computer for half an hour”, “I need to go and check my email” .. these are things people say all the time.  We think of a computer as an object that we spend time with.  Even in 2010, the way we interact with computers at home is pretty much the same as it was in 1980s.

It doesn’t have to be this way – and I’d be willing to bet that in the future, it won’t be.  But in order to make the transition, new ways of integrating a computer into our lives need to be developed.

The reason that the ipad is going to be revolutionary is because it’s a blank slate – a computing device for completely new contexts.  No matter what you think of it, I think we can probably rest assured that it will work pretty well – and that many developers are going to come up with a huge range of ingenious uses for it.

I think that it should be seen as a prototype, and as an experiment.  The form of the device provides many, new exciting possibilities.

Other companies will copy, material costs will become cheaper, even cheaper devices will be produced.  The public’s perception of what computer is, will start to change.  Cheap flexible displays and e-ink will become the norm.  Computers are going to start to inhabit our environment more seamlessly.  The way we use computers will integrate into our lives and workflows more sympathetically.

I reckon the ipad will move this all of this forward a great deal.

Tory Spokesman: Umm.. right. Well, welcome everyone. Please take your complimentary cup of bovril .. we’ll need all the strength we can muster for the long fight ahead of us.

(Crowd settles)

Well, thank you – thank you. As you all know this is the big one – the year we’ll oust this incumbent government out of office and we’ll have another shot at the big time!

Crowd: Huzzar!!

Tory Spokesman: Well – looking back on the political landscape of the past year, we were all obviously totally enthralled by the US elections. A time of enormous triumph.

Well now it’s our turn, and we need to let the people of Britain realise that David is the Obama of Britain .. are you with us?!

Crowd: Huzzar!! x2

Tory Spokesman: Now that really is the spirit, tally-ho, by-gosh, wot-wot-wot!?!!.

Um, so .. First on the agenda is, how to let the public know that we’re the good guys. We need to be clever here. We will use the word ‘change’ in our campaign – as much as is humanly possible!!

(Crowd goes wild)

Tory Spokesman: And, as we – the party of change – are all aware, there are other things that Obama has done, which we too will do. Obama likes healthcare – and so do we. We will be the party who make healthcare free to every single citizen living in the UK!!

(Crowd goes wild x10)

Tory Spokesman: At the moment, we think this is possibly all that’s required to gain office; but rest assured, David has told us that he will do absolutely anything to get into office.

Specifically, he’s decided to combine the spirit of morris-dancing Britain with Obama-mania. Which leads me to proudly announce our latest series of campaign posters; my lords, ladies and gentlemen… introducing David ‘a-la-Morris’ Cameron.

[[insert photograph of Cameron blacked up in a morris dancer's costume]]

Britain’s new Internet law — as bad as everyone’s been saying, and worse. Much, much worse.

Digital economy bill: A punishing future

The “Digital Economy Bill” expands government control over the internet

If you feel strongly that this bill should not be passed, I’d recommend you write to your MP to tell them.  There’s a great service called, www.writetothem.com which enables UK citizens to contact their MP, MEP’s and members of the House of Lords free of charge.

The main body of my letter is listed below – if you do contact your own MP it’s important that you use your own words.  I’ve never been certain that our government takes notice of the views of the common people, I think that this issue warrants at least trying to influence a positive change.

DIGITAL ECONOMY BILL

I would like ask for your support in opposition of the proposed Digital Economy Bill.

This proposed, draconian, legislation designed to alter the online-behaviour of UK citizens is unfocused, disproportionate and places the desires of large corporations above the needs of the UK population.

While supporters of the bill may suggest that the introduction of a fixed-scheme of powers to prosecute copyright evaders would be at odds with the fast-rate of change within the digital economy, the creation of a law which provides a vague set of powers, is at odds with liberty.

The recording industry’s lobby state they require this legislation to protect the industry against the effects of piracy and file-sharing. The unfortunate truth is that movement to a digital economy changed the parameters of their industry irreconcilably. If this unfortunate truth is accepted, the need to change must be firmly placed at the feet of those in charge of these media companies.

My personal view is that legislation should not be used to enforce a shift in culture, especially when corporations are the main driver in campaigning for this change. In my experience, education is the only effective method to create lasting change.

A Digital Economy Bill must look to the future and should protect, not criminalise, the citizens of Britain.

If we – the people of Britain – wish to create and sustain a burgeoning digital economy in Britain, we need to create an environment where free-discussion, innovation and continued civil liberties feature prominently.

I’m left wondering what this bill could have been. The move to a digital economy has the potential to create inequality. The bill could have focused on widening – not curtailing – access access to the internet.

• Access to the internet is currently unequally distributed between different sections of society. In the future digital economy, access to the Internet will be as important as the provision of basic household utilities. We should be looking towards countries like Estonia, France, Finland and Greece, who have legislated to make internet access a human right.
• While the 50p tax on land-line telephone users may help provide access to members of rural communities, physical access to the Internet is only one part of the problem. The issue of ‘net neutrality’ is vitally important. I’d like to know why safeguards haven’t been proposed to prevent Internet Service Providers from artificially limiting the type of traffic they transmit over their networks.
• As society becomes increasingly reliant on technology, the potential to monitor and control the activities of the population increases. Without wanting to appear alarmist, the possibility of living in an Orwellian dystopia is very real. I’d like to feel that our government is doing it’s very best to safeguard the civil liberties of the UK population.
• Access to impartial information, free from commercial influence, is vital to a healthy society. There is no mention of how publicly funded media – created via the BBC or Arts Council Grants for example – can be made available via the public domain.
• The types of company operating in the digital economy are far more varied than this bill suggests. By disregarding the full range of technology-led companies, the opportunity for sustained development and further growth are severely limited.

The new digital economy needs to create the right kind of environment to support entrepreneurial innovation, but it also needs to place safeguards – limiting the activities of companies operating in the digital domain.

I would hope that our Government’s primary duty is to act on behalf of the common majority.

Rather than create a set of proposals to ensure a bright future for the UK digital economy, this bill provides wide-ranging measures designed to crystallise the current status quo.

The civil liberties of the UK population are being eroded at a dangerous rate. Many of my friends, fellow Europeans from neighbouring countries, are shocked and appalled that such measures have been proposed.

The Digital Economy Bill does nothing to instil any kind of confidence that the government is able to face the challenges ahead, and I urge you to oppose this bill.

Thank you for your time.

So much of the hype that I read regarding crowdsourcing seems disingenuous.

The majority of the proponents are either those who take a fee from the initial prize fund (crowdSpring/99designs et al), or those who use crowdsourcing as a tool (CP&B, and other clients).

I’d imagine the most fierce supporters of crowdsourcing (as participants) are the very same people who would traditionally participate in the outsourcing of work. For this group, the $1000 offered by design firm CP&B to create a logo for motorcycle brand Brammo, may have been fair compensation – even if obtaining the fee involves entering into a lottery.

After reading about CP&B’s decision to use crowdSpring, my anger piqued my curiosity and I entered into one of these design ‘competitions’ myself.

After participating, I decided to exchange some emails with the contest organiser, and I discovered that he was a subcontractor who takes on web-jobs and uses the crowdsourcing agency to produce PSD images of each potential website which can then be given to other outsourcers who create an HTML website. He likes the crowdsourcing model because he has a number of different designs to choose from, and ultimately he doesn’t need to carry out the work himself.

Crowdsourcing creates a dynamic of factory owner v. factory workers. There’s no equality between participants.

I honestly don’t think that those participating are going to gain a better understanding of the processes involved in design. The idea that the contest organiser even knows what constitutes a good design isn’t even a given. The only known fact is that the organiser has some money.

The bottom line is that it’s unfair to expect anyone with any skill to work for free. In my mind, this is about good old fashioned wrong and right. One group of people is benefiting at the expense of another group of people – and your comment that participants experience “psychic reward” is laughable and offensive.

I do believe that crowdsourcing has a future – but only when a fair remuneration model has been developed. I think that the Amazon Mechanical Turk provided a more fully formed conceptual model in this respect.

The Future of Crowdsourcing

I believe that crowdsourcing in it’s best format involves creating efficiency by horizontally dividing a task between hundreds and thousands of people. Ideally all the participants involved are employed (i.e. paid), and the amount of work they complete is at least as engaging as it would be if the task was approached conventionally.

The benefits of this idealised view, involve speed / efficiency in completing the task and the luxury of a plurality of viewpoints.

Baring this in mind, in my opinion, there are a limited variety of tasks that are suitable for a crowdsourcing approach. I don’t think design is very suitable for crowdsourcing because it’s very difficult to divide a design task among multiple participants.  I don’t think that design can possibly excel when it’s carried out by committee.

Long term, I’d actually question whether these CS companies will survive. Currently I think they’re doing well because:

• We’re currently in an economic downturn – the number of people willing to participate and give crowdsourcing a go will surely have been buoyed by laid off workers.
• The concept is novel. Many people are willing to give something new a chance… but after a short while they’ll most probably ask themselves whether continued participation is worthwhile.

Even so, I don’t think the game’s totally over for companies like crowdSpring or 99designs.

I think that these companies are providing two types of service.

1. The first can be loosely defined defined as crowdsourcing. I say ‘loosely’, because they don’t divide the task of creating design – they multiply it.
2. The second type of service involves building relationships between designer and client; a task which is very similar to that of a traditional work agency.

I think they should focus on providing the second type of service – this is where they could make the most positive difference.

If we look at the way they operate at the moment, (cynically) I’d state that the current crop of crowdsourcing applications are only really acting as ‘enablers’. They provide a place for client and participant to meet – and the functionality they provide is very basic. Currently it would probably be fair to suggest that crowdsourcing web-applications are still most similar in functionality to a traditional bulletin board system.  Ideas (graphic files) can be submitted, and messages can be submitted publicly and privately. There’s little in the way of innovation.

If speaking optimistically, I’d state that these crowdsourcing applications provide a platform for collaboration. This statement holds a lot of potential, but if these companies can possibly survive, they need to try to offer innovative collaborative technologies. The problems they try to solve are both interesting and challenging – but unless they accept the fact that their current approach is full of holes, they stand no chance of becoming a positive force for change.

If the large firms are correct – and their days really are numbered – maybe in the future (within these industries) everyone will work independently of large organisations?

Currently in 2009, it seems that designers need to promote themselves to gain kudos in the industry. In a way, modern designers have become individual enterprises themselves – with their own individual brand, streams to interact with public (via a blog / twitter / vimeo etc).

Baring this in mind, I can imagine a time when all designers operate as ‘hired-guns’ and are hired according to a jobs requirements.

If this kind of situation was to develop, informal work networks would be created on a per-project basis. You’d need to work with a team of people who you’d not necessarily ever meet in person and you’d all need to get up to speed quickly.

If this became true, there’d be a need for a new breed of webapps that can provide a decent way for people to collaborate on projects. (There’s basecamp – but I don’t think that’s ideal).

I don’t like the idea of crowdsourcing because it builds upon exploitation – but I think that crowdsourcing sites like 99designs and crowdSpring are a stepping stone .. they won’t last or replace the way that the majority of design jobs are carried out.

However, despite their faults, these crowdsourcing sites do at least attempt to tackle the problem of finding new ways to sell design services and interact with clients (without the involvement of large firms).

Maybe what we need are alternative models to crowdsourcing which tackle the same problem in a better way – but what could they be?

And while most people probably think they’re too sophisticated to fall for any of the marketer’s tricks – maybe this isn’t the case?  Why aren’t there limits, when companies with a lot of money and power are otherwise given free reign to mess with the public perception?

But we all just accept it .. and because the change happens so gradually, we don’t really mind.  I dislike the idea of activism because all too often it seems that an activist’s views are often as polarised as the views they’re opposed to, but sooner or later something has to be done to moderate consumerism.

We’re probably going to come out of the recession over the next 12 months, but nothing will have changed.  I’m not expecting a revolution – but it would be nice to know that things could be slightly different this time around.

Many places sell ATmega chips with the Arduino bootloader pre-loaded. To actually burn the bootloader yourself, you do need an external programmer.  Fear not though – in a previous post, I discovered how to use an Arduino board (together with the mega-isp project) as a make-shift external programmer -> see this post for details.

Putting the Boot-in..

The version of the bootloader that you need to use, depends on the type of hardware that you intend to program.  The Arduino IDE supplies versions of the bootloader for a range of ATmega / Arduino combinations .. see the ‘./hardware/bootloaders/’ sub-directory within your arduino installation directory for more info.

There are also custom versions of the bootloader created by third-parties -> ladyada has produced some bootloader hacks and another unified version of the bootloader can be found here.

Atmel's ATmega8 microprocessor

Once you’ve decided which bootloader you want to use, you can use AVRdude to upload the code.

Steps Required to Burn the Bootloader

1. Unlock the bootloader segment
2. Upload the bootloader code
3. Relock the bootloader segment

Step 1: Unlock

First of all, it’s a good idea to make sure that you can communicate with your programmer successfully. To do so, you can issue a simple command via AVRdude, which will give you a nice ‘all clear’ status message as long as everything is set-up correctly.

The parameters that you use might vary according to your system settings and the external programmer you’re using.

avrdude -p m8 -P /dev/ttyUSB0 -c avrisp -b 19200

Briefly, ‘-p’ defines the chip I’m programming, ‘-P’ is the port that my programmer is connected to, ‘-c’ is the programmer type and the baud-rate is specified by ‘-b’.  You can run ‘avrdude –help’ to discover the full range of options.

This returned:

avrdude: AVR device initialized and ready to accept instructions

Reading | ################################################## | 100% 0.13s

avrdude: Device signature = 0x1e9307

avrdude: safemode: Fuses OK

avrdude done.  Thank you.

.. which is good.  This means that the stage is set for programming and we can begin to set the fuses to unlock the bootloader segment of the AVRdude.

Each ATmega chip has a number of Fuses which can be set.  I think of the fuses as configuration bits -> they define the way that the chip is going to function on a very low level.  I’ve been using a fuse-calculator to simplify the process, and I’d suggest that you do the same.

avrdude -p m8 -P /dev/ttyUSB0 -c avrisp -b 19200 -e -U lfuse:w:0xc4:m -U hfuse:w:0xd9:m

The ‘-U lock:w:0×3F:m’ performs the unlock and ‘-U lfuse:w:0xc4:m -U hfuse:w:0xd9:m’ is used to set the chip’s low and high fuse values.

I want to use this particular ATmega chip as a minimal Arduino, so I’ve set the fuses to instruct the chip to use it’s own internal 8 MHz oscillator rather than an external crystal oscillator.

avrdude: AVR device initialized and ready to accept instructions

Reading | ################################################## | 100% 0.13s

avrdude: Device signature = 0x1e9307
avrdude: erasing chip
avrdude: reading input file "0xc4"
avrdude: writing lfuse (1 bytes):

Writing | ################################################## | 100% 0.04s

avrdude: 1 bytes of lfuse written
avrdude: verifying lfuse memory against 0xc4:
avrdude: load data lfuse data from input file 0xc4:
avrdude: input file 0xc4 contains 1 bytes
avrdude: reading on-chip lfuse data:

Reading | ################################################## | 100% 0.04s

avrdude: verifying ...
avrdude: 1 bytes of lfuse verified
avrdude: reading input file "0xd9"
avrdude: writing hfuse (1 bytes):

Writing | ################################################## | 100% 0.04s

avrdude: 1 bytes of hfuse written
avrdude: verifying hfuse memory against 0xd9:
avrdude: load data hfuse data from input file 0xd9:
avrdude: input file 0xd9 contains 1 bytes
avrdude: reading on-chip hfuse data:

Reading | ################################################## | 100% 0.04s

avrdude: verifying ...
avrdude: 1 bytes of hfuse verified

avrdude: safemode: Fuses OK

avrdude done.  Thank you.

Step 2: The Burn

The chip has now been set up – the next stage involves uploading the new firmware.

avrdude -p m8 -P /dev/ttyUSB0 -c avrisp -b 19200 -D -U flash:w:/opt/arduino/hardware/bootloaders/atmega8/ATmegaBOOT.hex

… which produces …

Step 3: Re-lock

The final stage involves re-setting the lock fuse:

avrdude -p m8 -P /dev/ttyUSB0 -c avrisp -b 19200 -U lock:w:0x0F:m

And that’s it!

Kenwood CS-1575a Oscilloscope

I haven’t had any luck yet – so far I managed to source a service manual for a Trio CS-1560a.

If anyone has a copy of the manual for the CS-1575a (that they’re willing to share), please get in contact.

To be honest though, I’m a bit worried about killing myself via the high voltage on the board.  Whatever I do – I will proceed with caution!

I’ve read that it’s possible the capacitors might have dried out – at first I thought the gunk emanating from the base of the larger electrolytic capacitors was a sign of this – but on closer inspection I found it was just glue, which was disappointing, as changing the caps seemed like it was something I’d be capable of carrying out.

Any (and all) suggestions on how to proceed will be gratefully received.

Some of the capacitors used by the 'scopes power circuits.

The effects of high voltage on the PCB...

Stripboard design for the +5V DC power regulator circuit (copper side up)

There are lots of different schematics available to produce a 5V dc regulated current, after searching around I chose one at http://stuff.nekhbet.ro/2006/06/18/how-to-build-a-5v-regulator-using-78l05-7805.html.  I used this as the basis for my design, but I also added a quick blow fuse to limit the amount of current that can be drawn – the 7805 regulator IC the circuit uses has a maximum rating of 1A.

The circuit was drawn up in VeeCAD (which is good for designing stripboard circuits.)

The finished product fits on a 9×25 piece of strip-board and produces a nice steady 5 volts from my 12V power adapter.

The finished board

Programming the ATmega

It’s possible to program Atmel microprocessors using an Arduino board and the megaISP project.  This post documents my attempt.

Before starting of got hold of a copy of the datasheet for the ATmega8 (http://www.atmel.com/dyn/resources/prod_documents/doc2486.pdf)

Step 1: Upload mega-isp to Arduino

I downloaded the mega-isp source, and uploaded it to my Arduino board.  The source can be found at google code (http://code.google.com/p/mega-isp/).

Step 2: Set up breadboard

mega-isp: programming an atmega8 with arduino

First of all, I set up the breadboard according the advice given at http://www.uchobby.com/index.php/2007/11/04/arduino-avr-in-system-programmer-isp/

The article mentions something called a bypass capacitor .. which is something I hadn’t come across before.  Basically, it’s a small capacitor that’s used to smooth out small changes in voltage – and should be used whenever you set up a microprocessor in a circuit.  I learnt about them here (http://www.seattlerobotics.org/Encoder/jun97/basics.html)

Because I’m trying to program an ATmega8 (and not the Tiny18 mentioned in the  article) I needed to adjust the pins.  I also added another LED to signal when megaisp is actually programming (which was mentioned in the Arduino source code).

ATmega8/168/328p pinout diagram

The only pins that I needed to consider were:

Step 3: Connecting via AVRdude

AVRdude is an open-source utility for programming Atmel AVR Microcontrollers.

Running the following from a terminal

avrdude -p atmega8 -c avrisp -P /dev/ttyUSB0 -b 19200

produced

avrdude: AVR device initialized and ready to accept instructions

Reading | ################################################## | 100% 0.13s

avrdude: Device signature = 0x1e9307

avrdude: safemode: Fuses OK

avrdude done.  Thank you.

Which indicated that AVRdude had communicated  with the mega-isp successfully.