Archive for Technical

Asus WL-500W Serial Port (COM)

acid / June 11, 2009 / No comments

Today I am going to share with my experience of soldering serial port to Asus WL-500W router, just in case you need to recover it from brick.

Follow the instructions on your own risk. I don’t take any responsibility on any damage, although this has worked perfectly for me and for many people.

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You need 4 small pins like in the picture above which you can desolder from old motherboard.

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Some tools, most important is soldering iron ;-)

Now open up your router. Attention, by doing this you will void the warranty!

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Locate serial connector placeholder like on picture above.

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Solder pins like above. The pinout description is right under placeholder.

Because router and your PC serial port has different logic levels you need a converter.

I used MAX232CPE based TTL – RS232 level converter from local market, it’s really cheap. You can see the picture of my converter below.

I’ve also successfully tested another converter based on MAX3232.

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Now connect those pins to your converter. 4 pins need to be connected: RX, TX, VCC, GND. I’ve used black headers from old PC case.

The tricky part was that I knew I had to connect RX0 (router) to TX (converter) and TX0 (router) to RX (converter). But according to pinout marking on both router and converter I connected RX->RX, TX->TX in order to make it work.

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Run SecureCRT or PuTTY. Port settings 115200 – 8 – N – 1.

The video below will show you the result in action.

Any question – ask.

Good luck!

Category: Technical / Tags: , , , , ,

vBProductMaker 1.5.1 – Free vBulletin Product development tool for Windows

acid / February 25, 2009 / No comments

vBProductMaker

programiconbighelp

Version 1.6.0 is released, click here for details!

vBProductMaker intended to help vBulletin product developers and make it easy to manage their products and corresponding components. The skill level of users using this tool can vary from novice to advanced web programmers. It is combining code editor with syntax coloring, vBulletin-aware management console and XML builder, in order to produce final XML file which can be imported into vBulletin. vBProductMaker is using internal file type in order to store and retrieve all information related to your vBulletin product. The file type is defined as .vbu . You can save your product as .vbu file and then later load it, modify and finally export to vBulletin XML product.

Features

  • Indexing vBulletin script on local hard drive to help developer locating plugin hooks, template hooks, phrases, etc
  • Show indexed vBulletin plugin/template hooks in editor
  • Syntax coloring for PHP and Templates (HTML)
  • Managing product details such us ID, title, description, version, product url, version check url and state
  • Managing built in as well as custom phrase groups and phrases
  • Managing product dependencies from php, mysql, related product and vBulleting versions
  • Managing product install and uninstall codes
  • Managing product tempates
  • Managing product plugins
  • Managing product options building for Admin CP
  • Contains help file covering program as well as some vBulletin aspects in CHM format
  • Exporting project to valid, well formed  XML file ready to publish

Changelog

v1.5.1 – Initial release (beta)

Todo

  • Adding Cron functionality
  • Importing XML vBulletin products
  • More help topics

Requirements

Microsoft Windows with NET framework 2.0 or later

 

Download

Download vBProductMaker 1.5.1

Download vBProductMaker 1.5.1 [mirror]

 

As the help contains most of information one can need, I will show several screenshots from program help file below.

general

plugins

templates

phrase

settings

programoptions

export

This is public beta version, feel free to test and report issues.

Category: Technical / Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Backup your DB and files using batch file

acid / January 29, 2009 / No comments

I’ve been given a small task to backup our issue database on daily basis, for which I created a tiny backup file and would like to share with you.

The script below will do the following

  1. Create MySQL dump of your database using configuration set
  2. Compress files and MySQL dump into single archive file and copy to destination folder
  3. It will always create old backup so you always have previous version
  4. Copy both old and new backups to network shared resourse
@ECHO OFF
 REM ----------- START OF CONFIGURATION HERE
 SET DESTINATION_FOLDER=c:\dest\
 SET BACKUP_FILENAME=yourBackup.rar
 SET BACKUP_FILENAME_OLD=yourBackup.old.rar
 SET BACKUP_DB_FILENAME=backup.sql
 SET MYSQL_FOLDER=C:\wamp\bin\mysql\mysql5.1.30\bin\
 SET MYSQL_DB_NAME=yourdbname
 SET MYSQL_DB_USER=yourdbuser
 SET MYSQL_DB_PASS=yourdbpass
 SET NETWORK_PATH=\\your_backup_pc_ip\path
 SET NETWORK_USERNAME=your_backup_pc_user
 SET NETWORK_PASSWORD=your_backup_pc_pass
 REM ----------- END OF CONFIGURATION HERE
 
CD %~dp0
 
%MYSQL_FOLDER%mysqldump.exe -u %MYSQL_DB_USER% -p%MYSQL_DB_PASS% %MYSQL_DB_NAME% >%BACKUP_DB_FILENAME%
 ECHO DB Done
 
rar a %BACKUP_FILENAME% @files.lst > NUL
 @del %DESTINATION_FOLDER%%BACKUP_FILENAME_OLD% 2>NUL
 @rename %DESTINATION_FOLDER%%BACKUP_FILENAME% %BACKUP_FILENAME_OLD% 2>NUL
 copy %BACKUP_FILENAME% %DESTINATION_FOLDER% > NUL
 ECHO Files Done
 
@del %BACKUP_FILENAME% 2>NUL
 @del %BACKUP_DB_FILENAME% 2>NUL
 ECHO Removing Temporary Files Done
 
ECHO Accessing Network...
 net use %NETWORK_PATH% %NETWORK_PASSWORD% /user:%NETWORK_USERNAME%
 copy %DESTINATION_FOLDER%%BACKUP_FILENAME% %NETWORK_PATH% > NUL
 copy %DESTINATION_FOLDER%%BACKUP_FILENAME_OLD% %NETWORK_PATH% > NUL
 ECHO Network Copy Done
 
ECHO All Done

To make backup regular I’ve used Cron NT service for Windows because I honestly don’t like Windows Scheduler and always disable it ;-)
Here is the crontab line that suits my needs.

10 23 * * * cmd /c C:\wamp\backup\backup.bat

This will backup my stuff every day at 23:10.

That’s pretty much it.
Cheers!

Category: Technical / Tags: , , , , , , ,

JM20337 read data corruption – solution

acid / December 8, 2008 / No comments

Some time ago I bought hard drive enclosure. To my surprise recently I’ve found out that read operation is giving random corrupted data, in other words if you copy data from IDE HD connected to that enclosure, your fill will be corrupted on target media. Without any hope that I will get some answer, I wrote an e-mail to enclosure chipset vendor – JMicron. To my second surprise I got immediate response from very kind person Alex Lee working in that company. He was very prompt and professional and eventually helped to fix the problem, which was enclosure vendor design issue rather than chipset. I will share with this information just in case if some one else need it.

The enclosure box I bought is below. The model NTY-M35HD. I bought it from South Korean local market online, through gmarket.co.kr.

boxThe chipset used is JM20337.
Some PCB pictures of my enclosure.

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And here goes recommended patch, click on the picture to see full size. Basically you have to remove resistor R15 4.72k.

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Right after patch I have created a batch file for continuous reading / comparing over 2 days and not a single error.

So I want to thank Alex Lee for his great work and JMicron company for amazing products which I believe are leading in the market.

Cheers!

Category: Technical / Tags: , , , , , , , ,