I’ve fixed an annoying issue with nabPHP, when I store a regular expression in the database PHP escapes everything with \’s, which is ace…. until you put it back out and stick it into a webpage then resubmit it. In short, the backslashes grow and grow and generally screw things up.

Its sorted now and running on my server at home, it seems to be working ok so a release could be coming up soon

On the Simons Pissed side of things, the ISD1700 chipcorders arrived yesterday, I’ve managed to record some things to it and play them back (through an old-school buzzer – no speakers here!). The analog input requires a 0.1uf capacitor (for low-pass filtering) and guess what? I havent got one Oddly my finger seems to work, if i bridge the connection with my finger the sound is pure and clear :p

The wonders of the human body eh?

So i’ve finally got round to installing the nabaztag stuff on my server just to find that I forgot to compile in cURL support.

Hrmph.

Off I go to recompile it *again*.

On the plus side the software actually works now, the scheduling kicks off on time and it generates the correct responses, it just cant send them to the bunny until cURL is fixed.

T’other day I bought one of these (it fits my gadget needs by having blinking lights AND being USB enabled) I-buddy msn notifier. It arrived yesterday and in fine Tom-Style I binned the instructions and plugged it in.

 After the usual cocking about with XP it started working, all emoticons in my msn chats were triggering it (annoyingly even the ones in peoples names :/ ). Half hour later I was bored with it.

 ”hmm, wonder if i can get this working in my NSLU2..” he thinks.

So I fired up the ole’ XP virtual machine that I use for this sort of thing and installed usbsnoop. 10 minutes of msn conversations seemed to generate enough usb packet data to do the trick

 The protocol is stupidly simple, its using the USB HID stuff but seems to respond to data packets without having all the HID stuff set up.

Heres how it works:

1. Scan the usb busses for something with vendorid=0×1130 and prodid=0×0002 – thats the ibuddy
2. The first thing to send to it is the setup packet -
   1. (0×22, 0×09, 0×00, 0×02, 0×01, 0×00, 0×00, 0×00)
3. the header for the data packet is
   1. (0×55, 0×53, 0×42, 0×43, 0×00, 0×40, 0×02)
4. onto the header append another byte of the following format XBGRUDLR  where:
   1. X = heart LED (1 = on, 0 = off)
   2. B G R are the bits for the 3 leds in the head but inverted, i.e. 0 = on, 1 = off
   3. U D are the wing positions, toggle between them to flap
   4. L R are used to twitch it left and right, only enable 1 at a time
5. Thats it! Things toggled on stay on until turned off. To clear it all send 0xff

This works wonderfully with libusb and python, thanks to Scott Weston for publishing the USB rocket launcher python scripts, from which I borrows the USBDevice classes and bastardized for my own use.

Example script is here, currently it flashes the head blue. Note it requires Python, pyusb and libusb to be installed first.

 I’m planning on using this to alert me when torrents are complete, email notifications etc.

Do with it what you will

I’m always on the lookout for potential wearable computing thingummies, I’ll be a gargoyle one day at this rate :p

On my many and lengthy gadget hunts i discovered cheap USB photo viewer keyrings, this particular one was about a fiver, I happened to be buying some other stuf as well so cvhucked it on the basket.

Whats the first thing a hacky person like myself does to it? Rips it open of course

 Its now installed in a wrist warmer, as some kind of interactive jewlery thing, I’ve posted it all on instructables of course