Hardware - 3

Luckily xkcd #927 isn't all true. When talking about memory cards used in cameras and other appliance, SD has taken the market and become The Standard to rule all standards.

In my junk-pile I have all kinds of CF, MMC and Memory Sticks all of which have became completely obsoleted. Last usable one was the Memory Stick into my PSP (Playstation Portable). For some reason the stick became rotten and I'm hesitant go get a "new" one. That Sony-specific standard has been obsoleted waaay too long. Not to mention anything about 2012 obsoletion of PSP.

So, SD-cards. There is an association managing the standard, SD Association. Major patents are owned by Panasonic, SanDisk and Toshiba, but they've learned the lesson fom Sony's failures (with Betamax and Memory Stick). Competition can get the SD-license with relax-enough terms and make the ecosystem thrive keeping all of us consumers happy.

SDA defines their existence as follows:

SD Association is a global ecosystem of companies setting industry-leading memory card standards that simplify the use and extend the life of consumer electronics, including mobile phones, for millions of people every day.

Well said!
That's exactly what countering Xkcd #927 will need. An undisputed leader with good enough product for us consumers to accept and use.

SD Standards

SD-cards have existed for a while now and given progress in accessing bits in silicon, the speeds have changed a lot. This is how SDA defines their standards for consumers:

There are four different standards reaching the most recent SDUC. Those four can have five different classifications of speed having multiple speed modes in them. Above table is bit confusing, but when you look at it bit closer, you'll realize the duplicates. As an example, speed modes C4 and C6 exist in all of the 5 speed classes spanning from early ones to most recent.

If you go shopping, the old SD-standard cards aren't available anymore. SDHC and SDXC are the ones being sold actively. The newcomer SDUC is still rare as of 2021.

As the access for all of the standards require different approach from the appliance, be really careful to go for a compatible card. Personally I've seen some relatively new GPS devices require SDHC with max. filesystem size of 32 GiB. Obviously the design and components in those devices are from past.

SD Speeds

Why is this all important?

Well, it isn't unless the thing you're using your SD-card with has some requirements. Ultimately there will be requirements depending on what you do.
Examples of requirements might be:

• Storing still images from a camera, for that pretty much all of the cards work, any U-class card will do the trick
• Storing video from a camera, for that see V-class, U-class might choke on big data streams
• Reading and writing data with your Raspberry Pi, for that see A-class, U-class will work ok, but might lack the random-access performance of the A-class

Symbols indicating speed would be:

Examples

To make this practical, let's see some real-world readers and cards to see if any of the above symbols can be found in them.

Readers

In above pic are couple reader/writer units I own. Both are USB 3.0, but the leftmost one is a very simple micro-SD -reader. For "regular" size SD-cards I use the bigger box, which can access multiple cards at the same time.

Readers (writers) won't have a speed class in them. They will have the SD-standard mentioned. Please be aware of USB 2.0 speed limitations if using any of the old tech. Any reasonably new SD-card will be much faster than the USB-bus. When transferring your already recorded moments, speed is not an issue. When working with large video files or tons of pics, make sure to have a fast reader.

Card, 128 GB

Here is a micro-SD from my GoPro. Following symbols can be seen on the card:

• Manufacturer: Kingston
• Form factor. Micro SD
• Standard: SDXC, II is for UHS-II speed
• Capacity: 128 GB, ~119 GiB
• Speed classification: U3, V90 and A1
• Comment: An action camera will produce a steady stream of 4K H.265 video, that's what the UHS-II V90 is for. A card with this kind of classification is on the expensive side, well over 100€.

Card, 32 GB

Here is a micro-SD from my Garmin GPS. Following symbols can be seen on the card:

• Manufacturer: SanDisk
• Capacity: 32 GB, ~30 GiB
• Form factor. Micro SD
• Standard: SDHC, I is for UHS-I speed
• Speed classification: U3, V30 and A1
• Comment: I'm using this for a dual-purpose, it serves as map data storage (A1) and dash cam video recorder (V30) for HD H.264 video stream. UHS-I will suit this purpose fine as the video stream is very reasonable.

Card, 16 GB

Here is a micro-SD from my Raspberry Pi. Following symbols can be seen on the card:

• Manufacturer: Transcend
• Capacity: 16 GB, ~15 GiB
• Speed classification: 10
• Form factor. Micro SD
• Speed classification: U1
• Standard: SDHC, I is for UHS-I speed
• Comment: Running an application-heavy Raspi might benefit for having an A-class card, instead of U-class which is better suited for streaming data. This one is an old one from a still camera which it suited well.

Card, 8 GB

Here is a micro-SD which I'm not actively using anymore. Following symbols can be seen on the card:

• Capacity: 8 GB, ~7.4 GiB
• Form factor. Micro SD
• Standard: SDHC, I is for UHS-I speed
• Speed classification: U1
• Comment: An obvious old card lacking both A and V speed classes

Additional info

For further info, see:

• SD Association - Speed Class
• Picking the Right SD Card: What Do the Numbers Mean?

Rotting bits - Cell charge leak

Storage fragmentation. It is a real physical phenomenon in NAND storage causing a stored bit to "rot". This exact type of failure exists both in SD cards and SSD (Solid-State Drive). If the same exact storage location is written constantly, eventually it will cause the cell charge to leak causing data loss. As manufacturers/vendors are aware of this, there are countermeasures.

Typically you as an end-user don't need to worry about this. Older cards and SSDs would start losing your precious stored data, but given technological advances it is less and less an issue. Even if you would create a piece of software for the purpose of stressing out an exact location of storage, modern hardware wouldn't be bothered. You may hear and read stories of data loss caused by this. I see no reason not to believe any such stories, but bear in mind any new hardware is less and less prone of this kind of failure.

Finally

While shopping for storage capacity, I'll always go big (unless there is a clear reason not to). Bigger ones tend to have modern design, be able to handle faster access and have really good resistance to data loss.

My suggestion for anybody would be to do the same.

I'm sure everybody who has ever held a camera knows there is a thread for tripod somewhere bottomside of the camera. This is what my Canon EOS would look like from the belly-side:

Why all cameras have that specific threading is because manufacturers want to be ISO 1222:2010 -compliant. Reading Wikipedia article Tripod (photography), Screw thread, reveals the spec having a 1/4-20 UNC or 3/8-16 UNC thread. There is also a phrase "Most consumer cameras are fitted with 1/4-20 UNC threads."

UNC? Quarter inch?

According to mandatory Pulp Fiction reference, in Europe we have the metric system. Personally I have no idea what is a 1/4 inch Whitworth UNC thread mentioned in Stackexchange article Why aren't tripod mounts metric? Following up on the history, to my surprise, that particular camera thread can be traced at least to year 1901. There seems to be suggestions to circa 1870 and name T. A. Edison being mentioned, but none of that can be corroborated.

Time warping back to today.
My work has been remote for many many years. Given the global pandemic, everybody else is also doing the same. As every meeting is done over the net, I've made choices to run with some serious hardware. If you're interested, there is a blog post about microphone upgrade from 2019.

This is my new webcam setup:

The camera is a Logitech StreamCam. What I rigged it into is the cheapest mirophone table stand I could order online. The one I have is a Millenium MA-2040 from Thomann. The price is extremely cheap 20,- €. However, cheap it may be, but it does the job well.

It doesn't require much thinking to realize, the ISO-standard thread in StreamCam is 1/4", but a microphone stand will have 3/8" or 5/8" making the fitting require an adapter. Thomann page states "With 5/8" threaded connector for recording studios and multimedia workstations". Logitech provides options in their package for camera setup. The typical use would be to have monitor/laptop-bracket which makes the camera sit on top of your display. Second option is the 1/4" setup. To state the obvious: for that you'll need some sort of tripod/stand/thingie.

Here are pics from my solution:

When you go shopping for such adapter, don't do it like I did:

Above pic is proof, that I seriously suck at non-metric threads. From left to right:

• female 1/2" to male 1/4" adapter (bronze), not working for my setup
• female 3/8" to male 1/4" adapter (black, short), not working for my setup
• female 5/8" to male 1/4" adapter (black, long), yes! the one I needed
• female 5/8" to male 1/4" adapter /w non-UNC thread (silver), not working for my setup

For those wondering:
Yes. I did order 4 different adapters from four different stores until I managed to find the correct one.
Also, there is nothing wrong with my laptop's camera. I simply want to position the camera bit higher than regular laptop camera will be.

My gaming PC Windows 10 started acting out, it wouldn't successfully run any updates. I tried couple of tricks, but even data-preserving re-install wouldn't fix the problem. It was time to sort the problem, for good. The obvious sequence would be to re-install everything and get the system up and working properly again.

Doing such a radical thing wouldn't make any sense if I'd lose all of my precious data while doing it. So, I chose to put my hand to the wallet and go shopping for a new SSD. That way I could copy the files from old drive without losing anything.

This is what I got:

A Samsung 970 EVO Plus SSD. It was supposed to be much faster than my old one, which was pretty fast already.

Installation into Asus motherboard:

The M.2-slot is behind a block of aluminium acting as a heat sink. All cards, including the GPU needed to be yanked off first, then three screws undone before getting a glipse of the old 1 TiB M.2 SSD.
Note: In my MoBo, there is a second, non-heatsink, slot for what I was about to do. Transfer data from old drive to new one. I think it is meant to be used as a temporary thing as the drive is sticking out and isn't properly fastened.

Putting it all together, installing Windows 10 20H2 and running a benchmark:

Twice the performance! Every time you can boost your PC into 2X of anything, you'll be sure to notice it. And yup! Booting, starting applications or games. Oh, the speed.
Note: In a few years, the above benchmark numbers will seem very slow and obsolete. Before that happens, I'll be sure to enjoy the doubled speed.

When I got a new Android-phone, it struck me that you can actually place an SD-card into the SIM-card -tray.

The upper tray is from a Huawei Honor phone, lower is from my new Nokia 5.3.

Huawei-approach is to place the SD-card into SIM2-slot making it either/or, but taking much less space from the guts of the phone. Nokia approach is to allow having all three cards in place at the same time. Funnily, Nokia has also both IMEI-codes in the tray. Not really sure why, but they are there.

I'm a known iPhone man, but Android has its benefits on the developer-side. Platform has much more open APIs for example to telecomms-side. Also when doing any web-development, running the new stuff from development workstation in an Android is easy via USB-cable. With a Mac, you can do the same with an iPhone. For proper testing, both need to be done.

While at it, I cleaned out my collection of various SIM-cards:

Not really needing expired and obsolete set of SIM-cards from USA, Australia, Finland, etc. To trash it goes.

Apparently this blog post was on a lighter side. No real message to convey, just couple of pics from SIM-cards.

As mentioned in my USB-C article, I'm describing how I managed to upgrade my 8-in-2 firmware WITHOUT installing Boot Camp into my macOS.

Hyper has a support article Screen flickering with Pro? Please check this out. What they ultimately suggest, and what I instantly rejected is:

1. Install Boot Camp
2. Boot the Mac into Windows 10
3. Run the app to do the Hyper 8-in-2 firmware upgrade
4. Enjoy flicker-free life!

My mind was targeted to jump directly into step 3 and 4. I attempted a number of things and kept failing. So, I dug out my humility-hat and went to step 2. That one was a great success! For step 1 I would have never gone. That's for sure. I'm not going to taint this precious Mac with a dual-boot.

Constraints

This is the list of restrictions I painfully figured out:

• HyperDrive 8-in-2 has dual USB-C -connector, making it impossible to physically attach to anything else than a MacBook Pro.
  • USB-C extension cords do exist. Purchase one (you don't need two) and lift the physical connectivity limitation.
• Provided application, VmmUpdater.exe is a 32-bit Windows PE executable, more information can be found @ Hybrid Analysis
• Firmware upgrade won't work on a random PC having USB-C -port. VmmUpdater.exe won't detect the Synaptics chip without Apple AMD-drivers.
  • The driver won't install if your hardware doesn't have a suitable GPU.
• A Mac won't boot from an USB, unless allowed to do so
• A Mac will boot only to a 64-bit operating system, a 32-bit Windows 10 won't work
• A 64-bit Windows 10 installer doesn't have WoW64 in it to emulate a 32-bit Windows
• To actually upgrade the Synaptics chip's firmware, it needs to be in use
  • Windows needs to understand the existence of the video-chip
  • Windows needs to actually use the video-chip via HDMI to produce output. Any output will do. No picture --> no upgrade.
• Apple keyboard and touchpad will not work in a default Windows 10 installation
  • Some of the Windows drivers used by a MBP can be downloaded from Internet automatically, IF you manage to get an internet connection into a Windows 10 running on a Mac.
  • Some of the Windows drivers are not available
• macOS cannot write to a NTFS-partition, it can read the data ok

Requirements

• Hardware:
  • A HyperDrive 8-in-2 (to state the obvious)
  • A MacBook Pro (to state the nearly obvious), I used 2019 model
  • A Windows 10 running in a PC (to state the not-so-obvious)
  • USB-stick with at least 8 GiB of storage, capable of booting (I think all of them can)
  • USB-keyboard, during tinkering your Mac's keyboard won't work at all times. Any USB-keyboard will do.
  • HDMI-cable connected to an external monitor.
• Software:
  • Synaptics tool and EEPROM-file provided by Hyper.
  • Rufus
• Ability to:
  • Download files from The Internet
  • Execute Rufus on a platform of your choice to write into the USB-stick. I did this on a Windows 10 PC.
  • Run Boot Camp Assistant on a macOS, I used macOS 10.15 Catalina.
  • Write files into NTFS-formatted USB-stick. Any Windows 10 can do this.

Steps

1. Save a Windows 10 ISO-image into USB-stick as Windows to Go

Option: You can do this as a second thing.

Windows to Go, that's something not many have used nor ever heard. It's already obsoleted by Microsoft, but seems to work ok. The general idea is to create an USB-bootable Windows you can run at any computer.

That's definitely something I'd love to use for this kind of upgrade!

The easiest way of injecting a Windows 10 ISO-image into USB in a suitable format is Rufus. Go to https://rufus.ie/ and get it. It's free (as speech)!

GPT-partition table is a critical one make sure to choose it. These are the options I had:

Warning: The process is slow. Writing image with Rufus will take a long time. Much longer than simply copying the bytes to USB.

2. Download Boot Camp support files

Option: You can do this first.

Recent macOS have limited Boot Camp Assistant features. Older ones could do much more, but modern versions can only Download Windows Support Software (it's in the Action-menu). Wait for the 1+ GiB download to complete.

3. Transfer files to USB-stick

Warning: The stick is formatted as NTFS. A Mac won't write into it. You need to first transfer the files into a Windows, and use the Windows to write the files into the USB.

Transfer the WindowsSupport\ folder downloaded by Boot Camp Assistant to the USB-stick prepared earlier. Subdirectory or not doesn't make a difference, I simply copied the directory into root of the USB-drive.

Also transfer the files from Hyper support article https://hypershop.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360038378871-Screen-flickering-with-Pro-Please-check-this-out-.
Note: Only the .exe and .eeprom are needed, I skipped the .docx as they're not needed during the upgrade.

After successful transfer, you won't need a Windows PC anymore. All the next steps are on a Mac.

4. Enable Mac USB-booting

Study Apple support article HT208198 About Startup Security Utility.

You need to shutdown your Mac. Then plant your fingers onto Command and r keys, put the power on and then wait. Apple logo will appear, then a white progress bar will appear. You can release the Command-r at that point. If you'll be using an encrypted hard drive like I, you'll need to know a valid user on that Mac and enter that user's password to be allowed into Startup Security Utility.

The choices you need to have are:

• Secure boot: No security
• External boot: Allow booting from external or removable media is enabled

This is how Parallels would depict the settings in their KB-article 124579 How to allow Mac to boot from external media:

(Thanks Parallels for the pic!)

Note:
After you're done upgrading Synaptics firmware, you can go back to recovery, Startup Security Utility and put the settings back to higher security. For the one-shot upgrade the settings need to be at max. insecure settings.

5. Boot Windows 10 from USB

When you reboot a Mac, plant your finger on Option (some keyboards state Alt) key and wait. Pretty soon a boot menu will appear.

If you had the USB-stick already inserted, it will be displayed. If you didn't, this is your que to insert your Hyper 8-in-2. The Windows 10 USB can be inserted into the HyperDrive, your Mac will boot from there ok.

Your choice is to go for EFI Boot and wait for Windows 10 logo to appear.

Congrats! Now you're heading towards a Windows that won't respond to your keyboard nor touchpad.

6. Establish Windows to Go functionality

Make sure you have an USB keyboard available. This entire process can be done without Mac's own keyboard, it's just your own preference how you want to approach this. Getting the keyboard to work requires a keyboard, success is measured only on results. Make smart choices there!

If you can get the Windows 10 to connect to internet, that will solve some problems with missing drivers as they can be downloaded from a Microsoft driver repository. For Internet access, I used an USB-dongle to establish a Wi-Fi connection. Doing that requires selecting the correct Access Point and entering its password. On a machine without keyboard or mouse that WILL be difficult! Ultimately both the Apple keyboard and touchpad should start working and external keyboard won't be needed.
Note: The drivers for both are in WindowsSupport downloaded by Boot Camp Assistant. If you can point Windows Device Manager to load driver upgrades from there.

Warning!
Your Windows to Go will create a massive hiberfil.sys to enable hibernation. This can be a problem as typically the hibernate-file will be sized 75% of your RAM. This particular Mac has lots of RAM and the USB-stick would never be able to store such a file. So, eventually you're likely to run out of storage space. That is harmful, but can be easily remediated.

To fix, run command:
powercfg /hibernate off

Now the massive file is gone. Next, establish proper video. Your Windows Device Manager will look something like this:

There are bunch of device drivers missing. The most critical one is for GPU. I tried running WindowsSupport\setup.exe, but it never progressed and I simply didn't do that at all. Instead, I executed WindowsSupport\BootCamp\Drivers\AMD\AMDGraphics\setup.exe which enabled proper video to be displayed.

7. Go upgrade Synaptics firmware

All the hard work only for this! Make sure your Hyper 8-in-2 has HDMI-cable connected and monitor will display Windows 10 in it. If you don't have that, when executing the VmmUpdater.exe an error will display:

VmmTool: Initialize GPU library failed.
Also different VmmTool error variants can occur. If your Windows will detect the monitor and display video, then you're set!

When VmmTool will display current firmware information, you're golden!

Initially my 8-in-2 had firmware version 3.12.105.

Select the .eeprom file and a progress bar will indicate:

Running the upgrade won't take long. Something like 30 seconds or so. When upgrade is done, it will be indicated:

At this point, yank the 8-in-2 out of Mac and make sure you don't have USB-C power connected to it. The general idea is to power-cycle the recently updated Synaptics chip. When done, put everything back and run VmmUpdater.exe again.

This time it will indicate the new firmware version:

The version 3.12.105 got bumped into 3.13.107. Nice! Hopefully it will do the trick.

8. Boot into macOS and test

This is it. Will it work?

In my case it did. When my Mac wakes up, a single blink will happen in the external display, but no flickering or other types of annoyances.

Done! Mission accomplished!
(phew. that was a lot of work for a simple upgrade)

In professional life, I stopped being a Windows-guy and went back being a Mac-man. The tool-of-trade provided by me is a MacBook Pro 2019. Those new Macs are notorius for having not-so-many ports. My Mac has two (2). Both are USB-C. In my previous MBP (that was a 2014 model), there were ports all over the left side and a bonus USB on right side.

The problem remains: How to hook up my external monitor to increase my productivity by the macigal 30%? Actually, I believe any developer will benefit even more by having a lot of display real estate on his/hers desk.

So, new Mac, new toys needed for it. I had one USB-C to DVI -converter before, but for this Mac, I went on-line shopping to get the good stuff:

From left to right:

• HyperDrive PRO 8-in-2: A pricey alternative offering a lot of connectivity, disappointing initial quality.
• HyperDrive USB-C Pro Video: An already obsoleted product. Small and does the job. This is my recommendation!
• No-name StarTech.Com CDP2DVI: Cheap thing working perfectly on a Lenovo PC. Unusable with a Mac!

HyperDrives:

Obsoleted HyperDrive shop screenshot:

The pricey alternative looks like this (on top of a complimentary leather pouch):

Cheap no-name one won't even blink in a MBP. The simple HyperDrive works like a charm! Mac sees it and monitor auto-detects the signal. The expensive one blinks when connected to a Mac. It blinks a lot. All the other ports work perfectly, but HDMI and mini-DP not-so-much. Hyper has a support article about 8-in-2- flickering. Lots of discussion in StackExchange about Apple being picky about cables and converters, examples: Dual monitor flickering: the secondary monitor does the flicker and External monitor flicker / signal loss. With the HyperDrive fix, I'll write an another post about the suggested firmware upgrade, it's complicated enough to deserve an own topic.

For me, the expensive HyperDrive works as a tiny docking-station. I have the USB-C charger connected to it among monitor cable. When I want to roam free of cables, all I have to do is detach the dual-USB-C dongle and that's it! Done. Mobility solved.

Final words:
With a Mac, do a lot of research beforehand and choose carefully, or alternatively make sure you'll get a full refund for your doesn't-work-in-my-Mac adapter.

Now that EU is doing yet another round on Common charger for mobile radio equipment 2019/2983(RSP), it inspired me to take a closer look on USB-C or USB 3.1 cables.

I got me a couple of cables:

One USB-C cable is for micro-USB and another is for Apple's Lightning connector. More details about the Apple-cable can be found from support article About the Apple USB-C to Lightning Cable. They claim, that some iPads/iPhones would go up to 96W on a compatible charger. Qualcomm Quick Charge @ Wikipedia has more details on that.

This is my test set:

From left to right:

• Celly TCUSBC30WWH (30W)
• Exibel 38-9107 (18W), note: Exibel is a Clas Ohlson -brand
• A generic Huawei USB2.0 (10W)

To get a real slow rate of charging, an ancient 2.5W USB-charger could also be measured. As an impatient person, I don't think I own such a device anymore, so I couldn't measure it's slowness.

Then I took my iPhone 8:

It wasn't completely drained. The thing with Li-Ion charging is to avoid the battery heating. Given the chemical reaction in a Li-Ion cell on charging, it is not possible to pump too much current to a cell while maintaining efficiency both on energy and time. A typical charging cycle follows a very careful formula charging the cell more when it's drained and less when it's reaching full capacity.

My testing was around 20% capacity. Here are the measurements:

Note: Obviously my measurements are from the wall socket. Not all the energy goes to the iPhone, as there will be some loss on the charger itself.

• Huawei 10W charger measured 9W, which is nice!
• Exibel 18W charger measured 14W, which is ~20% less than expected
• Celly 30W charger measured 18W, which is ~40 less than expected

Conclusions:
An iPhone 8 won't be using the Apple-mentioned 96W, no matter what. The measured 18W is a lot more than USB2.0 can do, meaning the actual charging will be LOT faster on an near-empty battery. Note: it is not possible drain Li-Ion cell completely, your phone will shut down before that happens. If I'm happy to get 80% capacity to my iPhone, charging for that will happen in half the time I can get with a regular 10W charger. During charging, as the capacity increases, the rate of charging will decline, a lot. For the remaining 20% I won't benefit from USB-C charger.

Additional note:
iPhone 8 won't sync data via USB-C. That's really weird. For data, an USB2.0 Lighting cable is required. On my iPad, an USB-C cable works for both charging and data.

HDMI or High-Definition Multimedia Interface is the de-facto connector and signaling for almost everything at your home having picture and sound. As the data in the pipe is digital, it is relatively easy to take some of it for your own needs. Typical such needs would include streaming your activities to The Net or extracting the data to your computer.

As the devices required are relatively inexpensive, I got one. Here it is, a AVerMedia Live Gamer Portable 2 Plus (or GC513 as AVerMedia people would call it):

It is a relatively small unit having couple of connectors in it:

The obvious ones are HDMI in and out. The micro-USB is for powering the unit and extracting the data out of it to a computer. If you want to do some live streaming of your fabulous gaming, there are 3.5mm jacks for headphones/mic. The last slot is for an SD-card if you want to make any recordings with the unit not connected to a computer.

Windows software is called RecCentral. A sample session with a Super NES Classic Edition (https://www.nintendo.com/super-nes-classic/) connected to it would look something like this:

The software is capable of producing high-quality JPEG stills, but mostly people are interested in the unit's capability of producing AVC (aka. H.264, aka. MPEG-4) video from your precious HDMI input.

Just looking at the red triangle-shaped box isn't much fun, so I took the unit for a real-life test. I did some video/still capturing which resulted as footage of some Super Metroid gameplay. The actual game is from year 1994 and HDMI didn't exist at that time. But the modern SNES actually does have HDMI-output in it, making it an interesting target for this test.

With help of Adobe Premiere Pro (Audition, After Effects, Photoshop) software:

I edited a nice all-bosses video from the game. The resulting video has been uploaded into YouTube as Super Metroid - All bosses:

All artistic decisions seen on the video are made by my son, whose YouTube channel the video is at. In this video-project I merely acted as a video technician (obviously, my son's video and sound editing skills aren't quite there yet). Also, the actual gameplay on the video is by my son. IMHO his gameplay is excellent, given his age doesn't have two digits in it. Especially the last two bosses took a lot of practice, but he seems to master it now.

Finally:
I totally recommend the AVerKey Live Gamer Portable 2 Plus for your trivial H.264 capturing. It really won't cut it for any serious work but packs enough punch for the simple things.

Also, if you enjoy the YouTube-video we made, give it your thumbs up. My son will appreciate it!

This is a part two out of two on my Davis Vantage Vue weather station installation story. Previous part was about hardware installation.

Datalogger expansion

The indoors console has a slot for expansion devices. I went for the RS-232 WeatherLink datalogger expansion:

RS232 Cabling

The datalogger has a very short cable and a RJ-11 connector on the other end. The obvious good thing is the common availability of telephone extension cords to get past the 5 cm cable lenght of the datalogger. A regular landline telephone typically has such RJ-11 connectors in it and what I did was to get an inexpensive extension cord with suitable lenght.

For computer connectivity, with datalogger box has a blue RJ-11 to RS232 converter. The four connected pins of the converter are as follows:

RS232 and Linux

Most computers today don't have a RS232-port in them. To overcome this, years ago I bought a quad-RS232-port USB-thingie:

If you look closely, Port 1 of the unit has a DIY RS232-connector attached into it. That's my Vantage Vue cable connected to the indoors console. Also, note the lack of the blue RJ-11 to RS232 converter unit. I reverse engineered the pins and soldered my cable directly to a D-9 connector to get the same result.

Now the hardware parts is done. All the connectors are connected and attached to a PC.

Software

Half of the work is done. Next some software is needed to access the data in the data logger.

For Windows and macOS

Those not running Linux, there is WeatherLink software freely available at https://www.davisinstruments.com/product/weatherlink-computer-software/. It goes without saying, the software is useless without appropriate hardware it gets the inputs from. I never even installed the software, as using a non-Linux was never an option for me. So, I have no idea if the software is good or not.

For Linux

As you might expect, when going to Linux, there are no commercial software options available. However, number of open-source ones are. My personal choice is WeeWX, its available at http://www.weewx.com/ and source code at https://github.com/weewx/weewx.

Install WeeWX:

1. Download software: git clone https://github.com/weewx/weewx.git
2. In git-directory, create RPM-package: make -f makefile rpm-package SIGN=0
3. As root, install the newly created RPM-package: rpm --install -h dist/weewx-3.9.2-1.rhel.noarch.rpm
4. That's it!

Configure WeeWX:

1. (dependency) Python 2 is a requirement. Given Python version 2 deprecation (see https://pythonclock.org/ for details), at the time of writing, there is less than two months left of Python 2 lifetime, this project really should get an upgrade to 3. No such joy yet.
2. (dependency) pyserial-package: pip install pyserial
3. Run autoconfig: wee_config --install --dist-config /etc/weewx/weewx.conf.dist --output /etc/weewx/weewx.conf
   1. In the array of questions, when being asked to choose a driver, go for Vantage (weewx.drivers.vantage)
4. Inspect the resulting /etc/weewx/weewx.conf and edit if necessary:
   1. Section [Station]
      1. week_start = 0
   2. Section [StdReport]
      1. HTML_ROOT = /var/www/html/weewx
   3. (optional for Weather Underground users), Section [StdRESTful]
      1. Subsection [[Wunderground]]
      2. Enter station name and password
      3. enable = true
5. Configuring done!

Now you're ready (as root) to start the thing with a systemctl start weewx.

On a working system, you should get LOOP-records out of weewxd instantly. After a little while of gathering data, you should start having set of HTML/CSS/PNG-files in /var/www/html/weewx. It's a good idea to set up a web server to publish those files for your own enjoyment. This is something you don't have to do, but I strongly advice to enable HTTP-endpoint to your results. I will immensly help determining if your system works or not.

One reason I love having a weather station around is to publish my data to The Net. I've been tagging along with Weather Underground for years. There has been good years and really bad years, when Wunderground's servers have been misbehaving a lot. Now that IBM owns the thing, there has been some improvements. The most important thing is there is somebody actually maintaining the system and making it run. Obviously, there has been some improvements in the service too.

Aggregation problem

When I got my system stable and running, I realized my wind data is flatline. In nature it is almost impossible for not to be windy for multiple days. I visually inspected the wind speed and direction gauges, they were working unobstructed. However, my console did not indicate any wind at all.

After multiple days of running, I was about to give up and RMA the thing back to Davis for replacement, the console started working! That was totally unexpected. Why: 1) the system did not work, 2) the system started working without any actions from me. That was the case for me. As the problem has not occurred since, it must have been some kind of newness.

What next

Now that everything is up, running and stays that way. There's always something to improve. What I'm planning is to do is pump the LOOP-records to Google BigQuery.

As a side note: when new information is available, it will be emitted by weewxd as LOOP: <the data here> into your system logs. However, that data isn't used. After a period of time, your Vantage Vue will aggregate all those records into a time-slot record. That will be used as your measurement. Since those LOOP-records are simply discarded I thought it might be a good idea to base some analytics on those. I happen to know Google BigQuery well from past projects, all that I need is to write a suitable subsystem into weewx to pump the data into a correct place. Then it would be possible to do some analytics of my own on those records.

Last July, there was a severe hailstorm in my area. At the time, I wrote a blog post about it, because the storm broke my weather station. Since fighting with nature is futile, I'm blaming myself for relying on La Crosse -approach of using zipties to attach the components to a steel pole. Given my latitude, 61° north, during summer it can be +30° C and during winter -30° C. The huge variation of temperature combined with all the sunlight directed to nylon straps will eventually make them weak. So, here is my mental note: Next time use steel straps!

I did that when I got my new weather station. This post is about the hardware and getting it fastened securely. The next part is about getting the device talking to my Linux and pumping the results to The Net.

Davis Vantage Vue

After careful consideration, I went for a Vantage Vue from Davis Instruments.

Since this is a serious piece of hardware, in their ranking this 500,- € piece is a "beginner" model. In Davis catalog, there are "real" models for enthusiasts costing thousands of $/€. I love my hardware, but not that much.

What's in the box

For any weather station from cheapest 10,- € junk to Davis, there's always an indoor unit and outdoor unit.

In the box, there is paper manuals, altough I went for the PDF from their site. Indoors unit is ready-to-go, but outdoors unit has number of sensors needing attaching. Even the necessary tools are included for those parts, which require them. Most parts just click into place.

The Vantage Vue console is really nice. There is plenty of buttons for button-lovers and a serious antenna for free placement of the indoor unit. The announced range between units is 300 meters. I didn't test the range, but the signal level I'm getting in my setup is never below 98%. Again, serious piece of hardware.

Installing sensors

Some assembly is required for the outdoors sensor unit. I begun my assembly by attaching the replaceable lithium-ion battery.

The Li-Ion battery is charged from a solar cell of the sensor unit. I have reports from Finland, that given our lack of sunshine during winter, the sensor unit does survive our long and dark winter ok. I have no idea how long the battery wil last, but I'm preparing to replace that after couple of years.

Next one, anemometer wind vane:

Gauge for wind direction requires fastening a hex screw, but the tool in included in the box. Wind speed gauge just snaps into place. Unlike wind vane, which is hanging from the bottom of the unit, speed gauge is at the top of the unit, so gravity will take care of most of the fastening.

Next one, rain gauge:

On the bottom of the sensor unit, there is a slot for a bucket seesaw. When the bucket has enough weight in it, in form of rainwater, the seesaw will tilt and empty the bucket. Rain is measured on how many seesaw tilts will occur. Again, this is a real scientific measurement unit, there is an adjustment screw for rain gauge allowing you to calibrate the unit. On top of the rain gauge, there is a scoop. On the bottom of the scoop, you'll need to attach a plug keeping all the unwanted stuff out of the bucket:

Also note three details in the pic: the solar cell, transmitter antenna and a level bubble helping you during installation of the sensor unit.

Outdoors sensor unit done

This is how the final result looks like for me:

Idea during installation is to make sure the sensor unit has the solar cell directed to south (180°) allowing it to capture maximum sunlight on Northen Hemisphere. This also serves the base of direction for the wind vane. Obviously, you can adjust the deviation from the console if needed. People living in Southern Hemisphere definitely need to do that. Also, you may have something special in your install, the option is there. Remember, this is a serious piece of scientific measurement hardware.

Indoors unit

A running console looks like this:

In the screen, the top half is always constant. The buttons "temp", "hum", "wind", "rain" and "bar" can be used to set the bottom half of the screen to display temperature, humidity, wind, rain or barometric pressure details.

As you can see, I took the picture on 22nd July (2019) at 16:12 (pm). It was a warm summer day +26° C both indoors and outdoors. Day was calm and there was no wind. The moon on 22nd July was a waxing cresent. Given my brand new installation, there were not yet measurements for outdoors humidity. The lack of humidity also results in lack of dew point.

People writing the console software have a sense of humor:

Console display indicates rain (an umbrella) and a text "Its raining cats'n'dogs". Hilarious!

As you can see, the indoors temperature is rather high, +28° C. In reality, that didn't reflect the truth. Later I realized, that keeping the light on will heat the console indoors sensor throwing it off by many degrees. Now I tend to keep the light off and press the "light"-button only when it is dark.

Powering indoor unit

Most people would get the required three C-cell batteries, whip them in and forget about it... until the batteries run out and need to be replaced.

Davis planned an option for that. What you can do is to ignore the battery change and plug the accompanying 5VDC 1A transformer into a wall socket and never need to change the batteries. I love quality hardware, you have options to choose from.

Datalogging

The primary purpose of me owning and running a weather station is to extract the measurements to a Linux PC. An el-cheapo weather stations offer no such option for computer connectivity. Mid-range units have a simple USB-connector (limited to max. cable lenght of 5 meters), some even RS-232 connectivity (max. cable lenght up to 100 meters). When going to these heavy-hitter -models from Davis Instruments, out-of-the-box there is nothing.

To be absolutely clear: Davis Vantage Vue can be attached to a computer, but it is an extra option that is not included in the box.

Here is a picture of USB datalogger expansion unit for Vantage Vue:

Optimal installation in my house requires the console in a place where it's easily visible and accessible. But its nowhere near a computer, so RS232 is the way I go.

I'll cover the details of datalogger expansion, cabling and Linux setup in the next post.

I love playing video games whenever I have the time to sink into such a non-productive past time. The primary function is to have some fun, but also to clear the head from anything work related.

This time I wanted to get a new gaming mouse. My G5 easily had at least 13 years of service and still going strong. But it's the same thing with living room couch or a car, the old one is still ok, but eventually you simply just want a new one. That's what  happened to me. I simply wanted a new one (did somebody say "neophile"), so I got two boxes of new toys:

The top box contain a brand new mouse and an USB data/charging-cable for it. This is what the nose of a wireless G903 looks like:

As you can see, there is a micro-USB female connector. In the box, there is also a Logitech-specific cable, which is mechanically sound to convert this wireless mouse into a wired one. For people who want options, doing that is a perfectly good choice. You don't have to use the weird-looking Logitech USB-cable if you don't want to, but it will stick to your mouse a lot better than your average micro-USB cable.

Also on the options-for-a-demanding-rodent-owner, in the box there are lots of options for buttons:

Also, notice the USB-dongle, if you want to stick with wireless. I didn't want to use the dongle, so I went a bit further:

Yeah. I got me a Logitech mouse mat. This one isn't a regular one. Or... to be exact, in the Powerplay box, there are actually two mats. One regular, very slippery one for gaming and a charging mat, which goes under the slippery one:

All you have to do is pry the charging button off from the bottom of the G903. Btw. there are no screws or anything, just pretty strong magnets. The dud-of-a-button needs to be exchanged into one from the Powerplay box and your're rocking! This will convert your wireless mouse back into kinda-wired one. In reality the mouse is still wireless, but all communications and charging will happen simply buy using the mouse. No dongle needed. Notice how the Powerplay mat has exactly the same micro-USB -connector than the mouse has.

Finally, the pair will look something like this:

Also remember to install the Logitech Gaming Software to be able to configure your mouse and get all the stats out of it:

This setup is easily the best mouse I've ever had (so far). G903 is truly wireless, but when paired with the Powerpay, it works exactly as well as it would be wired. The only negative thing about Powerplay I have is its ability to mess up other wireless mouse traffic. The top mat is a high quality one, so I've been using that. The only thing I need to do is to remove the charging part to clear the signal jams.

This one is related to a previous post of mine Installing openSUSE Leap 15.1 into a MacBook Pro with encrypted root drive.

kworker CPU-hog

Symptoms:

CPU-load is high. Top consumer is kworker:

top - 11:16:47 up 6 min,  4 users,  load average: 0.93, 0.70, 0.36
Tasks: 248 total,   2 running, 246 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie

  PID USER      PR  NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S  %CPU  %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND
   58 root      20   0       0      0      0 R 73.33 0.000   4:29.74 kworker/0:

What a kernel worker (or kworker) is, a sensible explanation can be found from Kworker, what is it and why is it hogging so much CPU?. In this case, high CPU on a kworker is a symptom, not the fault.

This same issue is faced by multiple users on different hardware, for example Kworker is at 100% - I think I've tried everything!. Also Fedora Linux users on MBP are suffering from the same Bug 1192856 - ACPI Interrupt storm causes high kworker CPU usage.

Checking some kernel performance counters (more about those, see perf: Linux profiling with performance counters), perf-report:

  Children    Self  Command     Shared Object     Symbol
+   50.51%   0.01%  swapper     [kernel.kallsyms] [k] cpu_startup_entry
+   41.67%   0.31%  swapper     [kernel.kallsyms] [k] acpi_hw_read_port
+   39.99%  39.99%  swapper     [kernel.kallsyms] [k] acpi_os_read_port
+   37.62%   0.00%  kworker/0:2 [kernel.kallsyms] [k] ret_from_fork

Something really fishy is going on with acpi_os_read_port. To get the amount of interrupts generated, most people run a simple grep . /sys/firmware/acpi/interrupts/*, but not me. My solution is to do a simple(?) Perl one-liner wrapped here on  multiple lines for readability:

perl -ne 'next if (!/^\s*(\d+)\s+/);
 next if (!$1);
 $intrs{$ARGV}=$1;
 END {foreach (sort {$intrs{$b} <=> $intrs{$a}} keys(%intrs)) {
  printf("%s: %d\n", $_, $intrs{$_});
 };
}' /sys/firmware/acpi/interrupts/*

It will output interrupt counts. On my system, the counters are something like this:

/sys/firmware/acpi/interrupts/gpe_all: 4695534
/sys/firmware/acpi/interrupts/sci: 4694806
/sys/firmware/acpi/interrupts/gpe06: 4694582
/sys/firmware/acpi/interrupts/gpe17: 940

If you're really interested in what's happening inside ACPI and how General Purpose Events (GPE) work, read the document ACPI in LinuxArchitecture, Advances, and Challenges.

Anyway, it looks like ACPI event 06 is firing a lot. Way too lot keeping kworker busy handling the interrupts. This interrupt-handling on the other hand, takes a lot of CPU-power making your system run hotter than expected.

Fix:

As root, a simple echo disable > /sys/firmware/acpi/interrupts/gpe06 will do the trick. Resulting in CPU cooling down:

The effect is instantaneous and easy to notice. To persist this setting over reboots, things get bit more trickier. A lot of people suggest putting the above disable into crontab to be run on a @reboot. My opinion is clear: this is a system problem, system fix and needs to be addressed by system, not user. The @reboot-magic doesn't work in /etc/crontab, only on user's crontab-file.

A very good alternative is to go with acpi_mask_gpe-kernel parameter. It is documented in The kernel’s command-line parameters. And docs state "This facility can be used to prevent such uncontrolled GPE floodings". Nice! Exactly what I need. The tricky part is to edit /etc/default/grub and add acpi_mask_gpe=0x06 into GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX-setting.

That's not all. Simply having the setting in a file won't change a anything yet. To make the new setting stick, on most Linuxes you would run update-grub. Some smart brain chose not to implement that helper into openSUSE, so that's not an option. To achieve the same, go for a: grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg

Now you're all set. Reboot and confirm. Of course you didn't fix the actual problem with ACPI, you simply made kernel ignore the interrupt-flood. You may want to settle for that at this point. I did file a bug report about this (Bug 1146023), but it seems the problem is limited to a specific set of MBPs and Fedora kernel guys are having hard time reproducing the issue. So, I'm not expecting SuSE guys to fix this anytime soon either.

Touchpad scroll direction

In 2011 when OS X 10.7 Lion was released, Apple made a drastic change on how touchpad (or how Apple calls it: Trackpad) scrolling works. Personally I totally understand this new logic, they wanted the scrolling user experience to be exactly the same and you would do on your phone's touch screen. You place your finger on the screen and pull the finger to the direction you want the screen to scroll. Before macOS 10.7 (note: the name change from OS X to macOS happened on 10.12 sierra) touchpad scrolling was targeted for the scrollbar, not to the actual content like on your touchscreen effectively reversing the direction.

So, as a macOS / iPad user, I want my scrolling to happen correctly, not the Windows way. To change, navigate to Touchpad settings and reverse the vertical scrolling:

Reversing the reverse makes your head spin, but there is a logic there.

Touchpad gestures

On any typical use case, I would use a mouse. As in real external device, not the skin-on-my-fingertips damaging trackpad. For reasons unknown to me, it literally hurts to use those trackpads for too many hours. So, I normally steer away from them. It looks like I'm pretty alone with this one, but all I can do is to complain and use a mouse.

Typical this you may want to do:

• Right-click: On macOS, hold Ctrl and tap is a right click. This won't work on a Linux. You need to do the two-finger-tap for right-clicking.
• Scrolling: You can go with keyboard or keep dragging the scrollbars, that's ok. Doing a two-finger scroll with the touchpad, however, is much faster and less error prone.
• Zoom: Pinch won't work on a Linux, you need to use the actual zoom-control of whatever application you want to zoom

All the Apple's gestures are documented in HT204895 suppor article Use Multi-Touch gestures on your Mac, but as already mentioned, not all gestures are supported on a Linux.

Something else?

Nothing more pops into my mind. If you have anything to comment, please do so.

I happen to have a spare 3rd generation 15" MBP. It is late 2013 model, used for years but recently just gathering dust. Back in the days, when the laptop was shiny and new, it was a serious piece of hardware and cost north of 2000 €. Even today, a fully working second hand 15" late 2013 would be priced around 25% of the original value. Couple years later Apple started manufacturing MBPs with faulty keyboards, faulty touch bar (the really weird top row) and faulty batteries. I'm in luck, as my unit pre-dates all of those. Yes, there are also some fatures missing which I'd love to have, fingerprint reader, USB-C -port and improved display to mention the most important ones.

Since the dust-gathering, I decided to see how a fresh Linux installation would go. Back in the days, I had a plastic MacBook running Linux. Given 32-bits and not-so-powerful CPU, I recycled it at the point I got tired of waiting for pages to load too long on Firefox. The amount of JavaScript modern web pages run is staggering. All that requires huge amounts of CPU to parse, process and run. Old low-end models simply won't cope making web browsing nearly impossible. So, I didn't have a Linux-Mac for couple years and now I wanted one.

Known facts

This I could figure out before doing any real installing:

• Installation can be done. openSUSE docs describe the process @ https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Installation_on_a_Mac
• The built-in Broadcom WiFi isn't properly supported by most Linuxes, that includes openSUSE
  • Debian Linux wiki @ https://wiki.debian.org/MacBook/Wireless states:
    "MacBooks before the late 2008 models use Atheros chipsets, while late 2008 are now using Broadcom 4322 chipset."
  • StackExchange article @ https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/175813/241396:
    "Broadcom 4360 actually comes with either of two distinct chips, 14E4:4360 and 14E4:43A0. There is no driver in Linux for the first one, while wl is an appropriate driver for the second one."
  • Arc Linux wiki @ https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/broadcom_wireless#broadcom-wl only states the fact wl-driver not being open-source.
  • It is unclear which exact chipset is in the Mac, but it seems not to be properly supported in Linux.
• My MBP doesn't have Ethernet RJ-45 port
• The existing USB-ports or Thunderbolt-ports could be used to host a network adapter, either wired or wireless, but I choose not to go down that path. Having an USB-dongle stick out of the Mac isn't something I'm willing to do.
• There is a good chance, that a Linux-driver for the built-in Broadcom WiFi exists. The existing driver can be downloaded from the net, but require some trickery to install during openSUSE installer.
• In macOS, drives are encrypted. In Windows using BitLocker is a good option to keep your data secure. Linux supports drive encryption as well.

Prerequisites

• A MacBook Pro with SSD full of data you don't care about. Also emptied SSD-drives will do.
• openSUSE Leap 15.1 ISO-image from https://www.opensuse.org/
  • I personally will go for the full DVD, but it is not absolutely necessary. Small network installer will work as well.
• Skills to create a bootable USB-stick from the install image
• Your wireless network credentials and skills to connect a new device into it
• Two USB-sticks:
  • One to boot openSUSE installer from. This stick will contain installation image and cannot be easily written into and must be attached to the Mac during installation.
  • Second to transfer the WiFi-driver files
• Broadcom Linux wl-driver from http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/Sauerland:/hardware/openSUSE_Leap_15.1/x86_64/
  • Installer will need file  broadcom-wl-kmp-default-6.30.223.271_k4.12.14_lp151.27-lp151.121.1.x86_64.rpm.
  • Store the file into the second USB-stick.
• Since kernel-default -package has an update, the above RPMs needed for installer won't work in your installed openSUSE. To fix this, you will need also Broadcom Linux wl-driver from http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/Sauerland:/hardware/openSUSE_Leap_15.1_Update/x86_64/
  • Your installed openSUSE will need two files broadcom-wl-6.30.223.271-lp151.121.4.x86_64.rpm and broadcom-wl-kmp-default-6.30.223.271_k4.12.14_lp151.28.10-lp151.121.4.x86_64.rpm.
  • Store these files into the second USB-stick.
• To make your life easier, having access to another computer while doing the install will help the process greatly. Especially, if you need to get a newer version of the  Broadcom-drivers.
• That's it!

Disclaimer for RPM-files:
Those versions of files are valid at the time of writing. Both the install ISO and installed & updated openSUSE Linux are likely to eventually get updated and the versions of those files WILL change. Keep reading! There are instructions for you on how to compensate for updated versions. However, download locations will not change for openSUSE 15.1. The locations won't be valid for 15.2, but I'm sure you got that already.

Step 1: Prepare openSUSE 15.1 install

As instructed in https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Installation_on_a_Mac, copy the installer ISO-file to the USB-stick. On macOS and Linux, figuring out the exact output drive can be bit tricky, so be careful with that. On Windows, the best utility for USB-drives is Rufus. You can get it from https://rufus.ie/.

While at it, download the required driver from above URLs pointing to Sauerland repository. Both versions are eventually needed, so just download them.

Note: for installer, only broadcom-wl-kmp-default -package is needed. We can safely ignore any RPM dependencies, as it is not possible to actually install the package. For installed Linux both files are needed, they have a dependency between packages. More about that when you're actually tinkering with the files.

Step 2: Boot the Mac into openSUSE installer

Plug in the installer USB (the other USB isn't needed yet). Power up the Mac. When you hear the boot-sound, press and hold the Alt/option-key. When you see the boot-menu, you can release the key. Displayed on your screen, there is a boot drive selection menu:

Go for the USB UEFI, that will start openSUSE installer.

Old geezers like me will remember the times when Macs required special bootloaders and tons of tinkering just to get the USB-boot to work. For past years, thanks to UEFI, USB-booting a Mac isn't any different than booting a PC.

Step 3: Establish facts

When the graphical installer launches, you'll see the license agreement screen:

On top-right corner of that screen is also keyboard map choice. This is your chance to make sure your keys will work correctly on the GUI. This won't affect the text-console.

Switch to text-mode console

There are two critical pieces of information needing to be confirmed to get the WiFi-driver working. Since the openSUSE installer is running in graphical mode, you need to switch to text-mode. In a Linux, the console can be chosen with Alt-<function key> -combo. When graphical interface is running, key combo is Ctrl-Alt-<function key>. To make things even trickier, in a Mac <function key>s require the actual Fn-key to be pressed, so ultimately you'll need to press and hold Fn-Ctrl-Alt and then tap F2-key to go for a text-console.

Confirm kernel version

On a bash-prompt, check the exact Linux kernel version with a:

cat /proc/version

As a result, my install image will display:

Linux version 4.12.14-lp151.27-default

In Linux, all device modules are stamped with the specific kernel version they'll work with, so it is imperative to get the Broadcom driver for that exact kernel version.

Confirm broadcom WiFi hardware

On a bash-prompt, get a listing for wireless network devices. List PCI-devices with class 280, that's for all network controllers (listing is at https://pci-ids.ucw.cz/read/PD/), as already established, there shouldn't be too many of those:

lspci -d '::280' -vv -n

On my Mac, the response is:

02:00.0 0280: 14e4:43a0 (rev 03)

Remember from above: "Broadcom 4360 actually comes with either of two distinct chips, 14E4:4360 and 14E4:43A0. There is no driver in Linux for the first one, while wl is an appropriate driver for the second one." So, this is the confirmation we needed. wl is the driver needed and we can move forward with installing the driver.

Step 4: Install the Broadcom driver

This screenshot depicts my process:

Now that you know the kernel version (4.12.14_lp151.27 in my installer) and copied the downloaded RPMs into the other USB-stick, plug it in. Remember: the installer USB is needed and cannot be removed.

Determine the correct device and mount it

In the above screenhot, the USB-stick having the drivers is /dev/sdb. First I checked out which storage devices Linux found. There are number of those for: Apple SSD, installer USB and driver USB. Since I knew, my driver USB is a Kingston Datatraveller, displaying the block-device partition table by running parted /dev/sdb print helped to identify the correct drive.

I mounted the USB-stick with a:

mkdir /tmp/usb
mount /dev/sdb1 /tmp/usb

Locate the files from the USB-stick.

Unpack the driver RPM

At this point, the Broadcom RPMs versioned for openSUSE installer kernel need to be popped open. The ones for your running Linux will install as-is, so no need to unpack them. It would be easy & smart to just install the RPM, but given Linux installer, it is not possible. Most of the mounted filesystems in an installer are SquashFS filesystems (more info from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SquashFS) and are read-only. Well... you CAN alter a SquashFS, but it is more complicated than just running couple commands to extract the driver from RPM and injecting it into a running system.

To unpack an RPM, in a temporary directory run following (this is a single-liner, I just wrapped it into two lines for readability):

rpm2cpio broadcom-wl-kmp-default-6.30.223.271_k4.12.14_lp151.27-lp151.121.1.x86_64.rpm \
 | cpio -ivd

This will create any subdirectories and files into the current directory where cpio-command is run. That's why a temporary location is suggested.

Install wl-driver

As already established, Broadcom on Linux is a messy business. And this Broadcom chip in your MBP is especially messed up. So beware! Trickery ahead.

The other file you won't be needing during installation, but you will for your running openSUSE would contain a file etc/modprobe.d/50-broadcom-wl-blacklist.conf. This blacklisting mechanism exists in Linux to prevent device-modules from being loaded when a particular device is being used. Now, at the point you're running the commands on your Linux-installer its too late. Your installer already loaded bunch of device drivers you won't be needing. So, they must go. Contents of the file suggests what to remove:

# modules blacklisted for broadcom-wl
blacklist bcm43xx
blacklist ssb
blacklist b43
blacklist ndiswrapper
blacklist brcm80211
blacklist bcma
blacklist brcmsmac

You can run command rmmod for each of those, but I choose to go for a for-loop:

for module in bcm43xx ssb b43 ndiswrapper brcm80211 bcma brcmsmac; do
  rmmod $module
done

In my Mac, at least modules b43, ssb and bcma were loaded.
Warning: If you DON'T rmmod conflicting modules, your wl-module will NOT work.

Finally, it's time to go for the good driver. When you unpacked the driver RPM, it contains a subdirectory. My driver is at lib/modules/4.12.14-lp151.27-default/updates. Go there and run:

insmod wl.ko

There is zero feedback for your command. To get an indication of success, run iwconfig. It will display something like:

wlan0     IEEE 802.11  ESSID:off/any  
          Mode:Managed  Access Point: Not-Associated   Tx-Power=200 dBm   
          Retry short limit:7   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Encryption key:off
          Power Management:off

When you see an existing wlan0, you're golden! Now you're good to go forward with graphical installer.

Step 5: Install openSUSE Leap 15.1

First, go back to graphical installer. The key combination for that is:
Press and hold Fn-Alt and then tap F7-key

Add your Mac's Broadcom to Linux

In the graphical installer, go Next from license screen and witness a blank Network Settings screen. The installer wasn't able to determine any operational network interfaces in your system. Not to worry, now that your Broadcom is on-line, you can add it. Click Add, and add a Wireless device using Kernel module wl:

Moving forward with Wireless Network Card Configuration, a screen to connect to your WiFi will appear:

Scanning for any available networks will provide you a drop-list of found networks. Your own network needs to be in that list. Just add your authentication details to the dialog and you're good to go.

Instruct openSUSE installer to encrypt your root drive

(This is completely optional, you don't NEED to have an encrypted hard-drive. I just love doing stuff like this.) When your installer wizard will reach Suggested Partitioning, that's your cue. Going for encrypted root partition is actually surprisingly easy on openSUSE:

Go to Expert Partitioner using the suggested partition as a baseline for your custom partitioning. The only thing you need to change is to enable encryption on your root partition. Find mount point / and Edit it. Just click Encrypt Device and choose a wise password for your encryption. That's it. Then you can Accept the partition plan and move forward.

Add an user to new Linux

For security reasons, I'll always separate my administrators and regular users. What level of security you're targeting for is completely up to you. I, personally won't use Automatic Login and won't use same passwords for super-user and regular users. The Local Users dialog will look like this:

Hang tight, you're almost there.

Install!

When you reach the Installation Settings, you're about to start destroying any previous data on your Mac and start installing the Linux:

Enabling SSH and drilling a hole for it into firewall is up to you. Also, the choice of tooling for network management is up to you. I do dislike NetworkManager and obviously choose to drop it and go with wicked. If you want to learn more, go read wicked FAQ at https://github.com/openSUSE/wicked/wiki/FAQ.

When you click Install in the Confirm Installation -dialog, the ball starts rolling. If you missed the previous warning, before this point your data is still intact in the drive, after this point it won't be anymore. This is the part where you can go grab a cup of coffee:

At the successful end, your system will automatically reboot. When the installer reboots the computer, you can remove the installer USB. It won't be needed anymore.

Step 6: Reboot into your newly installed Linux

If you went with encrypted partition, GRUB will require the password to decrypt the drive to load Linux kernel:

Hint: If you already didn't, just yank out the installer USB.

The "funny" thing about encrypted root partition is: when your kernel is loaded by GRUB, kernel will need the same password again!

Yes, punch in the same password again to reach login-screen.

Add your Mac's Broadcom to Linux - Again!

Once logged in all the hard work you did with the Broadcom-driver are lost. Your newly installed openSUSE will NOT have the Broadcom-driver installed. What! What! What?

But wait! This time installing is much easier. You actually CAN simply install the RPMs from the other USB-stick. On an installed Linux, the system can be written into.

Confirm the kernel version (again) and notice how it is different. My system has:

Linux version 4.12.14-lp151.28.10-default

Just like before, figure out which one the device is (with a great likelihood, it is not the same device anymore) and mount it. Once mounted, as root you can do something like:

rpm --install -h *.rpm

Installing the RPMs won't make your network operational. In a Linux, there are always ways to avoid rebooting, but in this instance I found it simply easier to go the Windows-way and reboot. You can do that at this point. Alternatively if you don't just yet need a network, you can also remove the second query for encryption password and then reboot to fix two problems on a single reboot.

Remove the 2nd password prompt

This is something I wouldn't do on a shared machine. Since I'm almost certain, nobody else will use my laptop, in this instance I'm willing to add ease of use with cost of potentially losing my security. If a logged-in user can access the encryption key-file, my encryption security is gone! Before allowing a second encryption key to be used, the plain-text password is not stored anywhere. To keep my system still secure, I need to make sure the permissions for the file are correctly set and also keep any malware or unwanted software from stealing my precious key-file.

Process for setting up encrypted root in openSUSE is described well in https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Encrypted_root_file_system. As instructed there, create a keyfile, add the keyfile as a valid key into LUKS and secure the setup:

For relaxing my system's security, the general idea is to load some random bytes from /dev/urandom and create a random-content key-file. The docs are using 1024 bytes, I went double that for a 2048 byte keyfile. In my sequence, I first create an empty file, then lock all other users out of it and then populate the file with random bytes:

touch /.partition.35d5293d-6fe0-4eaf-987f-4f2eca8ca6d7.key
chmod 600 /.partition.35d5293d-6fe0-4eaf-987f-4f2eca8ca6d7.key
dd if=/dev/urandom \
  /.partition.35d5293d-6fe0-4eaf-987f-4f2eca8ca6d7.key \
  bs=1024 count=2

Then this newly created filename needs to be added into two places. First /etc/crypttab. After setup, there are only two columns. As instructed in the documentation, a third column needs to be added. Note: This single line having three columns is split into three lines here for readability. If you fail to have this as a single line, your system will fail to reboot:

cr_ata-APPLE_SSD_SM0256F_S1K4NYBF401257-part3
UUID=7e49a147-b626-41cc-bc89-49e8a13b9cb0
/.partition.35d5293d-6fe0-4eaf-987f-4f2eca8ca6d7.key

Second into initRD by creating a new Dracut configuration segment /etc/dracut.conf.d/99-root-key.conf:

echo -e 'install_items+=" /.partition.35d5293d-6fe0-4eaf-987f-4f2eca8ca6d7.key "' \
 | sudo tee --append /etc/dracut.conf.d/99-root-key.conf

Yet again, to keep your system secure, make sure nobody else can access your /boot-stuff:

chmod -R go= /boot/

To have this Dracut segment have any effect, you need to run mkinitrd as root. If you want more information about initRDs or Dracut, go to https://dracut.wiki.kernel.org/.

Now, you're ready to reboot the Linux. Both WiFi and password setups are done.

Step 7: Reboot and verify setup

You will need to enter the encryption password for GRUB, no change there. However, your Linux should go directly to login-screen. If it doesn't, you failed somewhere.

Also, after a login, your WiFi should work. To confirm, go to a prompt:

Since installer saved your wireless connection details, now you have network connectivity also in your installed Linux!

Step 8: Finalize

Remember the part where your installer used a different version of Linux kernel than your ready system? Kinda hard to not remember it, right. Now some additional work is needed to keep your system working:

As root, run this in a bash-prompt (again, a single-liner):

zypper addrepo \
  https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:Sauerland/openSUSE_Leap_15.1_Update/home:Sauerland.repo

The setup information is available at https://software.opensuse.org/download.html?project=home%3ASauerland&package=broadcom-wl.

Finally: Go to YaST2 and use the GUI to inspect all the software repositories your system has. It must have Sauerland's repo enabled for the Broadcom driver to get updates as openSUSE's kernel-default -package does.

Step last: All done

That's it. Now your Mac is successfully running an openSUSE 15.1 Leap Linux.

Enjoy!

Among the number of toys I have, are couple of Zebex bar code readers. Since forever (or 2013), I've had issues with Windows not detecting the newly attached USB-device correctly. See my previous article Windows 7 unable to detect a HID barcode scanner for details. That was on a Zebex Z-3000 to be exact.

During all these years, the problem has not solved itself and all my attempts to fix have been not-so-successful. The reader I've been most recently used is an improved one using a laser to read the data, a Z-3151HS (the HS stands for High Speed). The version query will return a single-line string containing following:

Model Z3151HS S01.01
Ver
01.27
Date
01-18-2019

On a plugin, the USB human-interface-device (or HID, or keyboard) does this:

Nobody loves seeing an USB device not recognized -popup, or Device Descriptor Request Failed on device manager. That's a sign of a major malfunction.

Luckily, in this case without spending too much time, little bit of troubleshooting became fruitful and both problem reason and a fix were found. The bar code reader loves being in a wrong mode. This is an USB-device, but no matter what I try, on plugin the device will be in IBM PC/AT/PS/2 Keyboard emulation mode. That incorrect mode makes the newly plugged in USB-device not respond to a Windows intiated device query. As you might think, your Windows will be pissed about the failure and bark about it. Obviously, the device should be in USB-mode to handshake properly with Windows, that's a no-brainer.

Again, the mode can be changed easily by scanning some bar codes (these are actually in the manual too):

Enter configuration mode, switch to USB-mode and end configuration mode. Poof! Now Windows 10 sees the HID USB-thingie ok and it does work correctly. The obvious problem is, that you really do need to do it EVERY SINGLE TIME you plugin the device to your computer. Not cool! Numerous attempts to fix the mode-select have failed. If you have a suggestion, I'd be happy to try it.

Bonus: Firmware upgrade

My unit had a measly 1.03 firmware when I bought it. Obviously, I've been upgrading firmwares while hoping the problem would be solved somehow. No such joy yet.

New firmwares can be downloaded from Zebex website @ https://www.zebex.com/en/product/index/20/Z-3151HS with appropriate tooling to do the update. Since this is on a computer, nothing will ever work as smoothly as you'd like. On an attempt to run the firmware upgrade tool, this will happen:

In front of your eyes, a failure will occur and a message will state: Make sure the device work under USB-Boot mode. I'm not sure whose English grammar is better, mine or that person who wrote that sentence, but the problem stands. You need to get your device into USB-Boot -mode and you have zero clue on how to do that.

Tons of googling, reading forum posts and manuals will reveal, that such a sequence does exist. You need to scan following bar codes:

Yet again, go for configuration mode, and place the device into USB update -mode. After that, your firmware update will proceed to actual update.

I'll hope these tips will help some poor user trying to get his/hers reader working.
Enjoy scanning!

Over four years ago I wrote about my weather station setup. Well ... It doesn't exist anymore. There was a severe thunderstorm and my gadgets weren't properly fastened to the steel pipe and this happened:

After weather cleared, I realized the lack of readings from my garage roof. The poor temperature unit / CPU was upside down, hanging from some wirings and FULL OF WATER! Ufff! Electronics and water won't mix. At least not well.

My zip-ties didn't like the ping pong -ball sized hail:

The picture from sunroofing is from my friend's place. He has some tinkering to do, to get this deck roofing fixed. That piece of plastic didn't survive chunks of ice plummeting from the sky.

To get my weather properly measured and data-logged, I already put a purchase order for a new unit. This time I'm going for a Davis Vantage Vue. Also, to save money this time I'm attaching it properly!