Reviving a Rio Carbon With A New Battery

 At 22 years old (as of 2026) my Rio Carbon MP3 player was fully dead. Plugging it in to a USB charger or computer elicited no response, nor did any combination of holding or pressing buttons. Not too surprising given it's age.

 

Some gentle prying got the back cover off without damaging too many of the internal plastic clips, try not to open and close your Carbon too many times if at all possible, and revealed an APlus/Callisto 061947-DN2, lithium ion battery with the date code 32nd week of 2004. When checked with a multi-meter I found that the voltage being delivered to the mainboard was exactly 0.0v. That seemed low even for a >20 year old cell, which lead me to believe that the battery protection circuit had kicked in, disconnecting the cell from the device.

 

Some fraction of battery protection circuits can be coaxed into re-connecting an otherwise dead cell by applying a voltage to the output terminals. I used my 121GW meter, set to diode test mode, as it will put up to 15v for testing white LEDs and zener diodes. After about 30 seconds the meter crept up from 0.0v to 3.5v, I quickly plugged the device into a charger and it woke up! The screen lit up, the HDD spun up and the first track in the first directory was displayed.  Good news, all the functions seemed to work as expected, but the battery life now was best measured in 10s of seconds.

 

I made some measurements of the original battery and found there was space for a new battery up to 48x19.5x6mm, not a huge space but there are lots of modern devices that use smaller batteries to do much more. It took some time but I eventually found a listing for 420mAh "602040" (40x20x6mm) lithium ion cells on Aliexpress. They are a half of a millimeter oversized but pouch style batteries are a little squishy and the original cell had padding.

 

Three weeks later the new cell arrived and it looked like it was going to fit. I de-soldered the original cell and removed temperature sensor taped to the end of the cell. Then I clipped the leads of the new cell to length and soldered it in. The fit was not fantastic but after transferring the original copper foil, foam padding and thermal sensor kapton tape, things were pretty snug.

 Before closing things up I plugged it in and verified that not only does the new battery charge it holds a charge significantly better than it's 22 year old cousin.

 

 After only 10min of work (and 3 weeks of shipping), my Rio Carbon was back in working condition!

EdgeTX Pre-Arming Sequence

I have a Radiomaster Pocket and found that it is very easy to accidentally actuate the SA button while removing it from the carrying bag or while bumping around on the end of a lanyard. This could lead to accidental arming of a drone which I would like to avoid.

Lucky for me, EdgeTX has some powerful programing tools built in, allowing for the arbitrary manipulation of inputs and outputs. 

The first step was to change the Mix for CH5, normally assigned to SA, and assign it to Logical Switch L01. In our program L01 will be the Armed bit, if all the conditions for a safe arming are met it will be on.

 

Next was to build the actual logic of the arming sequence. I decided on the following order of operations.

    * Move the throttle up past the value 50 (75% to the top)

    * Move the throttle down to -100

    * Click the latching button SA down

If any of those actions are done out of order or outside of a two second window the drone will not arm. This seemed like a reasonable compromise between ease of use and unlikeliness that it could occur by accident.

 

Below are the 8 logical switches that make up the program and a short description of each switch.

When the throttle is pushed up past value 50 AND the arm switch is not already held down L07 turns on and remains on for the next 2 seconds. This begins the arming sequence.

Next the throttle is pulled all the way down to near the value -100 (my throttle does not always makes it to -100 despite calibration), this switches on L05.

Finally SA is clicked on producing a 0.1s pulse from L04. Together the L04, L05, and L07 bits satisfy the conditions of the Arming Prerequisites L02.

With L02 on the Arming Latch L03 bit turns on. With the switch SA clicked on this satisfies L01 and switches Ch5 on, arming the drone. Clicking SA off will break the conditions of L01 allowing the drone to be disarmed with a single click.

In addition to the above, L06 and L08 are included to trigger audible indications of the state of the arming sequence.

If the Armed bit L01 is not active and throttle up/down motion has been preformed L08 will turn on. This indicates a correctly executed prearm sequence and triggers a prearm active notification.

If the button SA is on while the Armed switch L01 is not on this indicates that the prearm sequence was not done and SA should not be on. L06 checks for this and produces a 2.5s pulse with a 0.5s delay (a 3s cycle). This is used to trigger a repeating audible indication of 'Danger' notifying the user that the armed switch was erroneously pressed.

 

The Special Functions below show the audible indications for arming, disarming, prearming and accidental pressing of the SA switch.

L01 indicates that arming was successful

!L01 indicates that the radio has stopped sending the arm signal

L06 indicates that the arming sequence has failed and SA needs to be released

L08 indicates that the throttle motion was executed and the radio is ready to send the arm signal.

While there are many ways to create a prearming sequence this best matched my requirements of simplicity without using up the remaining SE button on my radio.

 Zosi C611 WIFI Cameras

The Zosi C611 is a cheap and simple IP camera that I use to keep an eye on the cats while out of the house. Unfortunately to set up these cameras an app with an account is required, this is not only annoying but it also puts an artificial lifespan on the cameras as the app is likely to not to be supported forever.

Fortunately the app can be bypassed entirely, to connect the camera to your network you need only to generate a QR code of text in the following format.

sid=“yourNetworkSSID”;psk=YourPassword

 When powering up the camera display the QR code to the camera and it will go through a connection process. Once connected a video stream can be found at:

rtsp://[cameraIP]:554/video1

 That's it, though these cameras are discontinued this bypass will likely work on other Zosi models.

*Update*

 Telnet is enabled on the Zosi C611 camera with the credentials 

root:123456asj

From poking around I found the device manufacture is "Asj" so the password is not just random homerow letters.

BetaFlight: Custom OSD Logos and Tiles

BetaFlight is flight control software used on first person view multi-rotor aircraft, it translates users inputs to motor speeds and returns information to the pilot via an on screen display (OSD) in the video feed.

The OSD information is made up of alphanumeric characters, punctuation, and other symbols arranged to convey dynamic information like battery voltage or control link quality, and static information like the pilot name. A staple of FPV flying is for pilots to add their own moniker to the OSD in order to permanently associate their name with their flying skills. Lacking any and all flying skills, I decided to spend time on customizing my moniker instead.

When you first boot your craft, BetaFlight displays a splash screen with the BetaFlight logo and information on how to access the OSD menu system.

This logo is a 288x72px tri-chrome image (black, white and green, with green being rendered as transparent) that can be replaced using a built in function of the BetaFlight Configurator software. When creating your logo image make sure the final exported image is an 8-bit RGB PNG file, if there is an alpha channel in your image it will not work.

Green is not rendered in the video feed.

The next easiest change to make is replacing the craft's name (Cetus X) with my own, this is also easily done using the Configurator software.

That seems a little flat, the display is capable of rendering bitmaps as shown by the boot logo, battery indicator and other onscreen glyphs. It should be possible to add custom graphics to the inflight display.

The BetaFlight Cinfigurator allows for the uploading of custom fonts, with each font file consisting of 160 tiles used for OSD elements plus 96 tiles that store the bootlogo we edited earlier. After exploring the OSD menus I found that there were about a dozen tiles that were both not used in the OSD and still human typeable, this is important because there needs to be a way to make BetaFlight show the custom tiles.

A map of the tiles that are 'available' for replacement

The last 3 tiles are the crosshairs which can be placed at any location on the display, this makes them useful for adding an extra row to a single row graphic.

To get a custom image into the font it must first be fit into a number of 12x18px tiles I chose to make the 2 and 0 of my image fall exactly into one tile each, this allows them to be duplicated without filling up extra tiles. Eventually these tiles will be assigned to the characters " # @ ' , ; [ ] so when the craft name is changed to "#@',';;;[] the full logo will appear.

The tricky part is now getting these tiles into a font file. The original font files (.mcm) can be obtained directly from the BetaFlight Configurator's github they can then extracted using the MAX7456-Font-Tools (max.py) resulting in 256 numbered .PNG files. Each of the custom image tiles can now be exported to a 12x18px image of the correct number to replace the original character in the tile set, making sure that they are 8-bit RBG PNG files. Once all the tiles have been replaced the MAX-7456 font tools can be used again to re-pack the numbered .PNGs into a .mcm font file compatible with BetaFlight.

In the BetaFlight Configurator the new font file can be uploaded to the craft (as well as the custom boot logo from earlier). The craft name can then be set to the string of characters that correspond to the custom tiles and it's done.

A custom bitmap displayed inflight without disrupting any of the other functions or information on the OSD or OSD menu!

Bonus: The little Cetus X icon on the right is made of 6 tiles, the upper 3 are the crosshairs' tiles, the lower 3 are displayed using the pilot's name to get an image that is taller that one tile.

MachineMonitor.py

A few months ago I repurposed my 2010 gaming PC into a Zoneminder server to monitor some network cameras and make timelapse video. The PC has more than enough power to do the job but it has a problem with uptime, occasionally it will lock up so completely that it doesn't even respond to a ping. Troubleshooting a problem that happens less than once a month is hard but I still would like to know when it has happens so I can reboot manually. I looked at what I had available and decided on my RaspberryPi ZeroW (currently hosting a webserver), and the cheapest thermal printer on the internet.

The printer is driven by a python scrip that takes a couple arguments and sends the correct bytes to the printer to get formatted text. It had only a partial implementation of the ESC/P protocol so it is no good for images, making it a perfect choice for printing human friendly notifications. Over a couple of days I was able to map the functions that were available and come up with a workable script, as well as some really long glitch-art.

To monitor the Zoneminder and other PCs, I used another python script, it reads a list of machines from a file, pings them and then generates a notification based on whether the machine has changed state since the last time it was checked. To begin, the user (me) fills out a config file that contains a list of the IPs/Domains to be checked, and their human readable name. At regular intervals the monitoring script is run by cron, the script then pings each machine and appends "up" or "down" to each line in the config file accordingly. The next time it runs, the script compares the new up/down status to the old one and generates an appropriate message, if there has been no change in state nothing will be printed, eliminating spam. Messages are passed to the printer script along with the required formatting arguments and a messages like the following appears.

I have published the code but keep in mind I am not, by any means, a programmer. I start every project with about 15 tabs of docs.python and w3schools, I know that I am 'done' when I close the last tab. https://github.com/nik282000/Network-Machine-Monitor

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2025 edit: the printer continues to function, announcing garbage day, holidays, birthdays, and the daily weather.

Cellular Automata!

If you've never heard of Cellular Automata here is the tl;dr.

Make a line of "cells," each cell can be on or off. Look at each cell and its neighbours, according to a set of rules you update the state of the cell in the middle. Do this for every cell in the line and then print the states of the cells on the screen as light and dark pixels. If you put each new line below the last it might look something like this.

If the 3 cells in a row form the pattern 100, 011, 010 or 001 then the middle cell will be 1 on the next generation.

All other combinations result in a 0.

Despite the simple rules, some very complex patterns or even randomness can come from the 255 rules of 1 dimensional cellular automata (the images are 2D because we are showing time starting at the top and moving downward). I've been playing with discrete automata, where the cells are either on or off, for a long time but only recently started looking at continuous automata.

In continuous automata each cell can be any value from 0 to 1 and on each step you perform a continuous function, like y = mx + b. Being continuous there is a MUCH bigger space to map, you could do any function and make infinitesimally small changes to it while still observing different results. To start I have been looking at simple rules, these look at 5 cells in a row, average them together with different 'weights' and then add a constant. If the result is greater than one then the only the fractional part is kept (the one is dropped).

For example, here are two images of continuous automata with very simple rules, they both take the average of a cell and its two nearest neighbours then add a constant value, in the first image that value is 0.04 in the second it is 0.041.

Each new cell is equal to the average of itself and its neighbours, plus an additional constant. 

New cell(n) = constant + (cell(n-1) + cell(n) + cell(n+1))/3

It becomes easy to see how many possibilities there are to generate unique patterns when adding 1/1000 to each cell makes such a big difference. To better map the possibilities I made a tool that lets me change the starting conditions (a single point or a random line of values), the weights used to average the cells together and the constant that is added to each cell on each step. Using this tool I have scanned through a few thousand rules and picked out the most interesting below, I highly recommend zooming in to see some of the fine details in the larger structures.

Text on a Graphics Display

Whenever possible I like to write my own code instead of using a library (at first). It's a challenging puzzle and often times I learn how to do something useful as well. Most recently I got a 128x64px LCD to use with an Arduino micro-controller, the display could show graphics but its built in text mode was very limited, so after getting the graphics mode running I set about building a way to turn strings into text on my display.

My basic plan was to store a bitmap of each letter and its width in an array so that I could look it up and read it back as x/y pixel locations. In order to keep my program as small as possible I had to choose the type of data I used to store the letters so that there would be very little wasted space while also being easy to maintain and update, eventually I settled on storing each letter as a 32bit integer.

The letters would have a maximum size of 5x5px, this would use 25bits, leaving 7bits for storing extra data about the letter. Initially, I used the first 4bits to store the letter's width, the next 25bits would hold the letter data and finally there would be 3 zeros at the end. The letter "A" for example would look like this:

01010111010001111111000110001000

Or for better readability:

0101    <-Character is 5 bits wide
01110   <+Bitmap of character
10001    |
11111    |
10001    |
10001   <+
000     <-Leftover bits

Unfortunately for me, C/C++ doesn't allow integers to be expressed in binary format if they are longer than 8 bits so I had to write a small program using Processing.org to scrape all the strings of ones ans zeros from a text file and then convert them into integers so my final value for storing the letter "A" ended up being 464332680.

To read back each letter and get it on screen I first extract the letter width by bit-shifting the variable 28 times, this leaves only the 4 most significant bits, and in the case of "A" this is a value of 5 "0101." Next I read back the 25 bitmap bits by shifting the variable from 27 to 4 times and masking all but the least significant bit (with the & 1):

int letterWidth = bitMap >> 28;   <-Extract the width of the letter
int i = 27;                      <-Starting at bit 27
for(int cy = 0; cy < 5; cy++){   <-Starting on row 0 and increasing to row 4
  for(int cx = 0; cx < 5; cx++){   <-Starting on column 0 and increasing to column 4
    if(((bitMap >> i) & 1) == 1){   <-If bit "i" is equal to 1 then draw a point at x, y
      point(x, y,);
    }
    i--;    <-Decrease "i" because we are moving from bit 27 back to bit 4
  }
}

Afterwards I pass the letter's width back to the string handling function so that I leave the appropriate amount of space between the letter I just printed and the one that comes next. Once this was working I used one of the three trailing zeros to indicate if the letter was a lowercase that needed to descend below the normally lowest pixel. The results are satisfactory given the small size of the display.