Savel brain dump in English!

At last I received my MSP430 development kit. The problem is, that Texas Instruments didn’t know geography and they didn’t discovered new EU countries. So, my parcel moved to Lichtenstein instead to Lithuania. So I invested 34 devalued US dollars and received some small items:

The print on the box says: MSP430 Ultra-Low-Power MCUs eZ430-F2013 Development Tool. There is CD and small USB device inside the box. The CD is with neutered software. The c compiler is limited to 4K!. The USB device is special development tool with small daughter board with F2013 micro-controller.

For now I didn’t made anything useful from this stuff. The software is not very user friendly. The example code is very small (on the cd) , only some blinking LED. I downloaded more examples for TI website. When I’ll find some spare time, I’ll examine it more.

USB device can be opened. So you and attach some wire to inside board or change daughter board. Windows XP detected this device as multi-port adapter and installed drivers from TI CD.

Blog post for information only.

In trash pile I found something strange. It was like spot light and pizza box hybrid. Inside lamp box I found some wireless stuff- some controller, PCMCIA wireless LAN card and PSU. The pizza box was antenna.

Wireless LAN PC Card, Simple mobility NL-2511CD Plus EXT2 (High Power (23dbm) Conexant/Intersil PC Short Card-NL-2511CD)
Controller based on Axis Communications CPU without any significant prints on silk screen. Some sticker with MAC address. LAN connection and power in slot. Three LEDs: power, LAN and Wireless.

Other PCB is power supply and PCMCIA adapter.

Antenna made in Israel: MARS Antennas & RF Systems Ltd.
MA-WA24-1X PM

After some investigation I discovered that few years ago one wireless internet providers used such devices for end user points. Now these devices are almost obsolete.

Sometimes it is great need to weld some metal sheets together. Sometimes they are very small, like nickel plated battery connectors. There are special industrial devices for spot welding, but for DIY and hobbyist user it is very easy to build this welder at home.

All you need is few very big capacitors, thick wire and DC power supply. Sometimes you need to put some resistance in such device, and automotive headlight lamp is very good alternative. The PSU must be as powerful as possible. Output voltage must be less than maximum voltage of capacitor and safe to handle.

Circuit diagram of the spot welder is something like this:

In my experiment I used 3 capacitors 100 000μF at 16V each. It is recommended to use variable output power supply to change the welding power. Too much power may make holes in your battery pack. Before welding useful device make some practice on some bad cells.

Here is my experiment with steel tape-like detail from digital photo camera. It is about 0.25mm thickness nickel plated steel. Double spots made connection quite durable. Never use single spot- it tears of very easy. For battery packs prepare special nickel plated or pure nicker foil. As simple steel or copper will corrode in time.

Magnified welding spots:

Just short blog post. The Relisys RWT205CE terminal I received was not working. The problem was classic- fault of the power supply. Just replaced few blown capacitors and everything is working fine. As I replaced with bigger caps, the small heatsink is bent. But it is working fine.

Originally this terminal computer is equipped with Windows CE operating system. And it is designed to work with some server. This terminal is based on i386 based SIS made CPU. RAM- mini dimm, 32Mb. Compact flash card (CF) placed instead hard disk. The card is hardwired to IDE interface using simplified connection. So the master/slave stuff is not working. It is big problem while trying to install other system using CF and CDROM. Other connectors: USB, LPT, COM, PS/2, PCMCIA, CF, IDE, Audio, VGA, PCI and some other unknown.

Main idea while playing with this computer- to install Linux OS and make something like router with advanced options like: data collection from external interface, USB web Cam translation.

After lots of experiments, I only managed to put freesco image to CF card. The problems were booting from the CF card is it was formatted with Windows XP OS. Just only when I reformatted the card using old Epson digital camera.

I managed to boot mini Debian install and it detected USB device, so I managed to add some other images to install.

Some problems with PSU. Or maybe it is normal- but I didn’t managed to configure the device to start after power failure. It is mandatory when using this terminal as fan-less computer or network router. Now after power on I get only blinking LED and no cold boot.