For couple of years i am thinking about digitalising my model railway. The standard digital equipment is much expensive, so i am working on my own technology, based on ESP8266 and ESP32.
As first prototype i have prepared a station module, quipped with servo motors for Railroad switches, and some street lamps, all controlled with single nodemcu (esp8266) board. For now, i controll it via USB to serial converter, but in the future there will be a data bus throught all modules, and controlled remotely.
This prototype worked well, switches ar switching, lights are shining, everything works well. Whe switches now looks much more realistic, compared to relay controled ones. The movement is smooth, and the moving mechanism is hidden underneath, so nothing is visible.
Next challenge was to create PCB, which will fit into the locomotives. There would be just couple of parts and the PCB should be as simple as possible. As processor there will be ESP32, because of its better capablity of WiFi connection. Also there will be h-bridge to controll the motor and some power module, to make 12V input to 3.3V output, to power the processor.
After first iteration, with bad wiring of some pads, ...
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Few months ago i have received a Canon 400D with some lens. the body of camera worked well, and two of the lens worked also. One remaining len, unfortunately the best one, not worked. I have tried to service it, but with no result.
However i have now received the original BG-E3 battery grip for the 400D. I am still using the body as spare one, because it still takes very nice photo, and especially with long aperture it takes maybe better shots than my new 2000D camera.
I will charge both of my batteries and i will try, how long it will last. However even one battery is usually able to cover 2 days of intensive photographing, so i will possibly not use it much.
Although it is a nice piece of hardware, and I will keep it, and I will see, I will find it practical.
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I was doing some research and tuning on my TrueNAS instance and I have discovered that I am using a discontinued version of TrueNAS. I am tuning on "core", which is based on FreeBSD, but unfortunately the system has switched to Linux core, using the subname "scale".
So I decided to switch to the supported branch of this system, and discovered that there is an easy way to switch from core to scale, using the standard upgrade process, just by using the "manual" way, uploading the scale distribution file.
The process was automatic and went well. The only problem was that the "jails" services (virtual machines for applications) are discontinued, but fortunately I was only using them for testing, so I do not care that I lost them.
The system booted fine after the upgrade and was comparatively faster than before. All the data on the disk pool survived, so everything is almost perfect.
The only thing I am still working on is the VPN connection. I lost the Wiregueard configuration during the upgrade process. So I tried to re-configure it as the .conf file remained in the file system. After a few tries I got it working and everything seemed fine, even after ...
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A few weeks ago I received a Tungsten T3 handheld. It came with a completely dead battery. I thought about leaving it as it was, as it works fine on the charger.
Unfortunately, the charger is not a classic cable, but a dock. The connection is not very strong, so it happens quite often that you press too hard on the screen, lose contact in the dock and the device switches off due to lack of power.
I decided to replace the original battery with a LiPol one. After removing the covers, I discovered that the battery is connected by just two wires, so there is no 'control' pin or temperature reading from the unit. This made the replacement easier. I ordered the 550mAh battery that fits the space. The original battery was about 900mAh, but I think half of that is enough for collection purposes.
I just unsoldered the connector from the old battery and soldered it to the new one. Put the covers back on and the palm was up and running. One thing that did not work was the charging port. However, this was solved by simply pressing on the back cover, as there ...
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Yesterday I received another piece for my collection. This time it was a Nokia 630 with Windows 8.1.
It looks very good, with no scratches, even on the plastic back cover. So I was really happy after the first look. Unfortunately, I discovered a big problem after turning it on. The Microsoft Store is down and it seems hopeless to install the software any other way. I have read many articles and discussed with many people and found out that sideloading is theoretically possible by installing .appx files, but practically it is so hard and usually only one in twenty appx can be installed. So I need to do some more research. When I have enough time, I will try it.
I might also try updating the built-in Windows 8.1 to Windows10, which should be a bit easier than sideloading apps, but we'll see.
I already have two Windows Mobile Nokia/Lumia phones, fortunately with some apps installed before the official store closed, but they are both on version 8.1, so there is at least a possibility that I will have one with 10, and hopefully I will be able to install some software/games on it.
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Finally, I have a mobile phone that I have been dreaming about for years. When the phone was released, I got a K310i, which was a low-end phone with about 16MB of memory. That was enough for a couple of Java games and a few midi ring tones. Not much more than that.
The phone I got was the W800i. This is the top of the range model. It has about 35MB of internal memory, but fortunately it has a Memory Pro Duo card slot.
So I started looking for this old card. I found a user on the forum who promised me one, including the USB reader for the card.
He managed to get his colleague, who was on a business trip, to bring it to me. I got it, but unfortunately I found out that I got the M2 card, which is the same technology but twice smaller. There is some reduction, but for the collection I prefer to have the original card. Currently I have found another man who is offering me a Pro DUO card, so I am waiting for a photo to be sure that I would get the correct card format.
While waiting for the ...
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My collection of mobile devices has been expanded by the HP iPAQ 214. I got it in exchange from a fellow collector who deals more with old PCs.
The device arrived in its original packaging, including all accessories, installation CDs and all manuals. It even contained the original sleeve, which was still sealed in cellophane, and apparently had never been used.
Even the PDA itself shows virtually no signs of use. The only minor flaw is the calendar button, which goes a bit stiff, but the functionality doesn't mind at all.
So far there hasn't been much time for any deeper testing, but I have tried the pre-installed UFO and also Age of Empires, the first version of which has been ported directly to Windows Mobile
AoE in particular is absolutely brilliant and brings back a lot of memories of my youth when I used to play this game on PC. I currently have an archive of the software for this device on my computer, so when I get some time I'll boot up one of the collection laptops to run ActiveSync on so I can use it to download new software to the device
I was ...
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I decided to upgrade the server's RAM from 4GB to something more useful. I ordered two second hand low profile 8GB modules with ECC, which is better suited to the ZFS file system.
Swapping was really easy, except for the one stuck connector in the motherboard, which was a pain to unplug. However, the server booted on the first try and detected all 16GB of RAM, even though the server is only supposed to be able to detect 8GB.
The second thing I wanted to try was to mount the 2TB USB hard drive with movies and shows so that I could share them across devices and play them on every TV in the house without having to carry the drive around. However, I discovered that there is no way to share an NTFS drive with TrueNAS as it can only work with ZFS. So one of the solutions was to back up the media to the hard drive, reformat it, copy the data back and use it as a hard drive, but then I would lose the ability to take it anywhere and connect it to any device.
So my solution is maybe to use my Raspberry with recalbox to run the ...
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I bought a round flash for my Canon camera on Aliexpress. I would like to use it for macro photography and also to photograph objects that are sensitive to flash.
In this kit, there are many adapters for different lens circumferences, and there are also different coloured diffusers so you can adjust the colour of the flash.
The round flash has a controller that attaches to the camera's hot shoe and offers different settings for the sensitivity of the flash, the length and also the number of diodes on the ring to flash. You can also flash only on the right or only on the left side to create some effects on the photograph.
My first attempts were not so successful, as for the long exposure times it burns the circle to photography on the sides. Focusing is also a bit weird, as the motor in the lens is much louder due to the weight of the flash attached to it. I am a bit afraid of this louder noise and I am afraid of damaging the mechanism.
In the end, I am not too happy with it for now. I will have to do some research on how to use it correctly ...
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I have done some analysis of SEO and Google ratings of my site hryprodva.cz. I found out that my average position in Google search is about five, which I think is really good.
The site has no income, so I have spent exactly $0 on advertising. The only thing I have done is to post some replies to forum topics and relevant internet discussions that suggested the games, but nothing special.
Also I have checked the backlinks and I found out that there are about 50% pages that have posted the links to my page by themselves or by other users, so I am glad that I am not so much spammer. There are about 300 external links (if google does not count), which I see as really satisfying.
I also tried to look at some statistics from microsoft bing search and crawling engine, but there is not much to study. There are also some statistics, but they are a bit confusing and not reliable at all.
I also found out from google statistics that about 65% of visitors come from Czech Republic and 30% from Slovakia. The remaining 5% are from Poland, Germany and others.
I already have an EN translation on my site, ...
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