hanez.org

I updated my Firefox extension for searching the Leo.org database some minutes ago. I added no new features, just made it compatible to the newest versions of Firefox.

You will find the Download here. In some days it will be available at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/leo-search/.

Have fun… ;)

I am lucky to say, that my PHP extension for using Smart Cards based on the winscard API was successful released on pecl.php.net. It is designed for the use with the wonderful project PCSC-Lite for *nix. Since PCSC-Lite is implementing the API compatible to the PC/SC standard it should be possible to compile this code on other operating systems too.

I have created this extension in 2010 but needed to clean it up and do some long term tests. It runs nicely on some machines and now you are able to do Smart Card terminal prototyping using PHP. I am using this extension to run Smart Card devices on the server side for enabling communication with Secure Application Modules (SAM) / Hardware Security Modules (HSM).

The name of the extension is “pcsc”. There is only a small subset of the API implemented but for most things this is enough. I will implement the full API at any time.

More information:

• PECL Project Page
• PHP SVN Code Browser

To checkout the code you need to execute the following command:

svn checkout http://svn.php.net/repository/pecl/pcsc/trunk pcsc

Thanks to the PHP developers who helped me doing this step and for commenting my code.

I upgraded to Linux kernel version 3.0.3 today and it works!

There were some things to think about but almost everything worked like kernel 2.6.39. The main problem was the Nvidia driver which must be the newest version available. The “stable” version for 2.6 doesn’t compile. I added the following to /etc/portage/package.keywords to get things run:

=sys-kernel/vanilla-sources-3.0.3       ~x86
x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers      ~x86

VirtualBox modules compiled without any problems and is running like before…

Just upgrade! Ask me if you need help… ;)

I am ill today and needed to distract me some bit.

I added a LM35 temperature sensor to my Arduino. Since someone did the work already, I only needed to copy some code and setup the wiring on a breadboard. I used the same wiring like in the link. Below is an image of the wiring made with Fritzing. I am using a LM335 for this because there where no LM35 as a Fritzing part available…

I changed some parts of the code to only print the temperature as String to serial. In the original code the data was sent as (byte) over serial to read the value with an application created using Processing. Feel free to change this again… ;) This is the code I used:

float temp;
int tempPin = 0;

void setup()
{
  Serial.begin(9600);
}

void loop()
{
  temp = analogRead(tempPin);
  temp = temp * 0.48828125;
  Serial.println(temp);
  delay(1000);
}

My output in the serial monitor of the Arduino IDE looks like this:

I got this nice Tiny2313 header board on Friday from Alex. Thanks for that nice piece of work!

It seems that I bought the last ones because there are currently no more of them in his shop available… :( But I think you could get one in the near future again. If not take a look at his site. All code and schematics are freely available there.

Soldering was a lot of fun and very easy to do. After successful soldering I build the small circuit at the end of the howto and flashed the microcontroller using the Makefile provided by Alex. I needed to change some things to make it work right on my Linux box using avrdude and the Atmel AVRISP mkII.

I changed the PROGRAMMER line to:

PROGRAMMER = -P usb -c avrispmkII

If you even get errors, try to add the parameters “-F” and “-D” to $PROGRAMMER. Call “avrdude –help” to get a description of these parameters… ;)

Don’t forget to add an external power supply to the header board since the AVRISP not seems to provide enough power. I got strange errors in the output of avrdude. After adding more power everything worked as expected.

The result: A blinking LED. Yeah! :)