IraqiGeek's Blog

MSNTV in europe

If anyone wants to get one or more MSNTV 2 devices (RM4100), or any other item from the US for that matter, in Europe, I can arrange to import them. For more detailed info Email me.

PocketGCC mirror

Today, I have setup a mirror for PocketGCC files, mainly for the users of the PocketGCC yahoo group, but its available for everyone to use. You can get it HERE.

I think there are a lot of files that need to be added, and hope to also add a good amount of documentation files to the mirror, such as howtos and tutorials.

If you have any file that you think would benefit PocketGCC users, please drop me an email at geek at iraqigeek dot com with a description of what you have, and how you think it would benefit the PocketGCC community.

EDITED ON 03/02/2010: The mirror used Philer which doesn’t seem to work on my new host. I’ve pulled that package offline and instead created a 7z file with all the PocketGCC related files I have and updated the link above to point to it.

Some ideas about RC planes

I’ve always been a big fan of aviation, and always wanted to learn to fly RC planes, and even build a few of my own, but living in Iraq during the embargo years didn’t help much in fulfilling this dream.

Anyways, I’ve been reading and following RC groups around the net for quite some time, and though I still haven’t flown an RC plane, I think I’ve learn quite a lot from reading all the forums around the net.

One of the topics that are often discussed is long endurance RC planes, especially within the UAV (unmanned aerial vehicles) communities and how to achieve this. Most of the discussion usually revolves around using composite materials in building the air frame, or how to improve fuel consumption and engine efficiency, and sometimes (very rare) someone thinks about hybrid RC planes but without having any clear idea on how to do this.

So, here are some of the ideas that I’ve had across the years:

First, I want to talk about hybrids. When thinking about a hybrid, most people tend to use the same analogy for cars, which is using the gas powered engine to charge a set of batteries that are later used to power an electric motor that in turn drives the car. This usually works in cars because cars don’t usually utilize the power provided by these engines to its full extent, and spend a considerable amount of time idling in traffic jams. This analogy falls apart with airplanes since they are bound by physics laws and have to keep moving above a particular minimum speed. So, what kind of hybrid solution can be used?

Well, my idea is about using solar cells to provide electric power. I think it has already been proven that its possible to fly a glider using solar power alone, at least during day, and have a gas powered engine kick in only when the plane requires extra thrust, say during climb. Even if those solar cells don’t provide enough power to drive a propeller, they can still be used to provide power to run the flight electronics and servos, and even drive a relatively high power video (and/or telemetry) link for many hours.

Integrating solar power in an RC plane, even with not so efficient cells, doesn’t add a lot of weight. There are many (extremely) light weight, and flexible solar cells being sold around the net for very reasonable prices, that will not add much weight to the RC plane. If you consider the weight saving from requiring having less battery packs on board, there is a good chance that there won’t be any increase in weight at all. You would still need to have some battery packs on board to provide for backup and insure stable operation, but no big packs would have to be carried on board.

Next in line, there is engine efficiency. There has been a lot of talk about how 4-stroke engines are more fuel efficient, and how fuel injection, electronic ignition, and using smaller carburetors can dramatically reduce fuel consumption, so there’s not much to talk about here.

One, simplistic, way to increase flight time is to simply carry more fuel. The way I am thinking about achieving this is by designing a wet-wing, aka using the wing structure as a fuel tank. While this is no new idea in real planes (even small Cessna planes use wet-wings), I still have to see someone implement this in an RC plane. Some of the advantages of using a wet-wing design include increased available space in the plane haul, relatively lighter and possibly smaller haul design since the weight of the fuel will be carried inside the wings. Other benefits include less strain on the area where the body of the plane attaches to the wings, since the body will be considerably lighter.

The major hurdle, and the reason I think no one has done this on an RC plane, is that it’s not really easy to seal the wing structure against leaks while still maintaining the flexibility and light weight of the (dry) wing. Another reason is that in building such a wing, you need to thoroughly consider the materials that will be used in the construction of the wings, since the fuel can be corrosive against many materials.

Considering the huge advances in composite materials, and how they are being increasingly used in the construction of RC planes, such as carbon fiber, epoxy, Kevlar, and Teflon, I believe its has become more feasible to build such a wing. It will still require a considerable amount of engineering work in making casts for the custom wing molds, but I believe it’s doable.

Another idea that I’ve been thinking about, though I don’t know if it works or not, is using part of the thrust generated by the propeller as a sort of a super charger (or turbo charger if you want), to increase the amount of air that is going to the engine, and hence increase the total power generated by the engine. Of course we are talking about internal combustion engines here. In a very simplistic way, this can be achieved by using an adapter to increase the area of the carburetor air intake, hence catching more of the air flow generated by the propeller. Again, I don’t know if this will provide any significant increase in power, or if it will provide any increase at all, but I think it’s not that hard to experiment with to find out.

Of course, one could integrate ideas and build a wet-wing and have the top surface of the wing covered with solar cells. It will be quite a feat to do that, but I think the outcome, if properly engineered, would be quite remarkable.

I guess that’s about it for this post. I have a lot of other ideas for UAVs, dealing with automatic route planning, maintaining constant low ground altitude (while avoiding crashing), terrain following, and laser guidance, but I think that I would be getting myself in a good amount of troubles by discussing those topics anywhere online, especially if such topics are raised by an Iraqi guy. I already get enough hostile comments from many people around the net just because of where I come from. I guess there are a lot of ignorant people out there who truly believe that ignorance is indeed a bliss, but what can you do about that?

Thoughts about IBM’s PowerPC

Is anybody noticing how IBMs PowerPC architecture is catching on the market?

The usual market for the PowerPC (PPC) architecture was usually high end IBM servers, and those “few” Macs sold by Apple, but now the picture is changing, and we see more and more PowerPC devices coming to the market.

First, take a look at the upcoming Play Station 3 Cell processor. Its based on a PPC core to power its general rocessing requirements. True that the cell processor is being advertised as as an IBM, Sony, and Toshiba, but if you look really closely you will see that IBM’s contribution in the design is more or less limited to the PPC core that the Cell processor is based on. Now, if you look really close at the Cell processor project, you will see that its a win-win situation for IBM. First, the got a good amount of money from Sony and Toshiba for licensing their PPC arcitecture. Then, Sony paid IBM a nice $600M to expand their FishKill fab, which will be the main fab that manufactures the Cell processors powering the upcoming PS3. So, in the end, whether the Cell processor is a financial success for Sony and Toshiba or not, IBM is on the safe side here. They already got paid for making extra room in their fab to make the Cell, so they arent sacrificing any production capacity to make the Cell, which could have affected IBMs contracts with its other clients, and they will get a new good base of developers who will be getting their hands on developing new code targeted to the new PPC based Cell architecture, whether that is in the form of games for the PS3, or for any other devices built around the new Cell platform.

Now, lets take a look at the other rival of Sony’s PS3, namely Microsoft’s Xbox 360, which has migrated from Intel’s x86 based architecture (used for the original Xbox) to IBM’s PPC architecture, and what a move that was. Microsoft convinced IBM to make them a nice custom tripple core PPC based chip running at an even nicer 3.2GHz. Its still to be seen if IBM will use that custom chip, dubbed Xenon, to make other products, namely servers and probably even some workstations, but the point is like the PS3, the Xbox 360 will too get a good deal of developers to work on the PPC architecture and write new code, new libraries, and get familiar with this nice, efficient, and often left in the shadows architecture.

Finally, in the summer of 2006, we should see the debut of a new processor, a new computing platform coming from a new player in the buisness, but nevertheless based on a not so new processing architecture. Of course, I am talking about none other than PA Semi’s PWRficient not so “embedded platform”. I say not so embedded because while the upcoming chip does fit as an embedded platform in terms of power consumption and high level of integration, its desn’t really feel like your average embedded processing platform when it comes to performance. Again, this new piece of silicon will be based on a couple of PPC cores running at a nice 2GHz clock speed, and carrying an even nicer 2MB cache. I already went into some depth about the design specifics of the PWRficient, so I wont delve into that here, other than to note the power envelope at which the upcoming chip will run. The designers estimate the chip to have a mere 13W TDP. Now just think about having one of those powering a notebook. This piece of silicon will be capable of beating the best offering from Intel, AMD, and any other company i terms of processing power and power consumption. When you consider the level of integration of the chip which translates in a highly reduced bill of components, which translates into even more savings in the price tag, and much less total power consuption from the whole device, the PWRficient gets even more attractive. The only hardle that needs to be overcome is getting a nice OS to run on top of such a notebook (actually, its not so much of a hardle if you think of Linux). It would be really nice to see a a Mac OS version targetted at the PWRficient (if his Jobliness agrees to make a “port” of the Mac OS targetted at this platform). Such a notebook could easily get 6-8hrs when paired with your average 60-70W notebook battery. Now that is what I call a true mobile platform.

Another very good use of the PWRficient platform is in the blade server sement, where a large number of PWRficient based servers could be squeezed into a very small volumes thanks to the high level of integration and low power consumption figures of this chip. It wouldn’t be so hard to design a rather capable server that consumes under 50W of power under full load.

So, at the end of the day, we see more and more companies moving to the PowerPC platform. If this trend continues, this arcitecture may be the most serious contender to the dominance of the x86 architecture in the not so far future. Maybe Steve Jobs did have a vision that was ahead of his time back when he switched from Motorola’s 680×0 to the PPC back in the 90s (or maybe not, as he is dumping PPC in favor of Intel’s x86 processors now).

First build of my Linux router

I have built a new linux router mini-distro/project that fits into a 16MB compact flash card. To read more about this click HERE.

What can an Xbox 360 running Linux do?

I wonder how long, we will have to wait until the Xbox 360 is hacked, and some form of Linux port is run on this machine. It’s just a matter of time until someone figures out a way to hack the Xbox 360 protection, and figures out a way to get Linux up and running on this gaming console. We may even get a whole Linux distribution targeted at the Xbox 360.

While the Xbox 360 is sold as a gaming console, under the hood, it packs a lot of processing power that is on par with a powerful server that costs about 30 times the price of this $299 console. Its true that a server costing $10,000 will pack much more RAM, a hell lot more storage space, and be designed from the ground up for reliability and 24/7 availability, but I will bet that the Xbox 360 with its IBM powered triple cores running at 3.2GHz will give a lot of those servers a run for their money when it comes to processing power, even though it only runs on 512MB of RAM.

If we look a little closer at game consoles, while they may not be designed by the same high standards as the server market products, they are still designed with enough robustness to tolerate extremely long operation hours. Think of 12+ hours a day. Generally speaking, your average piece of hardware reaches thermal equilibrium about after 20 minutes of operation. If any component wants to fail, it will fail not so long after that, mostly due to thermal stress. Gaming consoles are generally manufactured with pretty high standards, probably even higher than many brand name computers which cost a lot more. In fact, gaming consoles are designed to tolerate a lot more abuse, require minimum to no maintenance, and survive a longer life cycle than your average PC. After all, no one will buy a console that fails after a few months of hard core gaming.

Personally, I think that the Xbox 360 makes for a better and more practical hardware platform than the Play Station 3 will make. This is mainly due to the choice of processing platform that each console uses. While both will be powered by an IBM made chip, the Cell processor on the PS3 with its 8 SPEs (Synergic Processing Elements) and one general purpose processing core is a much harder platform to work with, and being a new idea, we will have to wait to see how well this combination performs. On the other hand, the Xbox 360 is powered by three general purpose processing cores, which is very similar to having a regular computer with three processors installed (take a look at this article from Tom’s Hardware) is relatively easy to deal with when developing new code or when porting applications from other architectures, or platforms.

Think of having an Xbox 360 running Linux with three 500GB drives attached through USB 2.0 running in a software RAID 5 configuration, for a redundant 1TB of storage, protecting your network from all the evils on the internet, converting all those music tracks you have, compressing all that vacation footage for DVD burning, acting as a centralized repository for all those files you have, storing all those backup images of all your home boxes, acting as your home asterisk VOIP PBX, while folding all those proteins, all while playing that DVD you want to watch on your TV without dropping a single frame.

Some may argue that the Xbox 360 processor beast may be limited by its not so impressive 512MB of RAM, which is not upgradeable (at least not as far as I know), but I think this is more than compensated for by its blazing fast memory interface running at 700MHz DDR, delivering a stunning 22.4GB per second of data for the IBM CPU to work with. This fast memory interface reduces the impact of having a large cache on the CPU because it greatly reduces the penalty of a cache miss on the CPU.

Considering that Linux and Linux applications and services aren’t as memory intensive as Windows, 512MB may turn to be plenty of memory to work with. There are a lot of examples on the net of people running a hell lot of servers on an old box with 128MB or less RAM on an old 200MHz Pentium box, and never complaining of lack responsiveness.

If we look at the majority of applications and services that users run on their home computers such as media encoding, watching DVDs, listening to music, and others, they aren’t bound by the amount of RAM available, but rather by the speed of your storage sub-system, and the amount of processing power available. This is where the Xbox 360 shines. In theory, the three cores on the Xbox 360 processor can run up to 6 threads concurrently. At 3.2GHz per core, and factoring in how efficient the PowerPC architecture is, and you get an idea of how much stuff you could do with a hacked Xbox 360 running Linux.

So, what can the Xbox 360 do with Linux on board? A hell lot.

New forums websites

I have recently registered the domains IraqiForums.com and IraqiForums.net and are hosted at HERE at my IraqiGeek.com server for the time being.

The new domains, as the name implies, are dedicated for discussions by Iraqis, to Iraqis, and about Iraqi matters. If the forums build enough traffic, I will move them out to a dedicated hosting plan on the IraqiForums.com domain.

3G to WiFi router

Ok, this is not a brand new idea for a new product. What I am trying to do here is find a DYI version of acommercial product.

Such a device could be used in the car, turning it into a mobile hotspot, or in any place where there is network coverage for instant online capabilities for a group of users. Other uses would be to provide the ability to use a WiFi VOIP phone to make cheap VOIP calls while on the move, or even providing life feeds of a web camera.

The idea is to make a small device, that is capable of operating on battery power for several hours, and that is small enough to fit in your pocket, well, it will have to be a rather large pocket. The final device should have a DHCP server and preferably able to do MAC filtering to keep unwanted visitors out of the network.

The above criteria led me to think about using a PDA, either with built in WiFi and a CF slot, a PDA with an SD and CF slots (like the Sharp Zaurus which runs linux natively), or probably an iPAQ with the dual PCMCIA sleeve (which is my favorite solution), and using that CF slot with a CF to PC Card adapter to (no need in the case of the iPAQ with the PCMCIA sleeve) and one of those wireless WAN (WWAN) PC Cards (like UMTS, EDGE, EvDO, or WCDMA) to the mix. In the case of the dual PCMCIA sleeve on an iPAQ, one slot would be used for a WiFi PC card, and the second for the wireless WAN data card.

In an ideal world, this would be all that need to be done to get the router, but this is the real world, so there have to be some hardles to oercome. The thing is, Micro$ofts Pocket PC (or Windows Mobile) operating system doesn’t come with TCP/IP routing capabilities, like its desktop windows siblings.

From my readings, I doubt that routing capabilities can be added to any PPC powered PDA in the form of a third party application, but would LOVE to be proven wrong by any PPC developer out there.

So, the other way I could come up with to do this on PPC OS is by running it as a proxy. Not my ideal way for solving this, because it won’t be a router anymore. It will be a WWLAN to WiFi proxy. But even this turned to be not that easy. Apparently, there arent many people who want to run their PDAs as a proxy for anything (duh). The only “proxy” I could find for PPC was PocketPCProxy, whose development is at alpha stage at best.

Other than the proxy program, the proxy PDA would need to run a DHCP server, so the clients would be able to get an IP address automatically once connected. But even then, the WiFi adapter on the PDA would still show as a client other devices search for it, rather than an access point, but I guess this is something that can be lived with, if everything else works as its supposed to.

So, in order to be able to turn an old PPC PDA into a proxy between your 3G network data plan, and your WiFi network, you would need to either write, or get someone to write you proxy server and DHCP server applications for Pocket PC. What a mess.

All this talk about network services (DHCP, IP routing, proxy) led me to think about Linux. After all, this is what linux is best at, networking.

For starters, there already are many PDAs that run Linux, and there is a linux “distro” for the iPAQ, so why not use any of these? While this would be more than ideal for running such a solution, and would put the solution back to being a router, the only hardle is the lack of supporting drivers for Linux, at least not any that I am aware of. Again, if anyone is aware of something that contradicts what I am saying, I would be glad to be proved wrong.

If any of the WWAN cards has Linux drivers, and someone had ported those drivers to a Linux PDA, then all that would be needed is to install iproute, and a dhcp server, which I don’t think is a hard thing to do.

New Classifieds section

And yet another addition to my portal, a new classifieds section. This section will be free of charge for all to advertise about anything as long as there is no offensive content.

The classifieds section can be found HERE.

New web proxy

And yet another addition to the blog. Today I finally set up a web proxy for all those who live in countries where internet access is filtered.

To access the new proxy, click HERE.