A world in dk(decay/denmark)

I got a comment from a reader who used my DTMF dialer but missed a feature.

It was the ability to change what prefix to remove. As i live in Denmark, whenever i make a call on a land-line there is no reason to dial +45, which is the danish country code. Actually the plus is converted into 00 as well.

But Eli needed the prefix 08 to be removed.

And i guess that there are a lot of other prefixes that could be removed and + shouldn’t always be converted to 00. So I decided to implement this feature.

Whats new

• It now remembers your settings
• It possible to choose a prefix to remove
• its possible to decide what + should be replaced by.
• I slapped a GPL V3 license on it

The files

dtmfdialer jad file

dtmfdialer jar file

dtmfdialer source code

Unfortunately it wasn’t just a 5 min hack. There were two major challenges.

Persistence

In J2me access to the filesystem is restricted and requires all sorts of security permissions, but every application has access to a “RecordStore”. The RecordStore (RMS) only allows byte[] to be stored, so you have to marshall/unmarshall every piece of data at quite a low level. I haven’t persisted any data in the first version, as this is indeed tedious to work with. But not having persistence for a prefix remover functionality wouldn’t be of any use. You would have to enter the same data every time you used the application and then it would be faster to just edit the number to call.

Netbeans mobility pack

It was supposed to be so eays.

But the floweditor somehow did mess up and didn’t generate the code, so the flow diagram and the sourcecode were out of sync, and i didn’t see any way to “resync”/”regenerate code/diagram”. This was cause for a lot of frustrations.

Originally i made it with netbeans so compiling and editing the generated code were best done in netbeans. But if i ever were to mess with it again i would seriosly consider “porting” it to J2me Polish or just “vanillia” j2me. As i really really don’t like the netbeans editor.

update : Eli found a bug in the prefix substitution, i fixed and uploaded the new version (June 27, 2009, 21:17)

I have decided to build a CNC machine in the summer vacation. As soon as I finish the last exams i’ll start building / hacking. For the moment I’m looking into building plans and cnc in general. At first I wanted to build a reprap using a kit, but my funds are limited, so it will be a three axis cnc router which hopefully will be able to act as an repstrap.

The project as it looks so far :
I ordered a set with steppers, motor-control and psu from ebay, and I’m waiting for it to arrive(The seller said 10-12 days, so maybe if I am lucky next week). It should be 1.7NM motors and a more or less “plug’n’play” set.

I intend to drive the motors using a old computer running linuxcnc. linuxcnc looks real neat, but might prove to be hard to set up.

The construction

I am looking at two set of plans at the moment

How-to-Make-a-Three-Axis-CNC-Machine-Cheaply

This was the building plan that made me decide that this was a possible task. But there are some issues with the construction I don’t like, especially that it uses belts. They are hard to find and they are not cheap.

JGRO’s plans

This is a free diy plan. it can be found here : http://www.cncroutersource.com/cnc-router-plans.html

It uses threaded rod instead of belts. And the overall construction looks simpler.

Materials

Although I do want to do “fabbing” using a extruder at first I think that there will be enough work for a couple of days getting the mechanics and electronics up and running. Just as there is a lot to learn about g-code and all sorts of 3dmodelling.

To begin with I want to cut using a dremel tool, maybe a more powerful spindle(?) to be able to cut wood – if I have enough power in the steppers.

You might ask what do you want to make / “fab” with a 3 axis cnc machine?  I can come up with a lot of different small things like “coat hanger”, “coffee filter”, “PCBs” but I guess that it just boils down to: ” I think its a very fascinating technology and want to play with it”

Sometimes it would be nice to use a script call somebody and play a message.
I “needed” a wake-up-call system and since I use a voip-phone and have access to a server. I thought i would be quite nifty if I could have the server call me. Furthermore i would like to be able to script calls, so for instance the calendar could call me with reminders rather than sending an email.

I googled around but weren’t able to find such a utility. But i did find cli-sip client pjsua, based on pjsip. Its posible to use it in conjunction with a shell script.

Scripting

jacob@vps:~./control.sh sip:108329@foobar.com "wake up you lazy bastard!"
Is the basic usage i wanted to have. In order to get this functionality there are two steps.

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