I traveled to Phoenix this week to give a BACnet and Lighting Applications presentation to the NEMA JSC on DALI. I flew there aboard a Song Airlines 757. During the powerup sequence for the plane, all the passengers were greeted with the image of Tux and the Linux boot sequence as the in-flight entertainment system in each headrest initialized. The touch panel color LCD screens provided games, movies, music, flight information, and satellite television. During the 3 hour flight, I watched Fox News, Mythbusters on Discovery, TLC, and Sunday night football. I also listened to some Ramones and The Smiths. I played trivia with other passengers – I came in 3rd place out of 3 players. I normally dread longer flights, but having satellite TV and Linux serving up entertainment really made the trip go by quickly.
Archive for October, 2006
Linux in-flight entertainment
Thursday, October 19th, 2006BACnet Plugfest Complete
Friday, October 6th, 2006Today was the final day of the BACnet Interoperability Workshop, or Plugfest as it is commonly called. Over the two and a half days we found only two bugs in the open source BACnet stack at SourceForge that I ported into our lighting panel in 5 days. I fixed both bugs in a few minutes and uploaded the firmware into the lighting panels using the in-circuit-debugger. The fixes were verified by the other vendor.
The MS/TP state machine worked. We tested it at 9600 baud, 19200 baud, and 38400 baud and worked fine. 76800 baud did not work, so I will need to figure out why. I may need to clock the processor at 40 MHz instead of 20 MHz to get some extra horsepower. I will also need to optimize the other processes, like the input reading and debouncing, to take less time in the main loop.
The food was great and I met a lot of nice folks. Hopefully my flight home tomorrow will be uneventful.
