ka1kjz

Coming soon to the interwebz… HamOpenSource.com, a community, wiki, forum, etc outlining Open Source initiatives (both software & hardware) in the Amateur Radio Community.

Did Firefox suddenly forget the “remember me” boxes on sites like IGoogle, Facebook, etc?  No amount of clearing the cache and cookies will help?  This is pretty simple…  It will destroy all your cookies, but then again, they are pretty borked anyway.

• Exit Firefox… make sure its exited by checking in taskmanager.
• Go to Start… Run… and type %appdata%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles
• Go to the (oddly named).default directory
• Delete “cookies.sqlite”
• Restart Firefox and enjoy

Basically… when Firefox last updated, the cookie used by these sites was invalidated, but for reasons unknown, the new one will not overwrite the old.  These steps destroys your cookie database and Firefox is forced to start over.

This is a new feature of this blog, the Chip Of The Week.  Hopefully every Wednesday or so I will feature a cool and interesting chip here.

First up is the ELM327 OBD – RS232 Interpreter from Elm Electronics.  Simply put, this chip will translate the On Board Diagnostics from your car’s computer to something more readable (RS232).  To quote the maker’s webpage…

Almost all new automobiles produced today are required, by law, to provide an interface from which test equipment can obtain diagnostic information.  The data transfer on these interfaces follow several standards, none of which are directly compatible with PCs or PDAs.  The ELM327 is designed to act as a bridge between these On-Board Diagnostics (OBD) ports and a standard RS232 interface.

The ELM327 builds on improved versions of our proven ELM320, ELM322 and ELM323 interfaces by adding seven CAN protocols to them.  The result is an IC that can automatically sense and convert the most common protocols in use today.  There are a number of other improvements as well – a high speed RS232 option, battery voltage monitoring, and customizable features through programmable parameters, to name only a few.

So… to start you off in applying this chip, here are a few references.

• ELM327 datasheet
• MCP2551 datasheet
• Cornell University EE476 paper “OBDII Project” by Avi Aisenberg & Mike Andromalos
• West Chester University, Independent Project, OBD2 LCD Project, by Jordan Carey

And finally, here is the original story on hack-a-day.

You may have noticed that I have begun watermarking my images with a copyright notice.  I realized the pictures of the SyntorX came out so well, they might end up in dishonest Ebay auctions or the like very soon.  To thwart such thievery, I decided to personalize them a bit.

First, I use GIMP for everything image related.  GIMP stands for “GNU Image Manipulation Program” and was the Linux equivalent of Photoshop (C) (R) (TM) (U) (PAREVE).  Some time ago it was ported to Windows and, well you cant beat the price!

I found this tutorial on the web by Tanked-Up Imaging.  There are others in there, so I heartily recommend poking around on that site awhile.

The Motorola SyntorX series of radios was a very capable, very high performing radio in both its day, and today.  One is still hard pressed to equal its performance in terms of bandwidth, receiver intermod and sheer transmitter output power.  Check out Mike Blenderman’s pages for more information on these radios and comprehensive in depth technical discussion.

Read More >>