Category Archives: electronics

Audi – Built in FM Transmitter

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Instead of replacing the head unit of my car I decided to rather just get an FM Transmitter. I ended up with a cheap one from ebay, one that looks like this. It has a USB port to charge things from and a 3.5mm male audio jack to plug into MP3 players, cellphones etc. The only problem, is that the cigarette lighter in my car is located just infront of the gear lever, this gets in the way and the wires there annoy me.

This got me itnerested in building it into the car. I eventually decided to make use of one of the “button” covers in the row of buttons. I have two blanks, so went about mutilating it to achieve my goal. It wasn’t as easy as I had hoped, the blank has a hole lot of junk on the back, but I sawed and ground it off to be left with just the right amount of space to mount a button, a female 3.5mm audio jack and an indicator LED.

Original Blank on the right, and my modified one on the left, hot glue and all

I trimmed the power lines going to my radio just behind it, and added two connectors so I could easily plug in and remove the fm transmitter if need be. It’s more convenient and also a bit safer/neater than soldered wires all over the place.

I added two wires with clips from the radio’s wiring harness for power.

One unfortunate thing, is the way I put everything together, it required me to push the FM transmitter through the hole of cover. This was problematic as it was too large. In the end I discarded majority of the case, and wound some insulation tape around the circuitry just to protect it. Not what I had wanted, and not particularly neat, but it works.

Neatly in place above the radio. USB, LED (off), 3.5mm audio plug and power button visible

Hooked it all up and it’s up and running. The FM transmitter is a cheap one, not that great quality and only transmits on 2 set frequencies, but it does the job. I have found however that the 5V it supplies for USB isn’t that great. My GPS doesn’t seem to like charging from it, although my cellphone is fine. I think the current may be rather limited, so may look into repacing that part of circuitry at some stage.

With a GPS plugged in to charge and the 3.5mm audio plug in as well. LED On

My Garmin is logging my every move.

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A while ago while researching a new toy, my Garmin Nuvi 200, I found a neat way to get my model, and several others, to log the route you followed. It’s a slight hassle but works fairly nicely, see instructions below. but the other day I was searching through my Garmin and happened upon a file by the name of “Current.gpx” with a second file “1.gpx” in an archive folder. Both were gpx files so I quickly imported them into Google Maps to take a look.

Now after I’d had a look, I went and looked for the same files on my Dad’s GPS, a Garmin nuvi 350, and found the same files. His files just contained a marker with each of his favourites which then popped up all over Google Earth, mine however contained a very detailed history of every journey I had ever made while my Garmin was on. On one side I thought this was pretty cool, on the other hand I wondered how many people out there are selling there GPSs with thousands of kilometres of driving history sitting on them. It’s quite fun to actually look at the routes. In Google Earth you can select each “route” or section of time while your Garmin was online, so each journey say. Then you can generate a cool altitude, speed vs time graph, and follow it around your route.

After thinking about it a bit and checking out my archive file, it seems that it only activated this “feature” after I used the hacked method to get it to log my single route, so I don’t think it’s anything for people to worry about, perhaps just to keep in mind.

To activate the custom tracking method, you must have locked signal and be looking at the map. Click “Menu”, then “Tools”, then “Where am I?”. Click once on the writing under “Nearest Address” then twice on the text under “My Location” then once again on the text under “Nearest Address”. This should bring up another menu with the options “Start Playback” and “Start Recording”. Click start recording. Two things you will notice. The screenshot button automatically turns itself on (you can turn it off in the menu if you want) and there is a large stop button at the top of the screen. Click that when you want to stop recording your moves. You may notice that there is a timer, it doesn’t tick every second, so if you’re unsure whether it’s working or not, you just have to wait a bit till it ticks over, often jumping several seconds at a time.

To get your data you need to plug your GPS into a PC and go on to the Garmin nuvi drive. Open the Garmin folder and then the Logs folder. Here you will find dated folders with all your logs. The gps.bin file is the one that contains your data.

To convert this into something a bit more usable you are going to need to download a program called Nutrak. This program will generate a GPX file for you which can be opened with Google Earth and various other programs.

Note: I believe by recording your moves once, it activates the automatic recording of every journey you ever take, ever.
Note2: I managed to find the post where I originally discovered this, he also gives nice pictured instructions, you can check it out here. Fairly old hack.

Micro USB… Really?

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I got a new phone today, yay! Cellphone contract ended last month, and wanted to switch from MTN to Vodacom but was going to end up being such a mission that I just gave up and am going to stick it out with MTN for another 24months. The upside of this is my new (although it’s a relatively old phone) Nokia E63. Basically the big brother of my previous Nokia E51.

Now the point of this. USB mini is a great port, it has been used on practically everything electronic, it’s great, I love it, so why have Nokia decided to stick silly little flimsy USB-Micro ports on their new phones? A cable I do not own, and will now wait a bit before buying. I’m probably just being illogical, or not thinking this through, but I just find it annoying, and why can’t everyone just use the same cable?

Then I remembered having read a few years ago that all the big Cellphone Manufacturers had gotten together and decided to unify the chargers they use on their cellphones. According to this article, this is supposed to be done by 2012. That’s great! Then I read on to see that they have chosen the USB-Micro plug as the weapon of choice for charging all cellphones from then on. Sigh. But I guess yay for unity.

In any case, I thought great! My phone has a USB-micro port, that obviously means that Nokia have gotten over their fear of allowing their cellphones to charge via USB and I’ll be able to charge my phone via USB. Borrowing a cable from a friend proved that my faith in Nokia was unnecessary as they have once again disappointed.

I don’t have much to say, seeing as I have set it up almost exactly as a larger clone of my previous phone, based on the same Symbian OS. It may just be in my mind, but it does seem to react slightly faster. I do however feel that their ability to have more than one “Home Screen” is the biggest waste of time ever. They’ve also put the asterisk, zero and hash keys on the right hand side of the what would normally be a standard numpad, a bit frustrating, but seeing as I am starting for the first time with a QWERTY keypad on a cellphone, I’m sure I’ll get used to it.

For the moment I’m downloading new Firmware for it, so we’ll see how that goes.

Install Flash Drive in A110

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The standard 8GB SSD that comes standard in the Acer Aspire is a bit crappy. It’s rather slow, and obviously 8GB isn’t particularly much space. I knew of others who had installed Flash Drives in their netbooks and figured I’d do the same. I couldn’t find any posts about people who had done it, but I did find Tnkgrl who had added a USB bluetooth device to hers and a guy over at WRP & CW – Radio Shack who added a USB fingerprint scanner to his.

They both used different places on the motherboard to access extra USB ports. Both of them work without disabling any of the other USB ports. Tnkrgrl made use of some pins under where the Wi-Fi card is situated, and the Radio Shack hack some points near the CPU. I wasn’t too keen to fiddle with a soldering iron near the CPU, so instead chose to use Tnkgrl’s post for reference. I managed to solder the power wires in quite easily but really battled to get the data wires in place. My soldering iron is unfortunately not built for finicky work like this, so I eventually gave up and decided to use the data points that Radio Shack used.

I purchased a 16GB Kingston Data Traveller G2, stripped it of it’s casing and soldered the appropriate wires to it. Putting everything back together and booting up in Linux revealed the drive to be in working order.

What I plan to do now is to install Windows XP onto the SSD and Linux onto the Flash Drive. Although I am getting very used to Linux, I still have several Apps that I just can’t get to work in Linux, and can find no alternatives.

Below I show how to take apart the Acer. When I did it I followed this guide by Tony Smith.

First remove the battery and unscrew the 6 screws on the underside of the netbook. I have circled them in the following picture. You also need to remove the two rubber feet near where the battery goes, and remove two screws from underneath them.img_4192Turn over the netbook and lift open the screen. The keyboard is held in place by 3 spring loaded clips along the top of the keyboard. I have circled them in the next picture. Using a flat head screw driver or credit card push these in one by one. As each one is pushed in, the top of the keyboard should lift slightly. Once all three of the clips have been pushed in, raise the top of the keyboard slightly and pull it towards the screen. This should allow the hooks at the bottom of the keyboard to come loose. Underneath, the keyboards wires go to the motherboard. It is fairly simple to release the catch on the cables clip on the motherboard, and free it form the netbook.img_4196Next you have to remove 6 screws that hold the casing together, they have been circled in the following picture. You also need to unclip and release the cable that goes from the touchpad to the motherboard.

Next part isn’t that nice. The top part of the casing clips into the bottom half with a series of clips around the edge. You need to stick your screwdriver or credit card in on one end and slowly work your way around the edge of the netbook unclipping it. Once they’re all unclipped you unhook the top parts from just below the screen hinges. You should now have the motherboard in full view.img_4200If you wish to remove the motherboard you must undo the two screws in the lower part of the image above. This will allow you to first remove the wifi card. You must also undo the clip that holds the SSD’s cable in place on the motherboard, and also unplug the pug that carries the wires to the screen in the top right of the screen. To make life easier you should also undo the two screws that keep a hook in place in the top left. This acts as part of the hinge mechanism and to hold the motherboard in place. Underneath the motherboard is another wire harness which carries wires to the board on the right of the laptop.

If you wish to install more/new RAM, this is quite easy, you need simply plug it in to the open slot on the underside of the motherboard.img_4201In this image you can just see where my two data wires solder onto the motherboard by the CPU. At the place there are two columns of solder points. The left column has 4 pins and the right column 5. On the left column the first point (ie the top point) is the Ground, the second point Data+, third point Data-, and fourth (bottom) point 5V+. In my picture I only used the data points.This image from the aforementioned Radio Shack shows the points better. This image from Tnkgrl shows the two power points I used for my Flash Drive, and also the other two Data points that can be used.

For the four points on the Flash Drive itself. Lying the flash drive down with the contacts on top, and to the right. In order from top to bottom, the contacts are: 5V+, Data-, Data+, Ground. I just stashed the flash drive to the right there,forwards of the SSD where there was some space. Because these are just standard USB ports they can be used to install any standard USB device. The guy at Radio Shack actually installed a tiny USB Hub into it, allow new additions to be installed relatively easily.