HR Geeks

From their home page, “The next Richmond Code Camp will be held at the J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College campus on Parham Road on Saturday, October 3rd 2009. It’s totally free. No gimmicks. No sales pitches. Enjoy breakfast and lunch at no charge while you mingle with your peers in a state of the art learning facility and enjoy over 40 awesome sessions covering a wide range of database, software and portal development topics.”

Looks interesting and isn’t far. I was told there are presentations there not specific to Microsoft Windows environment. Would be good to hear a report from someone that attends!

Official site: http://richmondcodecamp.org/
(Uses Microsoft site for event registration)

I ventured to Knoxville, TN over the weekend for a small con. I think the official attendance was around 27 people. It was good! People came from DC, Chicago, Atlanta, Lexington, Philly, Virginia and Maine (That I remember). Overall it was a great time, and fun to be able to discuss technical topics with knowledgeable people.

Neighborcon at the Yacht Club

Despite the torrential downpour and threat of tornado action, the meeting was still on. In attendance, starting counter-clockwise from my seating position, was Remad, Andrew, Telemnstr, Jody, and myself (enferex). It was a pretty chill meeting, lots of discussion. So, what did we talk about? Tunnels/caves/inner-earth dwellings of mega-coolness. And, of course, we talked about Sneakers, and the new Star-Trek. While, I have yet to see this movie, Jody pulled out a killer rant on Spock and the temporal association with the Beastie Boy’s. In fact, I suggest, even if not a fan of either of the aforementioned nouns, to check Jody’s rant. Well, it still seems that the meeting is listed at Lynnhaven still. The proper listing-authorities have been contacted. But that’s how we operate, super-elusive, after-all no one really reads these summaries anyways.

Whoops, I was wrong. The official 2600 site does have the proper information listed. So I guess we aren’t as elusive as I originally mentioned.

-Matt (enferex)

Heads up, there is a competition coming up in Virginia Beach of college level autonomous surface vehicles.

More info can be seen at the official site http://www.auvsi.org/competitions/surface.cfm.

It is happening on the 18th thru 21st of June 2009 at Founders Inn
in Virginia Beach, VA, USA

Customers of Continental VisiNet Broadband who subscribe to their business internet access that is delivered by fixed wireless equipment were notified that they will be shutting down this service on June 1, 2009.

The letter actually refers people to Cox, Verizon and Paetec (which was USLEC).

Oh yea, where’d wimax go?

I dissed the 757 crew and headed Southwest to Raleigh to drop in on their 2600 meeting. I got caught up at work and didn’t get out of Norfolk until around 3:30pm, which delayed me a bit. I had planned to leave at 2pm to make it by the start of their meeting at 5pm. This put me at the Raleigh 2600 around 6:45PM. It was great fun! I met Koft and his girlfriend Dana there (Koft used to live in Hampton R0ads). Saw a few familiar faces from Carolina Con and met new people. Discussion ranged from Ardunio /microcontrollers, to Crestron and other building/entertainment automation platforms, to software, and hardware. Definitely an interesting group of people. I finally forced myself to leave at 11pm, and I have to admit time flew. The group was moving the meeting outside of the coffee shop at this point, the meeting apparently was far from over. In the future I will drop in on their meeting again, but first might have to pay a return visit to the DC 2600 meetings. Around the 1994 – 1996 time frame other locals and myself would make the road trip up there as we didn’t have a meeting here. Perhaps in a few months!

For that that haven’t caught it yet, Enferex (Matt) has an article published in the current (Spring) edition of “2600 – The Hacker Quarterly.” The title of the article is “MP3 Data Stream as a Covert Means of Distributing Information.” Page 16. 2600 can be found at any Barnes & Nobles.

Our very own telmnstr and enferex will be presenting the Open Vulture UAV platform at ShmooCon on 2/6.  As we know it will be the highlight of the con, we will be broadcasting their presntaton live.

Assuming we’ll have signal, you can watch the event live at the URL below.  At the completion of the talk a recorded version of the presentation will be available at the same URL.

http://stugs.com/live

From the talk description:

Open Vulture – Scavenging the Friendly Skies Open Source UAV Platform
Matt Davis and Ethan O’Toole

OpenVulture is a software application and library designed to to control numerous platforms (land, sea, air) using a simple software framework. During the presentation our vision for having cheap and autonomous craft for the public to play with iand hack upon shall be explained. Unfortunately other factors have prevented us from providing a live demo, however our project plans will be unveiled, including a basic set of hardware that a user can obtain in hopes of creating their own autonomous drone. The concepts illustrated will demonstrate cheap UAV building, however the information and software provided can be tweaked to adhere to other platforms (/me thinks Wal-Mart Buggy).

Matt Davis / Enferex is currently a software engineer from the Hampton Roads region of Virginia (757). He is part of the 757Labs crew, prefers obnoxious music, and imbibing in quantities of coffee that make mere mortals shiver.

Ethan O’Toole / Tele Monster is currently a network and system admin in the Hampton Roads region of Virginia (757). He is part of the 757Labs crew and likes dreaming up wild projects. Every once in a while a few get completed.

I have been working on an embedded wireless application and the development board only supports power over ethernet (PoE).  The manufacture hasn’t released their official PoE injector so I started looking for an economical alternative online.   For such a simple device I was amazed at how expensive a basic 802.3 PoE injector can be.

After looking at what was required to build one, I decided I would give it a try.

What you’ll need

• Two keystone jacks
• Dual port surface mount jack
• A short length of cat5 cable
• Power supply of your required voltage :: My SBC supports 12-36V DC so I used an old 12V (1.2A) power supply from a Netgear broadband router
• Multi-meter, wire stripper, and a punch tool

First comes the standard data connections.  If you’ve ever made an Ethernet cable then these are pretty familiar.

• PIN1 -> PIN1
• PIN2 -> PIN2
• PIN3 -> PIN3
• PIN6 -> PIN6

On the power side, we will need to supply positive (+) and negative (-) power to a total of four pins.  To do this, you’ll need to loop two of the PINs for positive (+) and two for negative (-) as shown above.

The power connections are:

• PIN4 :: positive (+)
• PIN5 :: positive (+)
• PIN7 :: negative (-)
• PIN8 :: negative (-)

Once you have your power connections looped, install the power supply cable.  I had a bunch of CAT6 jacks “laying around” the office and decided to use those as they have a ziptie connector at the back of the jack.  This is useful for securing the power supply cable.

After you assemble the surface mount box label the two ports and verify the power pins with a multi-meter.

This cost me nothing as I stole all of the parts from our telephone supply closet.  If I had purchased all the required parts at retail it would have been about $25.   This is the same price as the cheapest PoE injector I found w/out shipping.

If you want to remotely power a device that isn’t PoE, build another for the other end but replace the power supply with the approporiate connector for your device.