Got this in the mail the other day, but haven't had much time to play with it yet. The software isn't the friendliest in the world but it works. And yes, it works in VMWare Fusion on a Mac. More to come. This is the 915MHz US Version, not sure the worldwide ones are shipping yet.

Gotta love the warning message...

This is the EZ430 Emulator

This is the RF Access Point

To program the watch, it needs to be taken out of the casing. This actually has some modding possibilities instead - putting this on the dog's collar could be fun.

Getting the battery out kind of stinks - had to use a paperclip as the included screwdriver didn't do the job.

This is the watch component connected to the EZ430 Emulator for programming. There's a couple of small SMT components that seem to get in the way when you connect the programming headers, but with a little fiddling it connects.

That's all for now - I'll put up some more on programming the watch, interfacing with it, and so on as I get some time to use it. Looks pretty cool especially for $25 US (Doubt it still works, but MCU2009-06 is the coupon code to try.

I've got a bit of an electronics hobby and my favorite place to buy cool things is SparkFun.com. Now, they've given me yet another reason to love them:

They're giving away up to $100 in free stuff (you pay shipping) on Jan 7, 2010.

More details are available at http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/news.php?id=305 but this works out to a $100 discount running for a few hours or up to a maximum dollar value. I'll certainly be trying to get some gadgetry but even if I miss out this just proves how awesome of a company they are.

I've been spending a fair amount of time thinking about NUI or Natural User Interfaces. I've been an iPhone owner for almost 2 1/2 years, just picked up a Magic Mouse (though what I really want is a trackpad attached to my keyboard), etc. I'm getting really close to the point of building my own multi-touch table (thanks to the awesome guides at http://www.nuigroup.com) and am still excited about doing so. That said - take a look at this this:

http://www.ted.com/talks/pranav_mistry_the_thrilling_potential_of_sixthsense_technology.html

Not sure how I feel overall about a projector constantly illuminating the world around me, but it's a ridiculously cool concept. Now I just need one of these to look at resistor color codes and tell me what it is...

Around July last year, I purchased Charlene (The Simpsons, "Dead Putting Society"), my 17" MacBook Pro with the nice glossy high-res screen, etc. As part of this purchase I added a Sprint AirCard, in this case the SierraWireless 597E ExpressCard device that fits perfectly in the slot on the left side of the computer. It's always worked well (save for certain hotels in Las Vegas and Chicago who obviously want you to buy the overinflated hotel access) but one feature was always left out on the Mac side - GPS. It also really stunk that I could even boot up a Windows session in VMWare and the GPS data would appear perfectly. In other words, it was simply a matter of sending the right commands to the card to activate the GPS data. I did spend quite a long time fiddling around trying to find the necessary sequence to activate the GPS functionality, but to no avail. Much like other little projects I've come up with, this got moved to the back of the list for later consideration.

Today I was reading an article about running OS X on one of the new Dell Mini 9's, something I've contemplated myself several times. This was full of fairly useful information, including a note about a program called Sprint SmartView for any of their AirCards, that also enabled GPS functionality on a Mac. Unfortunately while pleased with Sprint's EVDO service, I have less than favorable things to say about their customer service (*WHY does the forgotten password web functionality not realize that you can't accept an SMS message on an aircard? And WHY does support not realize that them doing the same operation not help?....*) I chalked up the fact that I had never heard of this new release to similar behavior, but quickly put it behind me after I downloaded and installed the app (Here if you need it.) Other than an irritating reboot likely required due to a kext, the software works perfectly and even lets you access the GPS data in NMEA form - on one of the serial ports created when you use the card. Nice job Sprint!

One final note, if you do pick up an ExpressCard and then get irritated when you realize you want to use it in a non-ExpressCard equipped system, all is not lost. At the base most AirCards are actually USB devices in a PCI Express / ExpressCard form. On a Mac, the easiest way to determine if your card is like this is to open the About This Mac and click on More Information to open the stats about your computer. Under the Hardware: USB section you should see a USB Bus with the AirCard device listed. If so, you can actually use a USB to ExpressCard adapter. There are more expensive options available too if you want to buy direct from Amazon (ie, this.)

I've been working on an amusing project for quite some time that will be better served with a wireless camera to snap photos of the action. I had been leaning toward the AIC250W due to its relative cheapness (approx $50-$100 depending on the mood at Fry's.) That and you can simply grab a copy of the current frame by making a web request to http://cameraip/IMAGE.JPG?cidx=randomtimestamp (Thanks to Scott Hanselman for that tidbit.) Unfortunately the camera has gotten a bit difficult to find, especially for a good price. Enter its successor - the Airlink SkyIPCam 500W - Wireless, smaller, supports "Night Vision", motion detection, etc, etc. More importantly, it was on sale for $70 a while back so I picked one up.

I finally got around to unboxing the thing yesterday and started fiddling with the included tools. PC only to setup, but once configured you can use a Mac / Linux to actually view the video / images / etc. The issue is that this is not what I want it for - I need to make quick snapshots. So I tried the link as described above - and of course it didn't work. Looked at the page source, but it mostly uses an ActiveX control or a Java applet so the actual HTML / Javascript is fairly useless. Tried Fiddler, but it would crash IE immediately when I accessed the video page. Time to pull out Wireshark. Captured a couple of seconds of traffic and found the clue I needed. The default view for this camera will give a live video stream (Motion JPEG format) - looking through the capture I found the initial HTTP request:

http://camip/cgi/mjpg/mjpeg.cgi

This will automatically feed you a binary stream of the current video. Now based on Scott's article above, I'm guessing there's some more processing that needs to be accomplished, but that's for another day. I still wanted an immediate snapshot of the current image. I fiddled with the URL a bit and finally found what I needed:

http://camip/cgi/jpg/image.cgi

This presented exactly what I wanted - a jpeg file of the current view. This still requires authentication (yes, I checked) so you do need to use a tool that supports user authentication (ie, wget --user username --password password http://camip/cgi/jpg/image.cgi) or code it appropriately into whatever tool you're using.

I do have a feeling there's also a way to get an MPEG4 version of the video based on a hint in the Users Guide, but initial tests haven't worked yet. My bigger pressing issue is getting the wireless networking working properly with the security settings I have in place... Anyway, I hope this helps someone - I'll reveal more of my project soon enough.