...And this is why I love FreeBSD

Just installed next cloud to try it out.

Simple enough. Just type `sudo pkg install nextcloud`

When it finishes installing the software this is the output.

Message from nextcloud-11.0.3:
***********************************************************************
*                         MIGRATION FROM OWNCLOUD                     *
***********************************************************************

If you are migrating from existing owncloud instance, you should do
the following steps:

- Copy/Move owncloud/data directory to nextcloud/data (don't forget
        hidden files)
- Copy/Move owncloud/config/config.php to nextcloud/config/config.php
- Change the datadirectory in nextcloud/config/config.php
- Ensure nextcloud/data and nextcloud/config/config.php are owned by
        www user and group


***********************************************************************
*                         POST INSTALL CONFIGURATION                  *
***********************************************************************

Please note that everything has been installed in /usr/local/www/nextcloud.

You will probably want to add an alias to your httpd.conf file, something
like this:

        Alias /nextcloud /usr/local/www/nextcloud
        AcceptPathInfo On
        <Directory /usr/local/www/nextcloud>
            AllowOverride All
            Require all granted
        </Directory>

And restart Apache.

***********************************************************************
*                       NEXTCLOUD VERSION UPGRADE                     *
***********************************************************************

After a version migration you should upgrade your nextcloud instance
using command line:

* cd /usr/local/www/nextcloud
* su -m www -c "php ./occ upgrade"

Random Electrical Fiddling - Part 3

I made a new LED strip light for the kitchen.

First I grabbed one of the pieces of wood I've recovered from a recycled pallet and placed a centre mark. From this mark I marked off 2cm intervals. I cut 30 or so short strips of 3 LEDs from an LED ribbon purchased on eBay for a couple of quid. You can find such strips here http://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html?_nkw=5050+300+LED+warm+white

I laid each of the small strips out on the piece of wood, removed the backing tape that covers the adhesive, and stuck them down using a fingernail to apply pressure around the edges.

Each strip of three LEDs has a positive and negative connection at each end of the strip. The intention was to connect all the positive contacts down one side to what would become the positive rail and all the negative contacts down the other side to what would become the negative rail. I therefore needed two power rails.


I added a strip of self adhesive copper tape along each edge of the wood. The copper strips were laid close to, but not touching, the LED power contacts.

To connect the power rails to the LEDS I soldered a small bare copper bridging wire between each of the power contacts on the LEDS and the appropriate polarity rail.

I screwed on a terminal block and created some connecting wires to be soldered on the the rails. This aids easy fitting and removal of the light.

The only thing left was to add a couple of eye screws on the back to mount the light to the ceiling and to run the power feed from the transistor connected to the PIR that controls the existing lights.

And test in place.

Pretty happy with how this prototype turned out. It can be used connected directly to a 12v power source (as seen here), in which case it's super bright, or it can be controlled by the automatic circuit where it gives a good glow and only draws 1 watt.

Random Electrical Fiddling - Part 2

I got a new charge controller yesterday so I rewired the solar array to use it and changed the fuse box for one that had a common positive and built a new negative rail.

I'd also picked up some 6 metre 900 amp jump leads from eBay for £16 and I intended to use them to enable me to move the fuse box into the kitchen and reduce the losses over the multiple cables that were currently feeding various 12v toys in the kitchen.

The jumper cables were perfectly designed for what I have in mind so I didn't have to try and find some crimp terminals suitable to fit the rather large cables. I just needed to unbolt the existing crimp terminals from the clamps, which involved the use of a lump hammer.

It did however mean I needed to make some terminal blocks to hook the load lines of the charge controller up to the cables and then also to terminate them in the kitchen.

A bit of bolt and washer hunting later I managed to put together some very suitable terminals. I just need some way of safely mounting them. This was achieved with a small bit of MDF and various drill bits and we end up with a pretty neat terminal block with wing nuts.

And on the underside we have the counter sunk heads.

These were easily mounted on to the existing board and a couple of crimped cables later the battery end of things was nicely wired up.

Then I had to build a new board for holding the fuse box in the kitchen and mount it on to a hollow wall. A little hunting turned up a couple of suitable medium weight hollow wall fixtures. The new board was drilled in the same way as the cable mount board and I made a couple more terminals to be mounted directly on it.

Now all that was needed was to wire in the fuse box, negative rail and test.

The voltage drop across the new cables is now not measurable with any meter I have and once I sort out the battery connection cables it will now be possible to wire up the 300w inverter in the kitchen directly to the solar array.

This also means I'll be able to run a 12v feed up to my bedroom and to the hallway without significant losses being incurred.

Now I just need the finance to afford a bunch more solar panels and some proper batteries. This setup is pretty close to being capable of safely supplying 360 watts. Almost 10 times more than the power of my solar panels at full blast and 30 times more than they typically provide.

The batteries I have (assuming they were in good condition) could only supply 360 watts for a couple of hours but this still makes it a nice little backup power supply for when the power occasionally dies (like the time a quadcopter accidentally flew into the local power distribution center and took out one of the large transformers).

Realistically I can get many hours of light and a couple or so hours of laptop usage out of it as it stands.

Why I Try To Buy Repairable Things

My oscillating fan stopped working a while ago. Today's heat made me investigate what the cause might be.

It turns out that at some point the two bolts that held the speed controller in place had vibrated free and I hadn't noticed.

This of course leaves the problem of where do I get two suitable bolts at 1am. Luckily I have a stack of various fixings and bits of hardware that I've salvaged from other things. Looking at the two nuts that I found rattling around inside the fan I had a feeling that I quite possibly had some bolts that may have the right screw thread and indeed I did.

I also recently bought a small vice that can attach to my kitchen table (A.K.A "The Workshop") and I've somehow collected a number of hacksaws over the years so finding one wasn't hard.

A short while later and a bit of "by eye" measuring I had two shorter bolts suitable for my needs.

A little bit of filing rough edges and screwing and the speed controller is firmly locked in place again. 

And the oscillating fan is operational once more.

I'm pretty sure the guest dog is going to appreciate this tomorrow when the heat will be slightly more intense than it was today.

Random Electrical Fiddling - Part 1

I moved my 20 watt 12 volt solar panels (x2) and the charge controller downstairs yesterday.

This enabled me to hook up the old car battery I salvaged from my MR2; before it sadly went to the breakers.

This let me release one of the two Ultramax batteries. Which means I can now use one for when I'm building other projects and testing them and just cycle the two batteries when one gets a little low. :)

While I was fiddling with the solar setup I noticed that in the new position when the sun really shines down and there's no haze they get up to their full 17 volt output and the charge controller doesn't like this and stops charging the batteries. So I've added one of the two DC-DC converters I got off of eBay a while back. This restricts the voltage quite nicely to a maximum of 14 volts, but also means that the normal output has dropped to just over 12 volt.

I may have to come up with a better way of clamping the output from the solar panels without having to sacrifice 3 volts on the DC-DC converter. I'd prefer a solution that didn't kick in until the output from the panels went over 14 volts. I shall have to do some investigation. I'm sure once my copy of The Art of Electronics turns up I shall have some example circuits I can build to do the job nicely. :)

This still seems to be charging the batteries fine and if I'm reading this meter right I seem to have gathered 42 watt hours of power today. I also want to change this so it's inline with the batteries (rather than recording the raw output from the panels) and has bypass diodes to cover the batteries going back to the charge controller.

Happy the solar charger was working well enough, I dug out the other DC-DC converter to investigate why it wasn't working and it seems to be fine now. I'm guessing it must have been something to do with how it was hooked up to the solar system that was causing the problem and we had a loose connection somewhere.

It's now working fine to charge my phone off of the spare 14Ah ultramax battery.

And while I was monitoring the charging and because the soldering iron was already on I decided to hook up a couple of the little solar toy panels and see if I could power a small motor from them. By the time I'd finished the sun had disappeared behind the cottages behind me. So I'll have to wait till tomorrow (assuming it's sunny) to try it out and see if I need to hook more panels up.

'Vadur

I had this rough idea for a game a while back. Not so much having some idea for making a ground breaking game but something that I could use as a design for attempting to write a game in various environments without having to implement anything too complicated.

In its various incarnations its always been called 'Vadur, because there's an element of tribute to Taito in there, among others. The idea has always been to implement some of the game mechanics from various games from my child hood.

It all kind of started with this video I made of a little program I wrote in C using OpenGL (very much 1.0 style OpenGL)

Since then, I'd been working on a C++ version of Vadur, both to learn a little more C++ and to learn a little about Video Game Engines and the OpenGL pipeline. I'd been using Irrlicht, as it seemed kind of cross platform and fairly powerful. I got to about the same stage as I do with most projects, hit my current boundaries and then get distracted by research until I come back with a new approach and start from scratch.

The next exercise I undertook was with a couple of friends, writing a cross platform tower defense style game and engine to go with it. It has been a lot of fun and we'll no doubt keep plugging away at that for the educational side of it alone.

But since then I've started messing with Unity, and it does a lot of the things that we had planned for our engine. Not that we'd ever seen anything like Unity, it just seemed to make sense to be able to edit inline while playing the game and then save that out as configuration for the game.

So I've gone back to Vadur, it is after all my test game idea for trying things out with. Here's what I've gotten in a few days of messing around in the evening and the odd weekend of research.

Computers need love too

The new file server ASUS AT3N7A-I motherboard is currently going through a MemTestx86 with it using my old 2G of PC6400 DDR2 RAM before I try switching the HDs from the current file server over to it.

The existing file server is a rather antiquated Dual Pentium III motherboard but as it is using RAMBUS ram it's actually been damn good at its job.

I'm going to try the existing FreeBSD install on the new hardware. It should work because it's a fairly recent FBSD and I'm not currently using a custom compiled kernel. I think the only likely issue will be with drive 3 (0 based index) because that's going to map to the external sata port. I believe this means the device names from drive 3 upwards will be off by one. That will just be a quick tweak to /etc/fstab in single user mode though.

I've also picked up two 60G OCZ Vertex2 SSDs to replace the boot drives for both my partner's machine and mine this evening. Based on my experience at work with my laptop it should improve both of our machines fairly drastically for booting and load times.

I was checking the temperature of the drives in the existing file server last night and I think I can get away with cramming it all in a normal mATX tower. I'll have to dig out a couple of drive bays from old cases and mount them in the case somehow to accommodate all the drives, but it will be a 12TB NAS in a slightly larger than standard NAS sized box and beat any NAS I could have bought for the equivalent money hands down.

The new mini ITX board is ION based and it's therefore got hardware HD decoding for transcoding with mencoder. I'm not sure if it's even possible but it would be nice if someone gets around to writing an encoder that will take advantage of the VDPAU libraries, then it would be a fully hardware accelerated encoding box too.

In other news MineCraft is running well now with my new 4g of ram and I don't have to kill off other applications when playing any more.