Smart Cover

The first thing to talk about is the iPad 2 Smart Cover, which I find just doesn’t stay closed. Here’s a picture:

… and a video:

The smart cover is neat. It hooks up to the side with little magnets, I just don’t find that it works very well.

Getting optical output – attempt #1

I have a fancy $630 ipad, why would I want to listen to crappy analog output from it? It’s the latest and greatest technology, however it has no toslink or sp/dif port.

What I do have is a HDMI out adapter that I can use with my HDTV. So, I think to myself…. HDMI has digital audio, all I need to do is get that digital audio into a format I can use, like toslink optical. Can’t be too hard, can it? So I google around and find a product that looks like it will do it, something called a “HDMI audio extractor”. It has HDMI in, toslink out. There’s also some other outputs, including analog out and a passthrough HDMI output. Surely, this ought to do it? Well, no. Turns out it only works in a passthrough configuration. If I don’t hook a TV up to the HDMI output on the HDMI audio extractor, then nothing will come out of the optical output.

Looking around for other options, I see a couple of other devices, mainly docks, that will output digital audio. They range from fairly cheap to really expensive. A bunch of other forum threads talk about using the camera adapter with a USB audio adapter. Yuck, that doesn’t sound pleasant.

Finally, I stumble on something called “airplay”. It seems the ipad is able to stream it’s sound output to a device called an “airport express”. I’m not sure why this was so hard to figure out, but it was fairly nonobvious to me. As an added benefit, it will also be a wireless solution.

Getting optical output – attempt #2

So I decide the way to go here is to use an Airport Express. The airport express is this contraption that looks like a fat wall-wart with an ethernet port, usb port, and 1/8 audio jack in the side of it. Supposedly, the 1/8 audio jack is a fancy combination analog-digital jack with a little laser sitting behind it that will output my optical digital output. I order a couple of mini-optical to toslink cables.

So, like any wireless piece of equipment, it has to be configured to my network. I load up “airport utility”. It can’t find the airport express. Not surprising, since my desktop uses a wired connection. On a whim, I try to plug the ethernet cable into the airport express to see if it can find it over a wired connection. No such luck. Off to the laptop it is.

The laptop is more productive, “airport utility” finds it’s device and warns me that it’s going to mess with my network settings to configure it. I figure… what’s the worst that can happen? Well, it manages to corrupt the laptop’s network settings in some incomprehensible way. I spend about 30 minutes repeatedly trying to re-enter network keys and whatnot before finally giving up, deleting my wireless and re-adding it.

Now I decide to change the airport express’ IP address to a static IP, because I’m a static address sort of person. For some reason, as part of changing the airport express’ IP address, airport utility once again needs to corrupt my laptop’s network security settings. Delete/re-add connection.

Then it says it found a firmware update (gee! that’s easier once I fix the laptop so it can talk to the internet). So I figure, sure, I want my airport express to be the best airport express it can be, so I update the firmware. It changes the airport express’ IP address to 169.254.171.162. I have no idea where this address came from, it’s not on my subnet, not reachable from my subnet, and not something I ever typed. I change it back to the static IP I wanted (once again, airport utility decides that in order to update the airport express, it must corrupt the laptop’s network settings). Delete/re-add network connection. Surprise, the IP is still set to 169.254.171.162 (I’d still like to know where this is). I give up and just turn the frickin’ thing back to DHCP. Apparently the new firmware must not be up to the task of something so fancy as a static IP address.

I decide that “base station 6b66b” is probably not my favorite name, so I give it a better name, like “Airport Office”. This once again causes airport utility to damage the network settings on the laptop. Delete/re-add network. Now my airport express has a reasonable name. Apparently changing any setting on the airport express also requires airport utility to do some unspeakable act of perversion to the laptop’s network settings.

Anyhow, *FINALLY*, we grab the ipad and magically a dropbox has appeared next to the volume control, giving me a choice of speaker selection of “iPad” or “Airport Office”. Success. I plug the Airport Express into my minidigi/miniamp using the toslink and mini-optical adapter and at long last, we have digital output from the ipad to a digital amplifier. Kind of a long way getting here, but it’s done.

The sirius/XM player also plays through airplay (just set the speakers via the ipod app first). Even other programs, such as games, are sending their audio to the airport express. I haven’t verified if this is true of all apps.

Complaining about the iPad Sirius/XM app

The app sounds good, but have a number of problems that should be simple to fix but haven’t.

1. It times out and shuts off if the iPad is idle for a while. The iPad doesn’t shut off itself, just the silly app, poping up a dialog box asking if you want to continue. This sort of invalidates the whole concept of using this app with airplay if you have to wander over every so often and restart it.
2. If there’s the slightest hiccup with the stream, it pops up a dialog box asking you to press ‘ok’ to reconnect. DUH! Just reconnect already, don’t ask me if you need to reconnect.
3. The iPad being a wireless device, isn’t going to have perfect connectivity, especially in neighborhoods like mine where there’s a ton of competing wifi routers. The occasional connectivity hiccup will occur, resulting in the confirmation dialog mentioned above.
4. Sometimes an error occurs that is so egregious as to cause the app to want to reset the authentication information. In this case, the app doesn’t automatically use the stored name and password, so you have to retype your sirius ID and password. Annoying.
5. A couple times it’s popped up a dialog complaining that someone else is using the stream (they aren’t), and disconnects me, requiring a full reconnect with password re-entry. I suspect the silly app is reconnecting, and detecting it’s own connection as another user. Alternatively, it could be wifi migration (I have two routers to cover the house).
6. The app has froze several times while ‘checking credentials’, requiring the app to be killed and re-started (and the name/password retyped, again).
7. At least once it has forgot all of my favorites and I had to re-add them.

These aren’t big things to fix, a lot of it can be done by just making the app a little more robust and auto-reconnecting on errors. Check the reviews of this app in the appstore and people absolutely hate it due to the reliability issues. You’d think sirius/xm would have the resources to make it right.

I ended up giving up on the Sirius/XM iPad app entirely. It’s just not reliable and the inactivity timeout is a total pain in the butt. So, what I did instead was to use a program called ‘airfoil’ with my own xmicroplayer software. Xmicroplayer can run for days or weeks without experiencing a hiccup. I have an existing Linux box that I run various virtual machines on with VMWare, so it was easy to run yet another VM, this time running Windows XP and install airfoil + xmicroplayer in it. The plus is that this consumes no additional resources around the house; the VM server was running all the time anyway. One complication was that airfoil was a bit perspective about connecting from inside the XP VM — for some reason I had to create the VM under VMWare on my Windows box, suspend the machine, copy it over to VMWare on the Linux box, and then restart it. If the XP VM was rebooted on the Linux box, then airfoil would start throwing firewall errors. As long as I keep a powered-on checkpoint set, it’s easy to restart the VM in the state where it’s working. I suspect there’s something interesting going on here, but I lack the desire to look into it further, as now it’s working, convenient (Sirius/XM always on and playing), and extremely stable.

I’m even thinking about getting a couple more Airport Expresses and installing them on speakers in other locations. Supposedly airfoil can stream to many things at the same time.

An oscilloscope is one of the handier pieces of equipment that you can have on your workbench, especially if you’re working with circuits that generate any kind of waveform or have any sort of oscillators. For about a decade I’ve had a decent B&K precision 20Mhz analog scope. I felt it was finally time to try upgrading to a digital storage oscilloscope.

There were several options for inexpensive digital scopes. The first I looked at was the Instek GDS-1000 series, but I quickly found that much of the discussion of the Instek scopes also included comments about the Rigol units so I started looking into those. I found many positive reviews of the DS1052E.

I went ahead and ordered one from an Ebay seller who was also a registered US Rigol dealer. There used to be a lot more Ebay sellers (most of them unregistered, not official dealers) and the prices were more competitive, but the powers that be have clamped down on that, so expect to see only a few Rigol scopes on ebay. Other options include buying the scope from overseas (i.e. dealextreme or similar companies), but that can incur a lengthy shipping delay from China or Hong Kong.

The scope arrived double boxed and in good shape. It included a couple decent 1X/10X probes, power cord, CD, etc. One early point of confusion was the included Ultrascope software which had some installation problems. The ultrascope software requires the National Instruments VISA runtime (aka VISA32.DLL) and Rigol foolishly included a version of the runtime that was either broken or otherwise included an incompatible DLL file. Some googling revealed the correct version of the NI runtime could be found at http://joule.ni.com/nidu/cds/view/p/id/1071/lang/en. One expects Rigol will fix the installation CD to have a compatible runtime, so if you order your scope, hopefully the problem will be fixed.

The scope itself is a pleasure to use. It has a color screen, so the two channels appear in different colors. It’s capable of performing a variety of automated measurements (frequency, period, min/max V, peak-to-peak V, etc). It can save waveforms to external storage (USB card) which can then be recalled later or viewed offline on the ultrascope software. There’s really little to say about a scope… it does what it’s supposed to do, and it does it well.

It’s also very compact, using a fraction of the desk space that my old analog B&K did.

One of the interesting things about this scope is that posts on the ‘net claim that it can be software upgraded to 100 Mhz capability. I’m haven’t tried the process myself, as I haven’t yet encountered any signals that need that capability, but if you need a 100 Mhz scope, google around and look into the process yourself. I wouldn’t be surprised if the process was unauthorized and voided the warranty or otherwise brought down the wrath of doom upon you, but let’s face if Rigol didn’t want people soft-upgrading the scope then they should have thought about that ahead of time…

In summary, the DS1052E is a good scope. It does what it’s supposed to do. It does it well. It does it in color. I have no complaints.

Link to the youtube video:

Unpacking:

First of all, unpacking…. It comes in a big box, and it’s relatively heavy. Big heavy things are the sure indication of a quality product, right? well let’s hope so.

Using Cisco CP Express:

The router comes with a CD-ROM containing installation software. There are several ways to configure the router, ranging from command-line terminal sessions, to something called CP Express, and to something even better than CP Express called simply “CP”. The quick start recommends using CP Express, so I go with that.

It needs a password. Well gee, that’s the one thing Cisco forgot to write down anywhere. Searching the printed documentation that came with the router, I got lucky and found the following in the Cisco Regulatory Compliance and Safety Information Roadmap:

The default username and password is Cisco. They are case sensitive.

Well, they were almost right. It is case sensitive, but it’s “cisco”, not “Cisco”.

Okay, back to business. Now we have CP Express up and running and it’s asking us questions that sound like the usual things a router asks: what IP address do you want to use, how do I connect to the WAN, what DHCP settings to use, etc. This all seems very good. I get it all configured and press the magic <Ok> button at the end. It tells me it’s updating the router configuration and exits. It does not update the configuration. No settings are changed. Try it two or three times more, no difference.

Using Cisco Configuration Professional:

So, I move away from the toy “CP Express” to the much more ominous-sounding “CP”. Who wants the use the “express” version of the software, anyway? We’re professionals here.

Well, CP loads up, displays a progress bar, opens two Windows Explorer windows, opens a third thing off screen, and sits there. I go off to the kitchen and get a bite to eat. It’s still sitting there. I watch some youtube. Still sitting there. Progress bar keeps moving across the screen (who was it who first decided progress bars should move even when the software is stuck, anyway?). It’s obviously not doing anything.

Maybe it has something to do with that window that’s 95% off-screen. I open up the windows task manager and start killing processes until I figure out which one it is. It’s called “IEC2″ . I don’t know what it is or what it does, or why it’s 95% off the screen. I can’t move it. I try to get clever and resize the screen but that doesn’t work either. I reboot the laptop again. Still stuck with a progress bar that indicates progress even when no progress is happening.

Took a break…. played some warcraft… did some work….

The next step I setup a virtual machine to run the Cisco CP software in so that I could try to configure it from a controlled environment. On a plain ordinary windows XPSP2 VM, the CP tool also failed. After wasting another hour scouring the Internet, I realized that this thing needs a particular version of Adobe Flash installed. Yes, that’s right:

YOU NEED ADOBE FLASH TO CONFIGURE THE ROUTER

If you don’t have flash installed, does the CP software warn you? No. it just sits there with a blank screen. If that isn’t pure stupidity, I don’t know what is. You also need java, which is slightly more understandable, but also a pain in the butt.

So, now we’ve got the CP software installed, running, and able to detect the router.

The next step, I try to enable the internal access point. It acts like it configures it, but the AP is not visible from any wireless devices. Don’t know what’s going on there.

Next, I try to change the router’s default IP address from 10.10.10.1 to something more sensible. Software warns me that it’ll lose connection if I change the IP address (well, duh!, but thanks for the warning). After changing the IP Address, the software immediately hangs. While it was smart enough to warn me that the connection will drop, it seems that the CP software itself isn’t smart enough to realize this and hangs waiting for a reply from the (now at a different address) router. Eventually after a few minutes it’ll time out.

Unfortunately now it can’t talk to the router. Although the router is at the new IP Address and responding to pings, it doesn’t respond to telnet or web connections. Could it be that I need to write the configuration to flash and restart the router to restart telnet and web on the new IP? I don’t know, and I’m a little bit worried about bricking the router if I write a known bad configuration to flash.

Fixing the access-control list:

Got out the serial cable and a USB-to-serial adapter to try to figure out what the heck was going on with the router that refused to talk to the new IP address.

The answer was fairly simple once I examined the configuration. There’s an access-control-list that specified which IP addresses are allowed to access the telnet and web interfaces. The ACL was not updated when the router’s IP address changed. Therefore we had a router that was configured on one network, but only allowing connections from a different network. The fix was fairly straightforward — from the serial terminal:

config
ip access-list standard 23
permit 192.168.0.0 0.0.0.255
exit
exit


The above is of course for a network 192.168.0.0 with a netmask 255.255.255.0. Note that the second argument to the permit directive is sort of the inverse of the netmask — it’s a mask of clients that you wish to allow.

Once I proved the router was working and talking to everyone I expected it to, the next step was to write the configuration to the startup configuration, so the router would be setup correctly on power loss:

copy running-config startup-config

Getting the access point up and running

Okay, so now let’s have a look at the internal access point.

The AP works like a separate device inside of the same box. It has it’s own IP address. It has it’s own configuration file. If you follow my CLI examples below, make sure that you’re telnet’d into the AP and not into the router.

The access point gave itself an IP address using DHCP. I don’t like dynamic IP addresses for my access points, so for our first step, let’s change it to a static IP. I used the CLI for a quick change (make sure you telnet into the AP, not the router):

config
interface BVI1
ip address 192.168.0.123 255.255.255.0
exit
exit

(of course, the telnet connection drops when we do this, because we just changed the IP address. We’re smart enough to know this, even without Cisco CP to warn us)

Ok, just as an example, we see the internal AP now set to 192.168.0.123. Simple enough, I’m starting to like the CLI way more than the crappy GUI tools.

Now lets play along with the GUI interface to the access point. Surprisingly it doesn’t suck the CPExpress and CP did. We can get to the GUI by using the IP address of the access point (in my example above, 192.168.0.123; probably different in your environment) in our web browser. It’s a much simpler design than CP/CPExpress. It doesn’t have the ridiculous pop-up window, and I’m guessing it doesn’t need Adobe Flash to work.

The AP will ask for a name and password. Even though I set the username and password on the AP, and verified it was set to what I wanted using the CLI, the access point GUI still expected a name and password of “cisco”. I couldn’t find any place in the GUI to change this. So, let’s fix this, again using the CLI on the AP (make sure you telnet into the AP, not the router):

config
ip http authentication local
exit
exit


I kinda figured this out by looking at the router’s configuration file, which had way more stuff in it than the AP’s configuration file. My guess was that since the ap lacked a ‘http authentication’ setting, it was defaulting to cisco/cisco. Telling it ‘ip http authentication local’ configures the http server to use the local username and password for authentication, which I think is what everyone wants.

Ok, back to the AP GUI. Like I said, it doesn’t suck as bad as the other cisco GUIs. In fact, it’s downright usable. You can click on the ‘express security’ link and setup your SSID and WEP or other authentication.

The wireless radio by default is disabled. You’ll want to change that. It can be done in the GUI by clicking network interfaces (notice Radio0-802.11N is ‘disabled’ and ‘down’). Then click Radio0-802.11N. Then select the ’settings’ tab. Click the ‘enable’ radio button. All the way down at the bottom of the screen is an ‘Apply’ button. Congrats, we’ve just turned the AP on. We can get out our laptop, check the WiFi, and find a new network available.

Now, once all of this is working, it’s time to save it to the startup configuration (make sure you telnet into the AP, not the router):

copy running-config startup-config

Observations on Day 2

Okay, we’ve made some progress and I think I have enough experience to make some conclusions:

1. The Cisco CP and CP Express software are junk and have major usability problems.
2. The Cisco AP web GUI is usable with some minor flaws.
3. The Cisco CLI (command-line interface) is by far better than any of the GUIs.
4. The Cisco CLI is easy to learn, at least for someone with average experience to command-line operating systems (and by ‘average’, I mean I’ve been doing this for 25 years).

I would suggest that anyone who wants to use one of these routers invest some time in learning the CLI. Although I figured out what I needed to do by stumbling around and the occasional google query, it might be handy to pick up a book and read up ahead of time. So far the router feels more configurable and more powerful than the other routers that I’ve used (D-Link, Netgear, Linksys, and DDWRT). It’s going to take some time to learn the full potential of what I can do, and how to do it.

For a very quick intro to the Cisco CLI, I’d recommend this link: http://www.cisco.com/warp/cpropub/45/tutorial.htm. It helped me considerably with some of the simple commands like setting IP addresses, writing the startup configration, etc.

Setting up a DNS proxy

All of my other routers had a DNS proxy built-in. The local computers send DNS requests to the router, which forwards those requests upstream to the ISP’s DNS servers. There’s a variety of flavors of this from simple forwarding to caching to actually running a local DNS server.

Scouring CP and CP Express for this (why did I try the GUI tools again? why?) there’s no explanation for how to set this up on the Cisco router. Some googling reveals some simple CLI commands can be used to setup the DNS proxy:

config
ip name-server 68.87.69.146
ip name-server 68.87.85.98
ip dns server
exit


Note that 68.87.69.146 and 68.87.85.98 are comcast’s DNS servers for my area. You’ll want to substitute the DNS server addresses for your ISP. There should be a way to learn the ISP’s settings from DHCP, but I’m not sure how — if somebody knows, please reply to this post.

Observations at Month 1

It’s now been about a month and the router has performed pretty much flawlessly. I even took some time to experiment with snmp monitoring and wrote up a SNMP monitoring tool for windows.

Related Stuff

• Scott’s Router Monitor. A small taskbar application to monitor Cisco routers. I wrote it because I didn’t much care for the web-based monitoring tool that came with the router. The tool will show you packets in/out, cpu utilization, and memory utilization.
• Cisco Router Cheat Sheet. Snippets of useful IOS stuff.

youtube video of my demo of the AOYUE 852A:

youtube video of an extreme close-up relflow soldering a part using zeph solder paste:

The miniDIGI and miniAMP are the two little cards sitting on top of my CinemaTube. The pepsi can is shown for scale. Here’s a closeup of the MiniDIGI and MiniAMP without all of my extra junk:

The miniAMP is the card on top and is a class-D amplifier that take I2S digital audio signals and amplifies them for your speakers. You can use it in a four-channel configuration (four digital signals in, four speakers out) at 10W per channel, or you can use it in a bridged configuration for 20W per channel (two digital signals in, two speakers out).

The miniDIGI card is on bottom. It has two toslink inputs, two coaxial inputs, a toslink output, and a coaxial output. It takes the digital audio from your audio components (dvd/blu-ray, media player, etc) and outputs I2S digital signals for other products in the miniDSP family. It can also take I2S inputs and output them on the toslink/coaxial outputs.

By using just these two cards, we have an amplifier that accepts your digital input (coaxial or optical/toslink), amplifies it, and drives your speakers. It’s a nice compact solution. The real power would be obtained by adding one of the miniDSP cards which can be configured as a digital crossover or other functions, but that is territory for a future review.

My miniAMP and miniDIGI arrived direct from the manufacturer, shipped all the way from Hong Kong. To my great surprise, I ordered it on a wednesday and it arrived the following monday. That’s much quicker shipping than many products that I order locally here in the states. The boards are well-constructed and include standoffs and cables for chaining the boards together. A toslink cable is also included. The one thing that isn’t included is a power supply. You’ll need something capable of supplying 12V – 24V DC at an amp or two. I used a 22.5 VDC / 1.5 AMP power supply from my Roomba. Beware that the power connectors use the 2.5 mm barrel jack, which I found to be slightly uncommon — the 20-30 wall warts in my junk bin all used 2.1 mm connectors.

Getting the amplifier up and running took only a few minutes. I reconfigured one jumper to select my input (optical #1). It comes jumpered to automatically bridge the input to the output, so you could easily daisy-chain multiple units together (think of the possibilities; a separate amp for each speaker, connected by optical cables).

I connected the supplied toslink cable to my CinemaTube media player and the thing fired right up. It’s pretty close to being plug & play.

There are a couple of limitations that one should be aware of. The most notable is the lack of a volume control. There are two jumpers than can select any of four preconfigured gains (-3 DB, 3 DB, 9 DB, 12 DB), but that’s it. One answer is to control the audio from your source device. This works perfectly with the CinemaTube that I was using it with. Another option would be to use a post-amplifier volume control. The solution that the manufacturer likely had in mind would be to use one of the miniDSP cards inserted between the miniDIGI and miniAMP. The miniDSP cards have an optional input for a volume pot.

The real flexibility will come with adding a miniDSP card, and that will probably be one of my future projects. An interesting projects would be to use two sets of miniDIGI + miniDSP + miniAMP, build each set into a speaker, configure the miniDSP to function as a digital crossover, and have this fancy amplifier-embedded speaker contraption. Such a configuration would get pricey ($70/miniDIGI, $60/miniAMP, $99/miniDSP) but it would be pretty darn slick when it was all done.

In short, an impressive product.

Imagine if the same could be done for your house… What if you have a display that instantly showed you your energy consumption, both in kilowatt-hours and in actual dollars and sense. That’s exactly what the TED-5000 attempts to do. It’s composed of a series of components that starts with a device attached to your electric panel that measures raw energy consumption and ends with a little handheld display. It also offers PC software and integration with google power meter.

Usually I don’t talk about the ordering process in a review because it’s not relevant and most companies get you the product in a timely manner. Well, things didn’t go all that smoothly with my interaction with theenergydetective.com. It started with the order itself, which had a notice to “expect delivery within 2 weeks”. Well, two weeks went by without any notification. I sent off an email to the company, and it was not responded to. Waited a few days and sent another email. No response. Left a voicemail. No response. Emailed the press department (I am writing a review, aren’t I?). No response. Eventually I gave up and assumed the item was vaporware. Notice came about three weeks after ordering that it had shipped, and on the fourth week I received via the local FedEx guy.

Only problem was, the handheld display did not function. It received no updates from the gateway despite several hours of fiddling with it and double-checking the setup. So I used the technical support resources at hand, the support forums at TheEnergyDetective.com. I outlined the problem in detail with serial numbers and all information that was suggested on the tech support page. Gave it a couple days. No reply. Got frustrated and tried to call tech support. After hours (they’re on the east coast, I’m on the west), nobody there. Researched tech support forums in more detail and found lots and lots of reports of bad displays. Called tech support again, early this time, and got right through to someone. His response was “You’re not gonna like this, but I can’t tell if the problem is in the gateway or display so you need to send both back.” Seemed like an odd thing for a tech support guy to say, like he was expecting to catch hell for the faulty unit. I conceded and agreed to send back both components. Talked to the RMA department, relayed my previous experiences with the excruciatingly slow shipping and was told that the RMA would be handled in 24 hours.

Back the items goes via FedEx to the east coast. 7 days there, 24 hours turnaround, 7 days back. That’s 15 days. No item. No notification from company as to reason for delay. No word whatsoever. So once again I get on the phone to to try to figure out what has gone awry with the RMA process. Turns out it took a week for them to process the RMA instead of the promised 24 hours.

The ultimate time from order to receipt of a function product was nearly two months. This is rather inexcusable. I can get product samples all the way from Hong Kong in a week, and pay less for shipping. The moral of this story is don’t trust the automated shopping cart system on their website. Call instead and figure out what the “real” shipping time of the item will be. If you have an RMA, watch the tracking and call when they receive it. Call every day until it’s shipped if you need to. There’s something wrong with the shipping department at this outfit, so you’ll need to babysit them. Finally, don’t use the tech support forum if you have a technical support problem (it’s been a month and my issue never was answered). Call the tech support department.

Ok, now that we’ve got that mess all straightened out, let’s get down to the actual device. There are three components: the MTU, Gateway, and Display. The display is optional, and in retrospect I’d suggest skipping it and saving the money (more on that later).

The MTU goes in your electric panel. You’re going to need some know-how to install it as you’re dealing with AC line current. Although the installation is relatively simple, you are working in the vicinity of live circuits, so if you don’t know what you’re doing them please stay out of the electric panel. The MTU includes a pair of current transformers that clamp around the outside of the two AC lines that feed the panel. The good news is that you don’t need cut into these heavy wires; the current transformers simply clamp around the outside. It measures current flow by means of electric induction, similar to clamp-on AC meters that electricians may use. While the current transformers measure the current flow, the MTU also needs to be connected via a circuit breaker to the AC circuits so it can measure voltage. You have a couple of options here, you can add a new double-pole breaker, or you can connect the wires to an existing double-pole breaker. Fortunately, since you’re connecting through a breaker, you can shut off power to that breaker (or via the panel’s main breaker for that matter) so you don’t have to work on a live circuit.

Here is a picture of my electric panel (MTU is near the bottom, CTs are at the top):

Also, a close-up of the current transformers. As you can see, they just clip around the wires:

The next piece of the puzzle is the gateway. The gateway plugs into an electrical outlet somewhere in your house and receives information from the MTU. The gateway is the brains of the TED-5000. It also has an ethernet connection that allows your computer to communicate with the gateway, and allows the gateway to talk to google powermeter. The gateway has a built-in web server, which you access through your browser just like any other website. The gateway also includes a Zigbee transmitter that can talk to the TED handheld display. Below is the gateway installed in my closet next to my ethernet switch. As you can see the gateway is pretty small, only slightly larger than the wall wart for the netgear ethernet switch:

Our final piece of equipment is the handheld display. It’s a little portable monitor that shows your current energy usage. It has a built-in battery and includes a charging cradle. The size and shape reminds me a bit of one of the original ipods.

You might be confused about how all this is working together. First let’s review the components again:

• MTU – goes in electric panel, measures current and voltage
• Gateway – plugs into outlet, interprets data from MTU, and send to handheld remote, PC, and/or google powermeter
• Handheld display – displays power usage to the human

There are actually several different communication technologies:

• Powerline communication – between MTU and Gateway. Similar technology to X10 home automation devices.
• Ethernet – between Gateway and PC, or Gateway and Internet.
• Zigbee wireless – between Gateway and handheld display.

Now let’s have a look at how information is presented. The most obvious thing is probably the handheld display. It’s default page shows “Real-time use” and includes dollars/cents per hour and kilowatts per hour. These are the two mose useful pieces of information. You can also tab through pages with the single button on the handheld display to view daily and monthy totals, cost projection, and voltage. The handheld display is adequate, but its monochrome display already looks somewhat outdated considering newer technology like the fancy iphones and ipods.

For example, you can get an ipod/iphone applet that displays TED information using a nice graphical interface. It looks a thousand times better than the TED handheld display, and includes a much more functional user interface with touchscreen control of various functions. There are multiple applets that I tried at the Apple Store, my favorite being called “TED-O-Meter”. Considering the relative cheapness of the Ipod Touch, how much better it is than the TED handheld display, and hwo you can do a thousand other things with your Ipod touch, I’d recommend skipping the TED handheld display, saving your money, and just buying an iphone or itouch instead. I’m also a bit prejudice considering my display was DOA and required a lengthy RMA process to exchange it for a functional device. Below is a picture of the display on my ipod touch:

Your other human interaction is going to be with software, either google powermeter or the supplied TED Footprints software. The Footprints software is very good offering an intuitive interface and is also the place where you configure settings for the device (such as entering your electric company’s rate information so the gateway can compute cost per hour). It displays information on a large round gauge and a series of bar graphs. It also includes some charts that can be used, but I really didn’t like them very well. It seemed like the charts would only as long as the browser was open viewing the TED page.

For charts and history, google powermeter seems to be the way to go. It’s a free service provided by google that stores data for your energy usage and allows you to view history. It puts a convenient google gadget right on your google homepage (or search page). The TED-5000 gateway can be setup to automatically upload its data to google powermeter.

In conclusion, ignoring the difficulty in ordering and the defect in the handheld display, I really like the device. It does exactly what I expected it to, allowing me to view the whole energy consumption for the house. I’ve already saved some money with it by noting abnormal energy usage and realizing that certain devices were left on. The one thing that would make it much more useful would be if more MTUs could be added for individual devices (an MTU to measure the air conditioner/heat pump for example would be handy). The TED can be configured with multiple MTUs for alternative energy sources (solar, etc) but I don’t think it can use more MTUs for specific device measurement. They really ought to add that.

The handheld display is something that I’ve griped about a couple of times (primarily because I’m still irritated over having to RMA it, along with the gateway). If I had it to do over again, I’d certainly have saved my money and not purchased the handheld display. My ipod touch can do everything the handheld display does and a whole lot more.

Now we get to the software (or maybe I ought to call it "softdrinkware"). In order to make soda / pop / "soft drinks", you need to use syrup which the company calls "soda mix". The company sells a variety of soda mixes in both regular and diet forms. As many people have noted, the regular mixes are actually hybrid mixes with 2/3 artificial sweetener and 1/3 real sugar. That’s a real shame as choice has been taken away from the consumer in favor of a perceived health benefit by those who think they know better than you. My initial order contain five regular mixes: Cola, Orange, Grape, Root Beer, and Pete’s Choice. Let’s walk through them from best to worst.

Pete’s Choice and Root Beer were both excellent. Pete’s choice tastes like Dr. Pepper. Both of these mixes tasted as good or better than store-bought soda. There was no annoying aftertaste from the artificial sweetener. I’d highly recommend them and I expect that most of my refills are going to be these two flavors.

Orange and grape …. not so much. Fruit flavors demand a certain sweetness to taste right, and it just isn’t there. The annoying artificial sweetener aftertaste is prominent among these two flavors although it’s tolerable. They also don’t taste that orange-ish or that grape-ish. I might try mixing the syrup in at double the amount next time to see if I can raise the sweetness and strength of flavor while hopefully not ramping up the aftertaste. I’m skeptical. And then there’s the cola mix. This has to be one of the foulest concoctions I have ever had the misfortune of drinking. It doesn’t taste like regular cola. It doesn’t taste like diet cola. The artificial sweetener aftertaste is overwhelming. It kind of tastes like the old diet sodas that would spoil after sitting on the shelf for 5 years. If I didn’t know better, I’d think they’d mixed in some of that chemical is in cough syrup that makes you gag when you put it in your mouth.

Since my initial order, I’ve had some more time to evaluate the machine. I’ve actually grown quite used to the orange and grape taste so that they no longer bothers me. I ordered some “lemon-lime” which tastes just like 7-up or sprite, some “fountain mist” which tastes like mountain dew, and some “lemonade” and “energy drink”. The energy drink tastes exactly like red bull, but costs about 10% as much. All of these flavors are pretty good. I can say that at this point the only one that I truly detest is the cola flavor.

I’ve also had my first carbonator refill. The delivery man who brings the refill asks for your used CO2 cartridge and sends it back for you with no hassle.

I’ve had a chance to try “sparkling water” (carbonated water without sugar) and the flavor essences used to make sparkling water. I’ve learned that I really do not like sparkling water. Not my thing. In my opinion it tastes like alka-seltzer. Maybe someone who enjoys sparkling water can enlighten me as to why you enjoy the stuff and perhaps let me know if this machine makes good sparkling water or not.

In summary, the major issue I had with this machine is the cola flavor. The orange and grape flavors, while not perfect, are something that you will grow used to. The other flavors are all really good. I wish that Soda Club offered more variety though. They should try some more radical and experimental flavors.

The iRobot roomba is a robot that claims to be able to vacuum for you. As vacuuming the floor is one of those tasks that I put off and rarely get around to, it seemed like a good product to evaluate. I evaluated it for a period of about a month.

The performance of the robot is pretty good. You push a button, it cleans the floor. It has a scheduler feature that I did not try, preferring to do the cleanings when I wanted to rather than at a predetermined time. It runs for about an hour, after which it’ll find its charging station and plug itself back in. The floor is always cleaner than it was before it ran, and I’m amazed at the amount of dirt that I find in the debris bin.

The robot does a great job of navigating the rooms. It follows the fall contour getting everything down by the baseboard clean, and it travels through the middle of the room as well. It’s smart enough to back away from and avoid obstacles. On the few times that it’s ventured into the very narrow laundry room, it’s always been able to navigate its way back out.

One of the issues that the purchaser may not realize is that the robot itself does require periodic maintenance. While you may no longer be vacuuming your floor, you are now responsible for care of one robot. This amounts to emptying the debris bin and cleaning the brushes at least once per cleaning cycle. If you have a dog that sheds, then cleaning may be more.

Here is the debris bin, it’s easy to remove:

Next up we flip over the roomba and clean all of the dog hair out of the brushes:

The brushes come right out for detailed cleaning:

One of the big questions is, is the roomba compatible with dog owners? There are a lot of mixed reviews on the issue. I have a pair of Australian Shepherds. When I first started to evaluate the roomba, the dogs’ hair was thick and they were actively shedding. This wreaked havoc with the roomba. It couldn’t make a cleaning cycle without stopping two to three times and asking me to clean the brushes (roomba knows when the brushes are not spinning freely). The dogs were overdue for a shave anyway, so off went the hair. After that, the roomba was much more successful. I clean the brushes once at the end of the cleaning cycle and it will perform flawlessly for the next cycle.

There have been some reports of dog hair messing up the gearbox. I haven’t experienced any issues. iRobot made some changes to the gearboxes some number of months back and that seems to have done the trick.

In conclusion, I’m impressed with the product. I’ve had comments about how much cleaner the room is since starting to use the roomba.

The kit I purchased is called the NCV2.1-14. It uses the IN-14 tube, which is a common and fairly cheap russian tube. The kit is also available in an IN-18 variant using much larger (and much more expensive tubes). Everything is included in the kit except a case; you’ll have to purchase a case yourself. The case I purchased is a “trophy case” from an online trophy case retailer.

The kit was easy to construct using through-hole components, no SMT to worry about. It does of course require a great deal of soldering, but nothing so complex that the amateur should not be able to do it. I found the hardest part was installing the tubes themselves as there are a lot of little wires that have to be threaded through holes in the PCB. Make sure the tubes are straight and true before soldering.

One of the advantages of this clock is that it includes an RS232 serial input where you can connect a GPS receiver. Connecting a GPS will ensure your clock is always accurate. There are many cheap GPS units available, check ebay.

Below is a picture of the completed clock:

GPS-Enabling the Clock

I decided to GPS-enable the clock. My first attempt used an ancient Deluo GM-305 GPS from the junk pile. It worked, but it didn’t work well. It took a long time to acquire the signal, had trouble receiving the signal through walls, and was just plain too large to mount inside the clock enclosure.

My second attempt used an EM-406A SiRF III Receiver module from Sparkfun electronics (p/n GPS-00465). This module was nice and small and looked like something that would be easy to mount inside the cabinet of the clock. It took a little while to figure out how to wire the module up. The module output TTL-Level signals while the clock was expecting RS-232 level signals. It turns out the voltage wasn’t a big problem, but the signal was inverted (the clock saw highs as lows and lows as highs). To fix this, I had to wire a 7404 hex inverter into the signal to invert the serial data going into the clock. It was a bit of an ugly kludge, but it worked. I used an old mouse extension cable for the connector to plug into the GPS. Here is a picture of the result:

Also have a look at Scott’s Nixie Clock, a shareware program that can display a replica nixie tube clock on your computer screen.

First, some background on my particular application. I always wanted a DVD jukebox so that I could store all of my DVDs in one location and watch them at will without having to chase down a DVD and insert it into the player. The advantages of storing DVDs on a big hard drive instead of a carousel of optical discs are fairly obvious, the main one being lack of complicated moving parts. My first attempt at this used a linux computer running MythTV. The DVD images themselves were stored on my fileserver.

Using a fileserver to store the DVD (as opposed to storing them on the player’s hard drive) has several advantages. First and foremost, the fileserver is already a high-performance rundundant machine with RAID mirroring. I don’t have to worry about a hard drive failure causing loss of the DVD images requiring me to reload them all. Second, the noisy hard drive is relocated far away from my TV room, leading to less distraction. Third, multiple players can be used to make the library available to multiple televisions.

The MythTV solution worked pretty well but had some drawbacks. Since I used a general-purpose linux PC (my old desktop machine from years past), it was a noisy power-guzzling machine. I was able to quiet it down substantially by using a SSD for the boot drive (I experimented with remote-booting, but found remote boot to be a pain to maintain). However the CPU fan and GPU fan could never be quieted down to truely silent operation. There was also an occasional stutter in the video output that I never could get sorted out.

Wait…. This is supposed to be a review of the CinemaTube, right?

I searched forth for a simple low-cost box that could serve as my media player. I had several goals:

1. It has to look and act like a DVD player, and play DVD ISO images.
2. Silence. No noisy fans to irritate me.
3. HDMI / 1080p output. For connecting to the flat panel TV.
4. Samba/SMB capability over ethernet. For use with the fileserver.
5. Low cost

The CinemaTube by Brite-View was one such device that fit the bill, so I ordered one from amazon.com. Let’s take a look at this thing in detail.

Ports

1. HDMI
2. Component video
3. Audio Out (analog R/L)
4. Audio Out (toslink digital)
5. USB
6. Ethernet

I started by doing the obvious, I connected a HDMI cable from the CinemaTube to the TV and powered it up. Boot is very quick, about 10 seconds, which close enough to instantaneous to make me happy. Much better than the old mythtv box.

The UI is relatively simple. There are three options – Media Center, Bonus Feature, and Setup.

My first visit was to the setup screen where I manually configure my desired resolution and gave the box a static IP address on my network. It’ll do DHCP by default, but I’m a static IP sort of person.

After setup I went to the Media Center screen. This is where you get started on playing back your desired media (well, duh!). It has options for HDD (via the USB port), PC (via ethernet/samba), and UPnP.

I wanted to mount my fileserver, so I visited the PC Media option. Unfortunately my first attempt was a bust — the fileserver didn’t show up. It took me a little while to realize that the problem was due to misconfiguration on the fileserver, I wasn’t running the NMBD daemon. After fixing the fileserver, it showed right up. I had to navigate through a couple of directories and then viola, there were my DVD images. It has a built-in preview mode that will play the contents of a DVD in a little preview window while you navigate:

Once you pick the video you want to watch, just hit the select button again and it will go fullscreen.

The best thing about the CinemaTube is that it works just like a DVD player. The remote control sports all of the usual DVD controls and it also support DVD menus, something that not a lot of other media players will do. You can pause, skip chapters back and forth, etc. Just like your normal DVD or blueray player.

The next step was to enable audio output to my stereo. Every other digital device I’ve ever used with my stereo used a coaxial audio connection. The CinemaTube was the first device I ran into that offered only Toslink connection. Fortunately, I happened to have some Toslink cables laying around in the closet for just such a possibility. After a short misadventure that led to the realisation that toslink cables come with plastic caps that need to be removed, I was up and running. Audio started flowing from the stereo as soon as the connection was made. If you’ve never used Toslink before, it’s really kind of neat, being able to actually look into the end of the cable and see the bits flowing (well, it’s indistinguishable from any other red led, but that red light is your audio bits!).

After my experiences with the CinemaTube, I’m a convert from the MythTV. The CinemaTube has played every media file I’ve thrown at it, a few which refused to play on the MythTV. It’s quiet, boots quickly, consumes little power, and has no stuttering or other playback problems. The remote control is intuitive and easy to use. It’s a simple device that does exactly what it should.