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Mission-Log

Watterott-Electronic sponsors Hardware

Buying Sparkfun products and being in europe always was a little bit annoying due to shipping times & customs hassle. Stephan Watterott, CEO of Watterott-Electronic, offers many sparkfun products and other greatly hackable devices and components in his Shop, shipped directly from Germany.

Stephan was also kind enough to become a sponsor and is willing to provide necessary kits and components for Apollo-NG's Hackerspace and R&D Lab, to let other hackers play with them and to enhance the functionality of the Odyssey or Aquarius:

  • BeagleBoard for Odyssey's MCU
  • Sensors for Argus
  • Power Sensors (Allegro)

When the current maintenance cycle ends and the next R&D cycle begins, all development tasks will be weight by importance, to identify priorities and then decide what is going to be needed.

Thanks for your support Stephan, we greatly appreciate your generosity.

2012/03/23 11:49 · chrono · 7 Comments
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Sharing is caring - not tracking

Operating and providing a website for a project always inherently leads to finding ways, to let more people know about your content. Social media bookmarking is a great way to do just that. But, as every so often, many people compromise comfort for reasonable security, including some javascript $social_media_provider offers to easily integrate it, allowing $social_media_provider to track each visit a user makes on any other website, that includes just the button/badge. Most users aren't even aware of the fact that this is happening in the background.

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2012/03/19 00:57 · chrono · 6 Comments
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Is burning wood bad?

So called “environmentalists” often claim that burning wood is “evil” but mostly forget in their argument, that domestic energy has to be produced somehow for humankind to survive. There is nothing evil about burning wood, quite the opposite in fact, wood can be a renewable energy source, when used properly. Simply put: To keep it sustainable, it's important not to burn more wood than nature is able to reproduce (i.e. grow trees) and to increase the amount of usable energy that can be harvested.

In order to avoid disastrous deforestation, which happened on the Easter-Islands, is currently happening on Haiti and will become more obvious in India and Africa in the near future, it's imperative to help these people now, by putting a stop to burning wood in open fires or simple stoves and not to implicitly deem them evil because, as of now, they simply have no other choice but to burn wood.

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2012/02/19 08:32 · chrono · 9 Comments
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Pelton-Turbine calculations

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2012/02/18 19:53 · chrono · 6 Comments
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4k HDD Partition Alignment Primer

Although HDD storage densities have increased dramatically over the years, one of the most elemental aspects of hard disk drive design, the logical block format size known as a sector, has remained constant. Beginning in late 2009, accelerating in 2010 and hitting mainstream in 2011, all major manufacturers are migrating away from the legacy sector size of 512 bytes to a larger, more efficient sector size of 4096 bytes, generally referred to as 4k or AF (Advanced Format).

While researching the benefits and consequences of a 512→4k transition, many reports of “partition misalignment issues” were found, that could lead to a severe performance impact which led to a closer investigation to verify the alleged problem and the proposed correct partition alignment. The result is obvious: Misaligned partitions on 4k harddisks introduce a severe performance impact, in this test case by a factor of 5.5 (Aligned: 83MB/s vs. misaligned: 15.5MB/s).

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2012/02/18 19:50 · chrono · 9 Comments
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Random numbers: The fast and the furious

The expression security = usability-1 can be interpreted in many ways. Either things become far too complicated, so that regular users just don't want to be bothered with them or the amount of energy it takes to complete a security-related task is just insane.

To wipe a 1TB (1024GB) disk with random data or prep a disk for encryption, it takes a little more than 4 days (97 hours) when utilizing /dev/urandom. Who would want to wait 4 days for a supporting task like this to finish? Just considering the energy it takes, to keep the whole system up and running, only to write random data to a disk, clearly demands higher random data bitrates without sacrificing quality. Hardware-RNG's are good alternative but not always available, so you might want to give /dev/frandom a try.

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2012/02/15 08:32 · chrono · 7 Comments
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GPS Modules & DevKits generously provided by uBlox

Even the earliest Apollo-NG design drafts already included multiple GPS dependencies for a number of subsystems. Apart from obvious navigation assistance, GPS will also discipline the reference clock module and the 10MHz reference oscillator module GPSDO. The first prototype was hacked around an old Rockwell/Connexant Jupiter TU30-420-031 GPS receiver, found on eBay.

→ Read more...

2012/02/15 08:16 · chrono · 7 Comments
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Odyssey's maiden voyage

After a long odyssey the Command-Module (CM) named Odyssey finally arrived and will undergo Pre-Launch preps immediately. On her first 600km long voyage, she proved to be a fine ship.

2012/02/15 08:16 · chrono · 38 Comments
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BX48 Prommer generously provided by Batronix GmbH

The new Batronix BX48 Batego is an extremely powerful, compact and easy to use universal programmer, that also comes with Linux support. After 3 failed attempts with different Galep-Prommers to write an eprom, Andre Bauer, managing director of Batronix, was kind enough to sponsor one of these nifty devices for Apollo-NG's R&D Lab. Thanks a million, Andre!

2012/02/15 08:15 · chrono · 12 Comments
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VServer generously provided by netcup GmbH

Due to the financial strain, this whole project has to suffer, it became obvious to ask other people for their generous help. It is probably much easier for a project to get other people interested, when it can already offer something more than just a guy with an idea and nothing else, not even a webpage to get more information.

As a matter of consequence I went and wrote to 10 companies in Europe, providing relatively cheap VServer boxes, to have basic HTTP/SMTP services while Apollo is off-grid, like a virtual base camp. Off these 10 companies, only 2 replied and both that did, are rather small, owner operated companies.

Oliver Werner, one of the two executive managers at netcup GmbH asked for a little more detailed description and after that, they've decided to donate one of their mid-range VServer packages for the project. Thanks a lot, for believing in just an idea and giving your support to help making it possible.

2012/02/15 08:14 · chrono · 20 Comments
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