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See You At Maker Faire Detroit On Saturday

Sat, 25 Jul 2010 01:05:24 EST

The flier you get with Maker Faire Detroit tickets.
I'll be at Maker Faire Detroit on Saturday, July 31st along with my cousin Brock of RCE-Cast supercomputing fame and Adam who is a practicing coolant engineer at the particle accelerator at MSU. All three of us are Michigan natives with Brock working in Ann Arbor, and Adam in Lansing, and I, a deserter in Massachusetts. I'm really excited that they are hosting an official Maker Faire in Detroit. I grew up in Michigan and eventually decided to leave the area due to not being able to find any interesting work within the state or any work at all. During my time growing up, from the 1980's, Michigan was filled with manufacturing jobs and inter tangled heavily with the automotive industry. My dad ran his own car repair business and would always task me with things like helping him pick up and deliver vehicles, hauling broken vehicles and parts around, as well as the most boring jobs like sanding rust off of metal. It honestly made me hate the traditional automotive industry which is why I wanted nothing to do with it.

The old guard in Michigan doesn't seem to be able to see past the manufacturing mentality, and there have been a plethora of unskilled workers draining the states economy since the US automotive industry started faltering. An example of a ridiculous attempt to try and spur business in my home county in Michigan, Shiawassee; is the Shiawassee economic development partnership. They put on the front of trying to help business, but the only business they cater to are established manufacturing firms. Their listings of $100,000+ manufacturing properties are laughable. Way to NOT spur new innovative business in your community.

It would be exciting if there were more opportunities outside of manufacturing in areas other than Ann Arbor. The state should be ripe with cheap facilities and incentives. I'm really thankful that I had access to the Internet to be able to know what was going on outside of my home state while growing up in places like California and Massachusetts.

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Windows XP IIS Install Problems Especially with ASP.NET 2.0

Fri, 10 Jul 2010 24:05:23 EST

The first wrong move of many is installing IIS on Windows XP.
In my day job I have to install IIS on a Windows XP machine about every six months. After two years or sporadically having to install IIS across different computer models and service packs, I have noticed that IIS never works correctly after you install it on Windows XP. I am so confident of this that I decided to install it on my own, fully patched Windows XP Service Pack 3 machine and document how I get ASP.NET 2.0 applications to work in hope that it will help someone else.

Permission errors with IIS in Windows XP.
The first thing that always happens when I install IIS on Windows XP is that I always end up with permission errors on the default http://localhost website. I re-started, but this still did not solve the problem.

Permission errors with IIS in Windows XP.
Because all I ever want to do is get ASP.NET working anyway, I created a new directory in Inetpub/wwwroot called ASP2Test and created an application directory out of it using the IIS control panel in Administrative Tools. I specifically set the ASP.NET version to 2.0. I then attempted to access the new application directory which I had created a simple aspx file in, but got the infamous failed to access IIS metabase error.

Creating a new application directory in IIS on Windows XP.
Setting the ASP.net version in IIS in Windows XP.
The fun failed to access metabase error with IIS on Windows XP.







After having to deal with this several times, I have figured out a step that normally will solve the error in ASP.NET 2.0 applications at least. Open up a command line and navigate to C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.xxx and use the exe "aspnet_regiis" with the parameter -i, which I think re-installs the framework. If you do this, then re-start your computer, you may get lucky and your ASP.NET application will now run in IIS on Windows XP.

aspnet_regiis -i

Running the aspnet_regiis command.
My ASP.NET 2.0 application finally works on IIS in Windows XP.








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Learning How to Increase Voltage Using Charge Pumps

Fri, 11 Jun 2010 22:04:22 EST

Fooling around with a simple charge pump circuit.
While continuing work on the squishy message system I have also started work on my next electrical engineering project that involves working with solar technology. If you have ever read about or worked with a small solar cell, you will quickly find out that it is an inconsistent and minute power source.

The major initial challenge in working with solar is getting usable, consistent voltage. Based on my initial readings it seems like there are two ways to increase voltage. Use a properly timed inductive coil or a charge pump. I refuse to use a coil because my instinct is telling me that coils are inconsistent and will be difficult to procure consistently in quantity and similar accuracy. So the only alternative is to use a charge pump.

A charge pump is a circuit configuration containing a few or several stages depending on how much of a consistent voltage increase is needed. The basic principal works with two capacitors in proper timing. The first capacitor is charged, then its positive and negative legs are switched to make contact with a second capacitor. The second capacitor takes the charge and the process is repeated in several stages in order to produce a consistent voltage increase.

There is an excellent short paper that summarizes the basic functionality of a charge pump as well as the different types of charge pump configurations. A comparison of efficiency vs area and several other aspects are also examined. The paper is titled "A DC-DC Charge Pump Design Based on Voltage Doublers" by Januz A. Starzyk, Ying-Wei Jan, and Fengjing Qiu. I would recommend it for anyone curious about the circuit.

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