After putting together the rotary phone beaglebone machine, I decided that I still needed to do something with the extra pinouts on the beaglebone. Since I had recently started using MyTinyTodo to keep track of my todo list, I thought it would be nice to have a quick visual display of how many things are still on my todo list.

To Accomplish this my goal, I would need to add some LEDs to the beagle bone and then hack some code to do what needs doing. First thing first: add the idea to the todo list.

Gather Some Components

In order to get this project going, a trip to the nearby electronics store was in order. After returning home with 10 green LEDs ( the plan was to use 6, but I figured buying extra would let me fry a few), I realized that there was a lack of 100 Ohm resistors in my home.

Fortunately, I had some 50 Ohms that I soldered in series to handle the job.

This is a very boring pictures; don't look at it.

Solder 6 of These

This is the basic circuit that get's wired to the BeagleBone. The extra length of wire will get cut off and the entire thing will be wrapped in a bit of electrical tape.

While I was at the electronics store, I bought some fans to replace the fans in the clock server because I think it runs too hot.

The Finished Circuit

Well looky looky! The circuit is finished. Six LEDs with a common ground, with a 100 Ohms of resistance for each LED.

Time to wrap these babies up with electrical tape and hot glue them into the BeagleBone's case.

Glued in Place

On the third attempt, I managed to almost get the LEDs glued into place where I wanted them. Yea, it took me a few time of gluing, and then prying the LEDs from the case a regluing before things were working properly.

As it is, one of the LEDs still doesn't let the box close very easily. Terrible terrible design. That's it! I'm firing myself.

Oh hey! This is probably the best picture that shows off the flowers etched in the glass.

7 Things On The ToDo List

At the time this picture was taken, there were 7 things on my todo list. But there are only 3 LEDs lit up. That's right, the LEDs need to be counted in binary from left to right.

With this setup, using 6 LEDs, the ToDo List will max out at 63 items; and I if I have that many things to do, something is very wrong.

Every 5 minutes, the LEDs run a simple animation sequence, parse the ToDo List RSS feed and then turn on or turn off LEDs as necessary.

Since there is still plenty of room in the box, I'm thinking of adding another something-or-other that is controlled by the BeagleBone pins. I'm not sure what it will be, but I can guarantee I'll have fun making it.

Hack on!

PS. I really want to have 15 things on my ToDo list, just so I can say "THERE...ARE...FOUR...LIGHTS" Ha hahahaha, I crack me up.

A few weeks ago I purchased a BeagleBone from Amazon. The BeagleBone is a small ARM based computer with programmable Input/Output pins developed by Texas Instruments and is part of their beagleboard line of ARM development boards. After finally deciding what to do with the computer, it was time to build a new computer case.

Where is it Going?

At the thrift store, I purchased a nice jewelry box with flowers etched in its glass. The small, solid box was $3.00.

The plan (play the A-Team theme), is as follows:

1. Connect a rotary phone to the BeagleBone for input
2. Do some other sweet shit (more on that later)

Alrighty! time to get crackin

Gutted

Step 1. Remove the guts.

For some reason, whoever created the box thought it would be a good idea to put a bunch of stuff inside that I don't want or need.

Here is the box with the lid removed and the crap removed.

Making Some Standoffs

When I made the clock server case, I kept some of the wood bits that I needed to remove from the internals of the clock. A wood saw and some small screws made some sweet standoffs for the beaglebone.

A black marker was eventually used to color the light wood.

Mangle the Box

Any dreams I had about making an very clean access hole in the case was dashed upon the rocks of my poor power tool using skills.

Oh well, it doesn't get seen, and it works as it should. Why am I complaining?

Wall Hanging Mount

Some twisted baling wire and two wood screws will make it very easy to hang the box on the wall.

Time to warm up the hot glue gun.

So Far So Good

Once the glue gun was hot, the standoffs were glued into the box.

Look at all of that empty space! The BeagleBone has a USB port so I will be putting something in the box, but I don't know what it will be. So far, I'm thinking it could be:

• a nice laptop hard-drive for file storage
• a character LCD to display information
• or... I could ditch the case and put the BeagleBone in the phone itself

On The Wall

All plugged in a running sweet!

Currently, my BeagleBone is running Arch Linux.
Originally, the BeagleBone ships with Ångström Linux, but I couldn't find any documentation for configuring the opkg package manager that ships with Ångström, and since I was looking to eventually run Lighttpd and MySQL on the device, I switched to a distro with an extremely useful wiki.

The Computers in the Corner

The Phone
The Bone
The Router
The Clock Server
The DSL Modem
The Status Server (between the modem and the router)

Now What to Do?

Put some LEDs in the box and write a program to light up the LEDs when something happens. That something is to be decided

But what else?
Options include putting a hard drive in the box and use it as a federated status.net server or put a character LCD in the case and use LCDproc to display various bits of information.

Currently the machine is programmed to:

• Dial 666 : play random Iron Maiden track on my MuttonChop machine
• Dial 75337 (sleep) : shut down computers
• Dial 9253 (wake) : emit wake-on-lan signal to various computers

Now I need to write a bunch of little programs to be run when various numbers are dialed on the phone, and I need to find a way to get the cables out of the way.

Until next time, hack on!

The BeagleBone story continues at http://www.jezra.net/blog/LEDs_BeagleBone_and_my_ToDo_List

On my home network, when various things happen, a command is sent to Wind(my media playing machine) via some networked text to speech scripts. Since espeak is already installed on Wind, I thought I would use some 'text to speech' to notify me when Wind is shutting down. Egads! what a bad idea.

If you have espeak installed on your machine, fire up the command line and enter:

espeak "shutting down"

Would you really want to hear that every time a machine is shut down? Well you might, but I certainly don't.

Why Bother?

When I first built Wind, I used two switches wired in parallel for the power on/off. This requires both switches to be depressed at the same time in order to turn the machine on or off. While this makes it very easy to avoid accidental shutdown, the switches I used give no tactile feedback and I can't always be sure that the machine has been shutdown, unless I stand around for a bit and wait for the computer light to power off. What a waste of my time.

I just want to hit the power and head out the door.

The Fix

For reasons of maintaining sanity, I felt a simple audio file should be played when the machine is powered off. The process went something like this:

1. Make an Audio File

   Using audacity and my cheap USB microphone, I recorded an overlapped descending 3 note arpeggio that I played on my concertina. After a bit of adjustment, it sounds like this:
   
   Note: The shutdown audio file uses the non-patent encumbered ogg format. If your browser does not support playing ogg files, you owe it to yourself and the internet to file a bug report with your browser's creator regarding the lack of ogg support. Why do they hate the internet?

2. Make a Shutdown Script

   part of the plan requires a very simple script that will play the audio file and then send the computer the shutdown command. On Wind, I created a script at /usr/local/sbin/wind_shutdown with the following code:

   #!/bin/sh
   sap /storage/opt/shutdown.ogg &
   shutdown -h now &
   

3. Run the Shutdown Script When the Power Button is Pressed

   Wind is running Arch Linux with acpi, so I need to modify /etc/acpi/event.sh to run wind_shutdown when the power button pressed. Basically, I need to find this line:

   PWRF)   logger "PowerButton pressed: $2" ;;

   and replace it with this line

   PWRF)   logger "PowerButton pressed: $2" && wind_shutdown;;

4. Rejoice!

That's all for now. From me and my text editor, I wish you all a very hacky New Year. Now quit reading, and go shut something off.