15km run today: my longest so far

I did my first 15 km run today :)

No record-setting pace; I got through it by keeping the pace low; took me a total of 1h and 40m to get back.

I borrowed Ida's heart-rate monitor for the run, making sure I wasn't over-stretching myself. Wanted to share the Nike+ Maps illustration of the run.

Thanks to Matt, Bobby, Dale, Diptamay, Dan, Lambert and Tim for getting that stuff live in the first place :)

Route & top-level stats

Pace, elevationand heart-rate stats

PMI is catching up with Agile

The PMI is regaining some relevance by embracing Agile as part of it's official certification process; the new buzz acronym is "PMI-ACP", and while in beta/pilot stage the fully-spelled-out-term is "PMI-Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP) Pilot Program.

The first certifications are due out in Q4 this year, with the  examination becoming available in September.

New Scrum rule book is out; July 2011 edition

Ken Schwaber & Jeff Sutherland released an updated Official Scrum guide in July. It now only contains the core rules of the game; the "best practices" have been taken out, allowing the many varieties of adoption discussed in books/blogs.

The benefit is an increased focus on what is required in order to be allowed to use the phrase "Scrum" for what you're doing. At least according to Schwaber & Sutherland

Arduino Soldering & Tinkering: Ethernet Shield & Accelerometer

Had a great & relaxing weekend, solidering & tinkering with the Arduino.

Impressed myself by soldering together three Arduino shields; Ethernet shield, Prototyping shield and SIM-Reader shield.






Ethernet by far the most interesting. Managed to get the built-in web-server to accept incoming requests from the local network and got the client to work so-and-so doing web-requests at large (couldn't get faster than 9600 kbps!). Got excited about a Cloud API for handling voice calls/DTMF & text messaging; Twilio Cloud Communications. Calls/SMS gets translated to HTTP calls to your web-infrastructure and you just return XML with a element stating text which should be read to the caller via speech synthesis (TTS). Caller can respond using DTMF. Supposedly it's also possible to record audio from the user. Looks very powerful. Here's a Twilio DTMF demo with Arduino (has nice little video).

Having put together the SIM reader card, I realized that it's really not that much fun. If all I wanted to do was to get a backup of the card, I could've purchased that for no money on Amazon. Perhaps there's a bit more fun to be had syncing the card up with Google Contacts or something, but to have a good time, I'll need probably need to at least get the GSM playground shield (~100 euro) - but ideally I'd get a shield which holds quad-band and GPS (it's currently $160 even without the shield).

Next items on the purchase-list seem to be Bluetooth and RFID components, perhaps from Libelium.

With great help from the perfectly named Live Fast - Code Young, I got the triple-axis accelerometer hooked up to the Arduino via I2C allowing text output on the Serial Port. A Processing sketch on the laptop is handling a visual illustration (just 2-axis though). The movements are pretty jittery, certainly in need of smoothing. Video & Pic:

Reference stuff:

• Lady Ada's Ethernet Shield to-do
• NewSoftSerial Ethernet library
• Lantronix XPort user guide
• Triple-axis accelerometer from Sparkfun (ADXL345)
• Wireshark network debugging

.NET API for Betabrite LED Message Display

I recently bought a used betabrite display. It has a remote control for easy programming of simple messages, but to be of any real interest I’d obviously need a library allowing programming via the serial port RS-232 interface.

I found Jeff Atwood’s library, described in an article on codeproject.com. It’s written for .NET 1.1, so I did some slight refactoring to ensure it would compile in VS2005+ and replaced the included class for serial communication with the built-in .NET 2.0+ support. Also implemented a few tweaks/fixes removing a few hardcoded values.

I got Jeff’s approval to put the updated code on googlecode. I initially committed Jeff’s original code, and then committed changes incrementally to ensure anyone can easily identify the changes made using SVN DIFF. I captured the list of enhancements/fixes in the Googlecode issue tracker (marked as done) and added a list of potential future improvements.

Feel free to request commit-status to the repo if you have enhancements.

Here are the details:

• betabrite-api-dotnet on Googlecode 
• Jeff’s description of the library; it’s classes and the Betabrite protocol 
• Fixed issues / work done, on googlecode 
• Open issues / potential improvements on googlecode

More Hardware arrives: Betabrite LED display

More hardware happiness! 560 multi-color LEDs worth of fun ;-)

Not yet sure what exactly to do with it, but I got a Betabrite three-color LED display on Ebay. It was of course critical that it's programmable; it's got an RS232 serial connection so I'm planning to hack it one way or another. Someone's already built a .NET API for the Betabrite, so that'll certainly be an avenue. Either way, having a big display just generally seems to be useful for hardware hacking.

Pics and HelloWorld show-off of the native colors & effects ...

HelloWorld standard animations (via remote control).


Packaging.
You gotta smile when you find this package waiting on your doorstep when you come home;

The three colors;
Red.

Yellow.

Green.

Remote Control and RS232 for programmers.


The Specs.
Manufacturer: Adaptive Micro Systems, inc
Model no: 213C-1
Series: B
Display Array: 80 pixels wide x 7 pixels high
Volts: 7.5 VDC, Amps: 3.25A
Date of manufacture: 03/03
More info at manufacturer site.

Gotta figure out to do something somewhat useful with this things...

Arduini Blinking LED, aka Hello World

Having ordered the Arduini board, along with many many (too many!) other components, I got the software installed and the cables plugged in. The project itself is stupid-simple, but as with any Hello World setup the challenge is in getting all the the different pieces lined up correctly; the development environment, getting to know the programming constructs and API etc. As opposed to general software development, the wiring up & configuration of things are not just metaphors here; the physical nature of wires & LED's are exciting :) Hopefully I'll get into some actual creative & fun stuff now that the Hello World is out of the way...

On youtube; it's glory forever captured:


The Arduini environment close-up;

The Arduino programming environment & code screenshot;

And the code itself;

void setup()
{
pinMode(12, OUTPUT);
}

void loop()
{
digitalWrite(12, HIGH);
delay(500);
digitalWrite(12, LOW);
delay(500);
}

All in all; Physical hardware happiness!