The A/C system of the Ford Escape has a resistive sensing element used regulate the blower motor. If you find that the A/C blows air on some fan speeds but not others, it is likely that the blower motor resistor has burned out or otherwise failed. On my 2009 Escape, the blower motor would run in positions 3 and 4, but not 1 or 2. Based on other reports online, failing for the low speed settings seems to be the most common symptom.

I recently received an Ouya and want to try coding a game for it. While the favorite child for Ouya developments seems to be Unity3D, the Unity IDE cannot be run on Linux. While there are a huge set of frameworks and game engines for developing on Android, I didn’t want to have to do game testing entirely via an Android Virtual Device or by loading onto a phone. Fortunately, libGDX provides a cross platform framework that should let me do most of the testing in on my PC.

I currently have an RCA RCRP05BR 5 Device Cable Replacement Universal Remote (Black), and it works well for controlling an LG TV, Roku XD, and original XBox. My home theater PC (picked up by a friend when Borders went out of business) did not have a built in infrared receiver, so the objective was to find a receiver compatible with the universal remote that would be nicely detected by Ubuntu.

Warning: this is way out of date.

In order to create the UAV flight control system from scratch, we’re going to need a microcontroller and a tool chain that is Linux compatible. Since we know we’re going to be dealing with servo control signals, input capture (good for reading pulse widths), and PWM modules are going to be important in our device selection. Microchip has a huge variety of microcontrollers available, and I have my eye on their dsPIC33 series because of the DSP hardware and variety of peripherals. Also, I have some experience using them in previous hobby projects, as well as my Senior Design. Best of all, I still have a PICkit2 emulator and PIC16F887 development board stashed away.

Or, how I started another project I was unlikely to finish.

It seems like everybody else has a UAV, and I don’t. So, let’s try to build one. I’m a poor writer, but if I force myself to document things in this blog, there’s a small chance I’ll keep myself from forgetting why I made decisions and going in circles.

Since the PDF library is not free software, it isn’t included with the distribution of Chromium. To get PDF support in Chromium:

Install checkinstall via:

sudo apt-get install checkinstall