Back to the Future

-


A year ago I started playing around with Google App Inventor and built a few test applications for my old £20 Android tablet. App Inventor has been taken over by MIT, who built the Apollo Guidance Computer that took men to the Moon, so they have a fair idea what they are doing and it has been re-launched in a new beta form. Now I have the Scroll Essential tablet, I decided to go back to this and it looks quite good, but the problem is that the Scroll has no drivers for either Bluetooth or Serial-USB so it can't communicate with anything. I've been investigating how to load modules (drivers) into the Android kernel, but it is no trivial task and might not be possible; a real shame as this would be the ultimate sub-£100 car computer.



App Inventor (MIT) running under Windows XP





Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Update on the touch monitor

-
This is tantalising... I found some data on driver chips used on these low-cost monitors and some of them have an I2C connection for sending pixel data directly to the screen. This may be to allow text or graphics overlay. Anyway the chip on my 7" screens is an AR05C-LF and there are millions of these in stock in the far east, but I can't so far find a data sheet for this chip or its sibling the AR05CA-LF. Being able to send digital pixel data via I2C directly to the screen would be, well, brilliant.
Read more

Apple iPad SSH Connection to Linux Laptop

-
Image
I was given this older Apple iPad a while back and was looking into installing Linux on it. Options are limited, but it is possible to install a shell to the iPad and run command line stuff.  SSH is always a bit of fun so I logged into my Linux Mint laptop remotely for a giggle. It was interesting running a few simple commands from the iPad. My cheapo Bluetooth keyboard came in very useful although I discovered that the iPad's OS version predated mouse support so the trackpad didn't work. Going a step further, I got my Raspberry Pi going again and was able to install VNC on the iPad and remotely control the Raspberry Pi's desktop. Could be useful! I'm also looking at fitting a small heatsink and 5-volt fan (recovered from a broken laptop) to the Raspberry Pi and over clocking it to 1GHz.
Read more

Skoda Rapid Heater Re-circulation Motor Repair

-
Image
In the autumn of 2018 the heater re-circulation motor (I'll refer to this as the HRM from now on) in my 2015 Skoda Rapid decided to fail. It had been making a grinding and clicking noise for a while and I had asked the local Skoda dealer to look into this during a routine service, which they didn't, but more on that later. The problem was that the motor failed in the re-circulate setting so the interior of the car steamed up very quickly and the windscreen couldn't be de-misted. Putting the air-conditioning on was a short-term solution up until the outside temperature dropped below 10 Celsius and that stopped working! There isn't a lot of information online about the Rapid because it is a less common model than other Skodas, but it shares a lot of design with the Fabia and Octavia so it wasn't too hard to get diagrams showing where the motor was and how it works. To get at the HRM I had to remove the glove box (7 Torx screws) and the heater motor (5 Torx screws),
Read more