AsierArranz.com

Hola a todos, estos dos meses ha estado muy liado y apenas he escrito en el Blog porque he estado constituyendo una empresa.

Quizás sea algo arriesgado en estos momentos, pero algo que siempre he querido ha sido poder tener al menos una parte del tiempo de trabajo libre para investigar en nuevos sectores, por lo que una gran parte de la empresa se dedicará a I+D y el desarrollo de proyectos y prototipos propios (de los que publicaré muchos de ellos si todo va bien). Y otra parte de la empresa se dedicará a desarrollos para empresas, centros de investigación e incluso puede que particulares. Todo se andará :)

Los trámites para crear una empresa en España son ilimitados, deberían reducir la burocracia para ayudar realmente a las empresas de nueva creación, en otros países se pueden crear en el día, aquí son necesarios 20 días y en mi caso probablemente algo más.

Así que ya existe Nebutek, si alguno de vosotros necesitáis o conocéis a empresas que necesiten cualquier servicio o desarrollo de los que aparecen en la sección servicios de la web Nebutek , estaré encantado de atenderos! xD

Por cierto, podéis ver uno de los últimos desarrollos libres que estoy finalizando también en www.nebudroid.com

Un saludo a todos

Asier Arranz General

Not Available in English, Sorry ;)

Asier Arranz General

Finally I have finished my exams, tomorrow I will stay three days in Telefónica I+D Barcelona to go work in a part of an European project, the Urus project. I can not comment the details, but I will tell you all the details that appear on the official web page of the project. The part of this project that I develop is the mobile communications with the server that coordinates the robots.

This project is based on a series of robots, which features guiding, transport and taxi. For example if you are in a great exhibition centre and you dont know how to reach the exhibition area of “60’s classic cars”, it would be possible to request a robot from your mobile to provide you one of the above functions.

The general objective of this project is the development of new ways of cooperation between network robots and human beings and/or the environment in urban areas, in order to achieve tasks that in the other way can be very complex, time consuming or too costly.

For example, the cooperation between robots and video cameras can solve surveillance problems in urban areas, or the cooperation between robots and wireless communication devices can help people in several ways. The focus of the project is in urban pedestrian areas, an important topic in Europe where there exists a growing interest in reducing the number of cars in the streets and improving the quality of life.

Network robots can be an important instrument to improve these issues in the cities. Network robots is a new concept that integrates robots, sensors, communications and mobile devices in a cooperative way.

Here are two videos of the experiments, you can find more on the official website of the project.

Asier Arranz General

The following video explains perfectly the mission of the Mars Science Laboratory in its arrival at Mars, it’s a “must see”, it lasts 7 minutes, but at each instant shows the high technology involved in the project.

I leave you with the video, which shows the spectacular precision that has its landing on Mars.

In the video there is a system that seemed science fiction, ChemCam. It is a system of laser-induced spectroscopy, which can point to a rock at a distance of up to 13 meters, vaporizing a small amount of minerals and collecting the spectrum of emitted light by the vaporized rock to instantly detect the composition. The mission is to discover if the life on Mars was possible.

Asier Arranz General

Finally I decided to pack the remaining projects in a video to finalize the PC-PIC posts. There is another project with the PIC that moves the mouse with the potentiometers and made left click and right click with the buttons connected to the PIC, but I haven’t included it in the video because I haven’t had time.

The project uses two potentiometers as analog inputs, which are translated to digital signals by the PIC and the data is sent to the computer with the serial output. In the computer a specific software programmed in Python translates the data to movements and sounds, depending on the project.

I leave with you with the video:

Asier Arranz General pc pic 18f4520 pong lfs

Hello again, I’ve been almost a week without posting because I have been doing some small projects for the PIC 18F4520 this weekend. Until a few days ago did not have much idea about these PICS, but they are fantastic, especially if you mix with assembler programming with Python on PC side. The videos will be released one by one, so I have time and material to write new posts. ;)

I leave with you with the first, which basically process METAR data from nearest airport, for example, the Bilbao airport now returns me this string:

LEBB 032130Z VRB02KT 9999 FEW025 17/15 Q1017 NOSIG

Once processed you will get:
032130Z Date and time of METAR – Day 3 (June) at 21:30 (Zulu = GMT) +2 hours (is summer time), so 23:30 (10 minutes ago)
VRB02KT Wind variable at 2 knots
9999 Vsibility over 10km
FEW025 A few clouds at 2500 feet
17/15 Temperature of 17 º and 15 º C dew point
Q1017 1017 millibars
NOSIG No changes are expected

We apply a pair of operations to transformknot to Km/h and to find the humidity:

Humidity = Dew point / temperature * 100 (in this case 88.2%)

I leave with you with the project:

Asier Arranz General

Today is Thursday, and what better day to tell of one of the events that was unknown for me until I visited Madrid when I was in Open Movilforum 2009.I know about this event by its director, Ildefonso Mayorgas .

The Thursday is an event that brings Internet-related people. In today’s edition (no. 96) there are involved Red.es and eBay. A few thursdays ago Enrique Perez (in El Hormiguero Flipy) (the producer of Muchachada Nui) and Ruben Ontiveros (director and screenwriter of QueVidaMasTriste.com ) was in the event.

Now the Thursday is approaching to the 100th edition, let’s see what topics will be discussed in it.

The event is held the last Thursday of each month, in fact its alternative name is “Last Thursday.”

During the explosion of “Internet bubble 1.0″ there was more than one employer that was having lots of difficulties. Now with the rise of 2.0 there are many topics to discuss, and Thursday is speaking about all of them.

If any of you want to participate, in the Thursday website often you have a form like this or you can contact directly with last @ thursday . com if as they say on the web, you believe that your impressions may be interesting for the discussion.

Asier Arranz General

Translation pending… Available in spanish:

Suena el despertador… las 7:50, ducha, desayuno rápido y al metro, que desde Atocha a Ronda de Comunicaciones hay que coger dos líneas de metro y se tarda 1 hora en llegar.
A las 9:30 llego y entro a la conferencia de Sami Viitanen sobre los WRT Widgets de Nokia, etoy intentando conseguir la presentación que nos hizo, que era muy didáctica, cuando la consiga haré un post sobre los WRT Widgets. Son unas aplicaciones que se quedan en la pantalla principal y al hacer click en ellos se ejecutan. Están programados en HTML, CSS y javascript y pueden acceder a funciones internas del terminal.
Un ejemplo en el Nokia N97 que estaba allí:

Widgets en el N97

Widget del tiempo abierto (sin conexión)

También se habló de la Ovi Store que va a poner Nokia en marcha para que los desarrolladores distribuyan sus aplicaciones. Poco después me dí unas vueltas por la feria y estuve viendo cómo funcionaba de bien la Microsoft Surface, que debía haber unas 4 o 5 en toda la feria.

Otra de las pantallas que me llamó la atención fue la pantalla 3D que estaba conectada al decodificador especial de Imagenio, que ofrecía unas imágenes 3D muy nítidas, usando para ello tan solo un 15% más de ancho de banda en la señal recibida (recibe la imagen y un mapa de profundidades en vez de dos imágenes)

Poco más tarde aparecieron dos reporteras muy majas de Agora News, que me hicieron una entrevista y me estuvieron contando cómo lo tenían montado. Todas las entrevistas que iban haciendo las tenían montadas y subidas en media hora al Videoblog. Es una agencia de noticias íntegramente digital, trabajan sobre streaming y videoblogs.

Y eso es todo, la feria cerraba a las 15:30, pasaron demasiados canapés y pinchos xD, sobre todo sussi, carne, “chupitos” de ajiblanco (sabor a gazpacho), y mil cosas más. Después de picotear algo, de vuelta al bus, cuatro horitas y a casita.

Un par de días muy interesantes, en los que he podido ver muchas cosas. Y a hora a mi y a todos los que quieran desarrollar para móviles se nos presenta una pregunta, ¿Qué móvil comprar para desarrollar?

Nokia N97 vs Android G2 vs Nuevo Iphone

Probablemente sea uno de los próximos temas. Un saludo.

Asier Arranz General

I’m back, finaly I didn’t write from Madrid, you will know why later… ;) MovilForum has been great, I have met many interesting people who have very good running projects . I’ve also been testing HTC Magic and especially the Nokia N97, which I was eager to see it.
I have also been able to attend to a presentation about Nokia WRT Widgets and the Ovi Store.

The bus from Bilbao takes about four hours, and the first thing that I feel in Madrid is a tremendous heat (36 º C in the shade). I go to the Round Communications station by subway (¡Ironically there is no coverage in the subway station! !) and I arrive at the “City of Telecommunications,” is a complex of buildings of futuristic design with double glazing and have a central space with a large pond and a fountain that throws water to about 30 meters, all very green and wooded, with ducks! Here you have a panoramic shot that I get:

Panoramic shot of the views:

I enter in the building and after the check-in I meet with Open Movilforum frineds, who have the stand there. The venue is not too big but there are many exhibitors, mainly from mobile terminals and logistics services and fleets control.

I plug the laptop, in this case a good NETBOOK the Asus 1000HE, maybe one day I will post about it, it’s awesome with its 9 hours and a half of real autonomy, and the demos start …

PyNoki and NiiMe

The main demo that I went to present was PyNoki, it uses Open Movilforum API’s from Movistar to be able to locate people and to establish automatically 3G connections through an SMS. Surprisingly NiiMe attracts more attention, it might be because is more attractive to use the accelerometers to drive a car or navigate through Google Earth . The afternoon was very entertaining :)

At 7 pm I went to the hostel, a hostel for bloggers (¡¿?!) that Open Movilforum reserved for me, It was great for the price that have (26 €!) . It has a single bed, all furniture is new, the bathroom in the room is very clean and new, and especially it has a very well placed desktop with network cable included. The hostel is Hostal Martín . Highly recommended!

I was hoping to keep writing the blog that night, but Ildefonso Open Movilforum invited me out to be with a group that was in the Dakar Madrid making a presentation about Second Life by Wilhelm Lappe . I did more informal demos about NiiMe for those who were there, while taking some beer. We spent a good time :)

A day and a night with very good atmosphere, but there are many interesting things to tell that occurred on the second day of Movilforum 2009.

(To be continued ..)

Asier Arranz Curiosidades / Curiosities, Fotografía / Photography, Proyectos / Projects, Tecnología / Technology

My friends from Open Movilforum have invited me to go to the MovilForum 2009 event, (20th to 21th May) in the Telefónica Telecommunications City(Madrid).
I will do some demonstrations on the use of the open API’s provided by Movistar (thay are here).

The main demonstration will be PyNoki, but I have a some projects which I could add these API’s.

Tomorrow I will go to Madrid, then I will post all interesting things here. See you tomorrow ;)

Asier Arranz General 2009, arranz, asier, feria, movilforum

I’m going to make a comparison very fast and simple, where you will see that there is no color between the two companies that offer a similar price, but one is light years away from the other, and I know why I say this.

If you are looking for unlimited domains, unlimited transfer and good price, after reading this you will know what company is better.

Recently I have had my PHP webpages hosted on a server (Apache) at home. I have zillions of gigabytes of space and unlimited transfer in Powweb, paying about $90 a year, to host the projects NiiMe and PyNoki, becaus I didn’t want to exceed my monthly transfer with NiiMe downloads.

But with PHP pages on Powweb the horror began… the pages take from 7 to 20 seconds to start loading, was terribly slow. I contacted support and they told me that everything was going well. So I migrate the PHP webpages to the web server that I have in my home.

Tired of all this, I tried with HostGator…
Hostgator has a great control panel. In addition I contacted support because a Python script that I wanted to run on the server didn’t work, and within hours they changed the configuration of the server and the script worked. Customer care system by “chat” is simply great.

Web sites load at very good speed, in fact this page is loaded from Hostgator. So if you are looking for a very good, very nice and very cheap hosting, no doubt, test Hostgator. And no, they haven’t paid me for saying this xD

Regardless, the aligator eats Powweb. Ñam Ñam … :)

Asier Arranz General

PyNoki is software that I have developed that allows to interact with a mobile phone remotely, getting images, enviromental sound, actual movement factor and localization, allowing the server to act on the phone when given conditions are detected, by synthetizing voice, making automated calls from the terminal and sending text messages composed by the server.

This allows us to use this application with use cases like these:
- Control of mobility in elderly people (Check they are performing exercises / walks at certain times)
- Monitoring through enviromental noise and images, and reaction to changes (SMS, call, …)
- Reminder to do exercise if there have not been noticeable movements
- Monitoring of the terminal when entering a specific area
- Measuring the activity of the user of the terminal throughout the day
- Etc.

I have presented PyNoki to the 4th mashups competition organized by Open Movilforum, the project incubator of Telefonica Movistar. And PyNoki won!! :-)

The project will continue with many improvements that I will publish soon.

More in: www.PyNoki.com

Asier Arranz General

After a month of inquiries, it seems that I have found a solution. Until now, many models of Acer laptops suddenly display a white screen (called “white screen of death”), this usually happens after a couple of months after purchase.

It’s very difficult to identify the problem because it’s a random error, so I start to work in the solution because I prefer to touch my computer instead of sending it to the service. Many users have sent his laptop to the Acer Service and have returned with the same fault, with the screen replaced!!

I will send an email to Acer. Tehy could sen me an Acer Timeline as gratitude xD (If you are looking for lightweight laptop have a look)

I leave you with the disassembly video and photos in which is shown the exact point of the connector of the screen on which you must to exert pressure indefinitely. I used a paper folded several times , as simple as useful …

Ideally, a piece of rubber, but the objective is to do pressure (not much)

1. Open the laptop
2. Find the conector of the screen (the larger)



3. Put over it a non-conductive thing (folded paper, rubber…)



4. Close the lid carefully (first fit the side nearest the keyboard)
5. While we’re closing, watch that you are not moving the point of pressure and that it continues pushing the connector

   And eureka! SOLVED! , I have been over a month without white screen, before, i saw the white screen sometimes every day and sometimes every 2-3 day. A few days ago and before publishing this, to make sure I removed the paper and … white screen!

   Greetings to the unofficial Acer forums! I hope that this solve the problem for you! ;)

   Asier Arranz General, Tecnología / Technology

I have had a lot of problems with a spanish ISP provider, and because of that the blog has been 3 months offline (home server), more details in spanish article

Asier Arranz General

If you recently bought a computer with an antivirus, you will notice a poor performace, especially reading files. And if you have an old PC and uninstall the antivirus, in a clean installation of Windows XP, the PC becomes very fast!

We will see that with four things known, we can maintain a PC without antivirus, and enjoy a better speed, sometimes even several times more …

Needed software (only one):

AUTORUNS (Sysinternals)

1. Extract the autoruns.exe file from the .ZIP, and always leave it in the desktop.
2. Open autoruns.exe
3. There are many sections, first we look at the Logon section, click on it
4. In the Logon section we have all the software that starts when your PC starts, you can disable everything except explorer.exe, userinit.exe and rdpclip.exe, if you prefer you can keep checked or unchecked the MSN messenger, audio, etc… anyway we can always re-activate it
5. Here is the key: now in the program go to the top menu and click on Entry and set the Verify Code Signatures . Close Autoruns, and re-open it
6. Now it will take longer to open because it will check the programs signed by Microsoft, to see if they have been modified or not.
7. We put the in the Everything section, you will see (Not verified) in all third-party programs (Drivers Sound Nero, graphics drivers, antivirus) ignore or uncheck them if you are sure that can be dangerous.
8. And now the most important part, verify all files that have as Publisher “Microsoft Windows (blah blah …)” they will be (Verified) , if any of them has a (Not Verified) it may be a virus or have some kind of rootkit. We must turn it off if it is not a critical file, and the best option is to search it in another Windows original distribution (Home, Vista x64, 7 …) and replace

9. if you could not replace it because it’s in use, we can download an Ubuntu Live CD for example, and then make the substitution
10. Finally we have checked everything, once we have a clean boot without unnecessary processes and potential threats, we must open the task manager (Ctrl + Shift + Esc), go to View> Select Columns and add the columns of “I/O Reading”, here the only process that might make about 3 reads / writes per second is lsass.exe or sometimes csrss.exe

If you have any questions, you can answer in the comments.

Asier Arranz General acelerar windows, antivirus, autoruns, boost windows, clean, limpiar, remove, virus, windows

Today we are going to put our nVidia 9600M GT to its maximum performance, which hold up to 140% of its initial capacity!

Graphics cards essentially have 3 “clocks” at different frequencies, the GPU (core chip that makes all the calculations), the DDR memory (where textures are stored and read) and the SHADER (which processes each pixel individually parallel to the GPU)

There are two ways to overclock these graphics cards, hardware (BIOS flashing) and software (nvidia software)

Now we are going to the heart of the matter, if we overclock the card is best to keep the GPU:DDR ratio and DDR:SHADER ratio, I’ve seen many overclocks that work very well without caring this proportion, but if we do this we will avoid bugs (black screens) and the scores in 3Dmark will rise proportionally to the overclock, this will not happen if we went up with the GPU and not with the DDR, etc …

Therefore, for the 9600M GT we have this values (see at http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA -GeForce-9600M-GT.9449.0.html )

Core Speed 500 MHz
Shader Speed 1250 MHz
Memory Speed 800 MHz

Well, I have tested some configurations an I carry the core to 660 MHz mantaining the proportion (AND ALWAYS GETTING WITH THE DIVISION NATURAL NUMBRES WITHOUT DECIMALS).
I had 5600 marks before and now i have 7636 !!!!

500 / 1250 = 0.4 SHADER
500 / 800 = 0.625 DDR

For 660:

660 / 0.4 = 1650 MHz
660 / 0.625 = 1056 MHz

So let’s open the tool and put the values [660 / 1056 / 1650], sit over a couch in order not to fall, and watch the 3Dmark score!

The method to make a hardware overclocking

And to make a software overclocking [Download this nVidia tool]

If you have any doubts post it into comments

Asier Arranz Tecnología / Technology 9600m nvidia overclock

Hello to all, today and specially to the Acer 5930g forums. I’m going to change a P8400 processor, and we will put a T9600 instead.

1. Remove the laptop battery
2. Remove the screws on the back cover
3. Remove the cover with a plectrum, or anything similar (made of plastic)



4. When opening the cover, we must locate the 9 screws of the heat sink (2 in the chipset, 3 in the processor and 4 in the graphic adapter)
5. BE CAREFUL with the graphic adapter screws, because they are very soft, and you will ned a good screwdriver.



6. Now remove the two tiny screws from the fan (warning, they can fall into the PC, and if this happen, you must dissasembly more parts
7. We must take care with the heat sink, we must have some skill because it’s a little fit, but once removed the fan it’s easy



8. Release P8400 processor with a flat screwdriver, giving 3/4 turn to the plastic screw,you must hear a “click” and it will be released.



9. And here are the two monsters :) , one sais “goodbye” and the other one sais “hello”.



10. Clear the graphic adapter contact surfaces with alcohol



11. The 9600M GT core cleaned!



12. Now use the thermal grease, it will be better to spred a little into the heat sink and a little (very little) in the chips (very spread)



13. DON’T REMOVE THE DEFAULT GREASE FROM THE GRAPHIC ADAPTER MEMORIES because they need to be into contact with the heat sink. I only added a little more of thermal grease.

    

14. It’s also recommended to clean the heat sink with alcohol



And that’s the end!! All is ready and mounted, now we must power up the computer and enjoy with our T9600, soon I will write about the benchmarks into the 3D mark, and how to OC the graphic card to the limits. Now I have 7614 marks!! A NEW RECORD!!

Asier Arranz Tecnología / Technology 5930, 5930g, acer, p8400, procesador, processor, t9600

Here are some videos of the projects I’ve been doing with the N95’s accelerometer, they were finalists in the Nokia MobileRules’08 competition, I didn’t became rich, but at least I visit Helsinky and met many interesting people :D

The video with the new projects: NiiMe Play, NiiMe Drums…

(Any day I will re-upload it, because I had a problem with Youtube and the copyright of the original sound…, and now it’s bad re-encoded)

And the last video, handling the pendulum which I have showed two posts ago:

I will develop more applications when I have more time

Asier Arranz Proyectos / Projects accelerometer, acelerómetro, n95, niime, nokia, projects, Proyectos / Projects

This is video that show how an automatic Charpy pendulum works, I have developed the software to transform an old manual pendulum to an automated one, the software uses an enconder and some sensors to detect the position of the pendulum, allowing it to autocalibrate itself in 6 oscillations (as the standard ISO indicates).
It has full control over the test, the engine for driving it up and down, the hook for the launch, the brake to stop the pendulum, and the door control as a security measure.
This test indicates a material’s resistance to an stroke (resilience), and shows the result in Joules.

Más información y proyectos similares en: www.A2Jsoft.com

Asier Arranz Proyectos / Projects charpy, hardware, péndulo, pendulum, plc, software

Well, finally instead to post all the topics in separated forums I have decided to focus them in a Blog, everything that you want to see it in the same place :)

Here you can find everything. On issues of software applications and hardware: from the projects that are already in progress, until the projects which are under developing. In areas of photography: my first steps in some competitions and various photographs (especially weather photographs), also from time to time you will see some special weather “follow-up” with its special meteorological story.
Here we go!

Asier Arranz General a2jblog, asier