I’ve bought 4 large stepper motors and 4 DQ860MA drivers on ebay a few days ago. Unfortunately one was faulty from the beginning. The seller sent me a new one winthin 2 days which is awesome, but the best part is that i hadn’t to return the damaged one!

So i decided that there are pepole out there who for sure are interested in a teardown :–)

I posted a video on Youtube showing how I connected a Smoothieboard wired to a Yaskawa Sigma 2 AC-Servodriver with a 400W Servomotor. Afterwards I got asked to show more details and that’s why I write this blog post.

I had two identical computers of which one had a damaged Windows 7 installation that refused to boot. The other was a spare machine for that case, but unfortunately it wasn’t updated for about 2 years. So I had to install about 200 Updates which was really annoying.

After all the updates were installed I decided to make an image of the up-to-date computer and restore it on the damaged one.

Since I’m a big fan of open source tools, I wanted to use one and decided to use Clonezilla. The biggest problem with Clonezilla is that it does not support creating images of Software/Fake Raid’s/Firmware RAID’s according to their website.

My computers both have 2 SSD disks with 120GB each configured as RAID1. The RAID controller is the one provided by the Intel X79 chipset of the ASUS P9X79 Pro Mainboards, which is a Firmware RAID.

Last week i tried to read and write data to and from a SICK FlexiSoft Safty controller which has a Modbus/TCP gateway.

Because i had a lot of trouble to get that up and running i decided to write a few lines about i managed to solve my problems.

My MateDealer project was entirely written in C because the Arduino IDE or more detailed the HardwareSerial part lacks the 9-bit support. It is easy to send a 8 bit data frame, but nearly impossible to do that with 9 bit frames. I worked for a while on implementing 9-bit support for the Arduino IDE and recently i finished my work!

I’ve recently bought a few SparkFun ProMicro 5V 16Mhz clones from Ebay because they are extremely cheap (7 Euro each) and habe native USB. The only problem i had is that i was not able to program them using inotool.

I’ve tried to generate the locales on my Raspberry Pi, but i ran into a problem that i was not able to solve for a few hours.

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root@rpi: ~$ locale-gen
Generating locales...
  en_US.UTF-8.../usr/bin/locale-gen: line 41:   303 Killed
localedef -i $input -c -f $charset -A /usr/share/locale/locale.alias
$locale

locale gave me another error

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root@rpi: ~$ locale
locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or directory
locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES=C
LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

But finally i found the solution in an inconsiderable forum post. The reason for the locale-gen error is simply not enough RAM!

The solution is easy, just create a swapfile:

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fallocate -l 512M /swapfile
chmod 600 /swapfile
mkswap /swapfile
swapon /swapfile

Then run locale-gen again and it works :–)

I’ve worked with the Java based Arduino IDE for a long time now, and always thought that i miss the comfort of vim. But for soom reason i never searched for an alternative, but yesterday i had enough of that shit piece of software!

Ino

So i googled a bit to find an alternative and stumbled upon ino. After a few test i must say that ino is exactly what i was looking for :–) Take a look at the quickstart to see how easy it is.

Because i’ve got a lot of emails during the last year with several questions about my MDB projects, i try to answer them here.

Making web uploads less painfull

For one of my current Flask projects i want to have a nice looking and easy to use file upload form. That means no <input type="file"> form field where i have to select each file and the upload it on at a time. I came across this nice tutorial for a HTML5/jquery file uploader, but the backend is written in PHP. So I decided to try to get this working with Flask and it was easier as I supposed :–)