Technical

1 Acre = 43,560 square feet
1 Acre = 160 square rods
1 Acre = 1.1834 square arpents
1 Acre = 10 square chains
1 Acre = 160 square rods
1 Acre = 160 perches
1 Acre = 160 poles
1 Acre = .4047 hectare
1 Acre = 4047 square meters
1 Acre = is about 208 3/4 feet square
1 Acre Square = 5645.376 square varas
Arpen measurements vary by locality:
1 Arpent (in LA, MS, AL, FL) = .84625 of an acre
1 Arpent Square (in LA, MS, AL, FL) = 191.994 feet or 2.909 chains on each side
1 Arpent (AR and MO) = .8507 of an acre
1 Arpent Square (AR and MO) = 192.5 feet or 2.91667 chains on each side
1 Caballeria (Texas-Spanish) = 108 acres
1 Centimeter = .3937 inches
1 Centimeter = .032808 feet
1 Chain = 66 feet
1 Chain = 4 rods
1 Chain = 4 perches
1 Chain = 4 poles
1 Chain = 100 links
1 Chain = 20.1168 meters
1 Foot = 12 inches
1 Foot = .36 varas
1 Furlong = 660 feet
1 Furlong = 40 rods
1 Foot = 0.3048006 meter
1 Hectare = 10,000 square meters
1 Hectare = 2.471 acres
1 Inch = .0254 meter
1 Kilometer = 3280.83 feet
1 Kilometer = .62 mile
1 Knot = 6080.2 feet
1 Labor (Texas-Spanish)= 1,000,000 square varas
1 Labor = 177.136 acres
1 League (Texas-Spanish) = 25,000,000 square varas
1 League = 4428.4 acres
1 Link = 7.92 inches
1 Link = .66 feet
1 Link = .2017 meter
1 Meter = 3.280833 feet
1 Meter = 39.37 inches
1 Meter Square = 10.764 square feet
1 Mile = 5,280 feet
1 Mile = 8 furlongs
1 Mile = 320 rods
1 Mile = 80 chains
1 Mile = 1.60935 kilometers
1 Mile = 320 perches
1 Mile = 320 poles
1 Mile = 8000 links
1 Mile = 1,609.2655 meters
1 Mile Square = a regular Section of land
1 Mile Square = 27,878,400 square feet
1 Mile Square = 640 acres
1 Mile Square = 259 hectares
1 Mile Square = 2.59 square hectares
1 Perch = 25 links
1 Perch = 1 pole
1 Perch = 1 rod
1 Perch = 16.5 feet
1 Pole = 16.5 feet
1 Pole = 1 perch
1 Pole = 1 Rod
1 Rod = 1 pole
1 Rod = 1 perch
1 Rod = 16.5 feet
1 Section = 1 mile long, by 1 mile wide
1 Section = 640 acres
1 Sitio (Texas-Spanish)= 1 league
1 Township = 6 miles long, by 6 miles wide
1 Township = 36 sections
1 Township = 36 square miles
Vara Measurements differ by locality:
1 Vara (Texas-Spanish) = 33 1/3 inches
1 Vara (Southern Colorado) 32.993 inches
1 Vara (Florida) 33.372 inches
1 Yard = 36 inches
1 Yard = 3 feet
1 Yard Square = 9 square feet

ok new version of Field Genius supports image files with world files. now how do you make a world file? good question!
First off the world file is in meters so if you are used to working in feet you have to convert your numbers to meters.

like if you have a GIS program and you make a 8.5x11 image print at a scale of 1"=50' and your image is output at 150 dpi then your world file would look like:
0.102 --- x units per pixel since it was 50 feet per inch and 150 pixels per inch that means each pixel was 0.3333 feet or 0.1016 meters
0.0
0.0
-0.102 --- assuming no scale factor (image is not squished) it should just be a negative of the thing in the first line (negative because images are stored from top to bottom in the file, but our coordinate system is positive going UP so negative makes it work right).
1397.86 --- upper left of image X coordinate in meters -- just an example number
1597.39 --- upper left of image Y coordinate in meters -- just an example number

now name this file like if you had image.tif the world file would be image.tfw and if you had image.jpg then the world file would be image.jgw.
You can make the file in note pad just make sure you put an extra blank line below the last line.

That should pretty much cover the basics...

I got my info from a wikipedia article and some playing around

Ok so we have had the RTK system for a couple weeks.
From the stand point of some one who has used a total station for years they system can be summed up as "different" heh.

Took about 4 hours to get it "working" the first day... and that was only kinda working from what I later found out. Did a couple jobs with it only to find out that the data I collected was crap. Then I read a bunch of stuff - amazing how hard it is to find instructions on WTF is going on with an RTK system. Soo many options for settings, truly an information overload. And for anyone that thinks "well why didn't you just read the instructions that came with it" -- yeah that book is only about 100-130 pages, and assumes you know WTF is going on before you start reading it.

So the basic run down of the system, you have the base GPS reciever. You set up the base reciever over a known controll point. With the software I have that is either a point that you know the geodetic coordinates of, a point you know the cartesian coordinates of, or a point that you stand there and gather enough satellite data until you are comfortable with the average position (the one time I did this soo far the point it averaged out in 1/2 hour was about 3 feet off from the actual position - not bad really). You have the base station - which in our setup is either of the 2 GPS recievers - they are identical - but you plug it up to a transmitter radio, and use the software to configure it as the reference base station. When you do that the software tells the GPS reciever to calculate RTK correction messages and broadcast them out over the radio transmitter modem. That was actually all pretty easy to setup. Except that there are only about a dozen different types of RTK correction messages that you can broadcast out.

First time I set it up I got lucky and picked the lowest quality message you can pick and still have RTK corrections - some of the "RTK corrections" will not actually let you resolve an RTK solution for the position of the rover - which gets back to the flexibility - you are able to do so many things - figuring out how to do what you want is difficult. Again the instruction manual here says "these are the possible broadcast messages, set which one you want and use it".

That helps for NOTHING. Thanks to the people that make the survey software I use I found on their website a helpful PDF describing the types of corrections and what they are useful for.

Message type -- what it is -- what you can use it for
RTCM 1 -- Code differential corrections -- DGPS (not RTK)
RTCM 9 -- Partial code differential corrections -- DGPS
RTCM 18 & 19 -- Uncorrected carrier phases and pseudorages -- RTK
RTCM 20 & 21 -- Carrier phase and pseudorage corrections -- RTK
CMR -- Trimble's compact measurement record -- RTK
CMR+ -- Trimble's compact measurement record plus -- RTK
Leica -- Leica proprietary -- RTK
Javad -- Javad/Topcon proprietary -- RTK
Ashtech -- Ashtech proprietary (DBEN) -- RTK

Now my Sokkia Radian IS's only give me the option to do some of these type corrections - pretty much the first 5 on the list. (and some others not on the list that *shrug* who knows what they do)

Those are the ones supported in my software - so out of those CMR should be the best type correction to use. At least that was my determination out of what I was able to read.

So once you have the base station up and broad casting corrections you setup the rover on top of a rover pole, and connect up a radio modem reciever with an antenna - plug that up to the GPS reciever you plan to use as the rover, plug up the data collector and load up your settings.

The settings is where I ran into difficulties, now experienced RTK GPS users may know that it takes a minute or few for the thing to "catch up" when you are roving around taking measurements -- I on the other hand was used to a robotic total station with pretty much instant gratification on my position location. The robot takes a measurement to the prism on my pole, transmits it via radio modem to my data collector - it updates my position on the screen all in under 1 second.

With our RTK system, depending on the satellites it takes between 2 - 30 seconds to stabalize after you stop moving. This is where the settings really come into play. TOLLERANCE SETTINGS - as they are called in my software, you set the number of:
SV's (satellites in view) - 5 seems to work pretty good for me so far as a lower limit.
Then you set the horizon - the satellites have to be higher than this degree to be able to be used in the SV number, I have been using 5°, 10°, and I tried 15° once - but that seems too limiting for most of the day around here.
Then you set some RMS settings, which is position averaging tolerance - it records your position like 1 time a second and averages it with however many other records you set in the software, and determines the error in the average (standard deviations) and reports that, for survey grade accuracy we would like the average position to be resolved to 0.03' or less horizontal and about 0.1' vertical on average stuff. If you want super accurate numbers you should really be using a total station or you have to occupy the survey point for a longer duration.
Also you can set your occupation duration settings -- I was using a minimum of 10 seconds of good data, and over that 10 seconds I wanted 10 points that were of good RTK data.
At good times of the day in 10 seconds I get my RMS down to 0.009' for horizontal and vertical position tolerance. Which exceeds the accuracy of the Radian IS system - so that means that the total error is reduced to the tolerances of the system itself which are 10mm (0.0328 feet) horizontal and 20.0mm (0.0656 feet) vertical. Those are pretty much fixed errors + or - to whatever point you survey in.

All in all I am pretty happy with the system. We got it to do large area topography and asbuilts in between buildings (which typically require many setups of a total station becuase total stations require line of sight between the base (total station) and the rover (prism pole) - RTK GPS only requires a view of the sky)

So, at some point this weekend I was playing the brain game on my NDS and Jon mentioned somthing about having linux on there. I told him I had mine all setup to get on my home network, but I wasnt sure how to get on any other networks. He said I needed a wardriving app, asked if I had one. I hadn't really thought about getting one up until that point.

soo today I was scouring google trying to figure out who made a wardriving app for the NDS. Alot of people seemed to think that some of the programs set up to control your desktop on the NDS were good wardriving apps. shrug best one I found was from sgstair on his site I loaded that up and found 1 weak WAP at the office. That seemed dismal, the Sony notebook saw 3 usually.

Little while later I was leaving to go pick up my family at the mall, so I decided to start up the Wardriving app. I picked up 38 WAP's by the time I had made it to the end of Baum Drive. I had logged 130 WAP's by the time I reached the mall.

We had another 126 WAP's that we picked up on the way to Walmart. Turned it off. Was standing in line waiting to check out at Walmart and started thinking about how many WAPs might be in Walmart. Turns out there were 117 WAPs that showed up. I figured that must be at least 1 for every cash register, they were all encrypted and all had the name "default" broadcast on the SSID, they all seemed to vary by 1 bit (consecutively numbered) on the MAC address.

Started up the app again for the drive home, found 100 from the time we were sitting in the exit until we got home. (some of those were probaly Sams club I am willing to bet)

Turned it off again, walked out back to cook some dinner, and turned it back on. Six WAPs (including ours) showed up real quick. Kimberly's computer only picks up 1 WAP here at the house, and that is ours. Karins computer on the other hand usually picks up 6 WAPs, soo the NDS seeing 6 seems to be an accurate record of the 6 WAPs in the vicinity.

Anyway its somthing fun to play with, the density of WAPs around here is pretty amazing I think 130 between the office and the mall - thats like 2 miles and you only pass 1 set of appartments.

Well on Friday I recieved the PowerCivil Disk from Bentley. Loaded it up on the office notebook computer on Saturday -- yeah I don't know much about Microstation that was very obvious to me very quickly. I could open a drawing and move around a little, but getting any information out of the drawing was a wash for me.

So I worked through the tutorials for PowerDraft (what the PowerCivil package runs on -- built with the Microstation engine)

I can draw some lines and circles now. I sort of know how to work it -- but not really -- I got the basics of the tutorial and figured out how they hide all the tools (after just installing they have a few toolbars available and many of the buttons on the toolbars are turned off (I dont know why you would do that))

So after I learned a little I moved on to playing with the PowerCivil part of the program -- they help file has video's that you download from their website and play as plugin's to the help file -- very nice I thought really helps you learn the tools when you can see exactly what to click on and here some telling you why you check this box or uncheck that box.

I need to watch alot more of the videos before I could use this program to do the work I do every day... I can definitely see how it could speed up my productivity though... many things that I work through to build a site in 3d with Land Desktop are nearly automagic in the PowerCivil software -- thats nice. I am sure the new Civil3D package from Autodesk has changed alot of things too, but they just arent a customer friendly company, as bentley has shown us so far -- heck the disk that I got from Bentley has my name printed right on the disk in shiney ink -- not one of those stick on labels. Everything we have ever gotten form Autodesk is always pre-packaged.

So anyone that keeps up a little on my blog probably knows I use Autodesk's AutoCAD and Land Desktop (LD) for alot of my design work and drawings.

Well in the LD software package they have a civil design package and a survey package that I use. They have discontinued the civil design package and instead are offering a Civil 3D product that semi replaces LD (you still have to install and use LD for to get all the features that were onces all integrated into a single product)

We found a bug in the hydrology part of the Civil design package last year. The result of that was eat it -- we are not fixing it for a while. OK thats nice, I can not use their product to do that design work anymore -- bought new HydroCAD software to do that part of the design with.

A couple weeks ago we got an email from Bentley. Bentley makes a competing drawing/design product called Microstation. In the email they were advertising a new package they call PowerCivil for complete site design -- sounded like what I need. The email advertised a promotion price $4325 for those people who may be using LDD version 3 which Autodesk will soon be retiring. You got 1 year of 24 hour tech support and priority downloads for that nice low price.

The competition sells Civil 3D for $6200 list on their website.

So I watched a bunch of the demo videos that Bentley has provided on their website, and was quite impressed with how quickly and smoothly the design process looked with their software. I went ahead and put in a call to them -- got no where, soo I called back again today, and finally got to speak with someone.

He told me a little about the product and gave me the area representative whom I should call to talk further about the product. I called the rep. and left a message with alot of my info. He called back in a half hour or so. He listened to me a few minutes, then decided that I knew what I was talking about as far as using this software and asked me what I wanted to do - get a hands on demo, or have a look see type demo. I prefer to have a hands on demo, so he was setting me up with a full copy of PowerCivil and a Full License good until sometime in March. That should be pretty neat. He thought that with my design experience I should be able to get up and going pretty easily with their software.

We shall see how it comes out....

so we Hacked Jon's DS seems to have been a Firmware version 2 ... even though mom bought it for him in January 2006...

my passme worked flawlessly we got v5 of flashme put on it and now it runs homebrew and roms like a champ using the Supercard.


good stuff...

So there are now 6 NDS's in my family.
If that is any indication of the sales of NDS then Nintendo seems to be doing very well with the NDS

Only color missing from the collection is pink...

I have a silver
Bud has a silver
Jon got a silver for his bday this week
Kimberly has a blue one
Karin got a Teal Nintendogs one from Santa
Becca has a Red Mariokart one she got for xmas.

Mariokart seems to be a popular game with everyone (its multiplayer capabilities are VERY NICE)

only one hacked for homebrew so far is mine, Jon is ready to do his tommorrow if we can rewrite the firmware on my passme to make a passme2 out of it shouldn't be too hard... Just need to get a parallel cable to hack up and use.

The supercard I fixed seems to be a bit touchy ... soo I might have to do some more surgery on it.

I started the the download of NDS roms 250 - 300 on Friday hopefully those will be done and playable when I get back to check it tommorrow.

So the broken supercard works again after an hour of soldering, desoldering, cutting, and testing with my new Weller WESD51 soldering iron, and an exacto knife as my tools of choice.

Upgraded the firmware on that supercard and now it plays NDS games too!!

Glad I did not have to buy a new supercard!

and I have to say DANG the pins on the CF card adapter are SMALL. REALLY REALLY SMALL.

Pins on the Tivo boot rom were HUGE compared to these.

I am pretty amazed I finally was able to fix somthing instead of causing an electronic casualty YEAH!

I have a supercard CF and have used it quite a bit for about 9 month, then a couple weekends back I turned on the NDS and got
" not find the CF "
" Please turn off the GBA "

so I used the L R during boot and when it got to the CF test the first time everthing was good
and it worked again.

Then later I get the same thing, push the L R to go to diagnostics and I get 3 different error codes
error code: 02 CF State: 11
error code: 01 CF State: 11
error code: 01 CF State: 51

(I kept recycling the diagnostic about 20 or 30 times and those are the 3 different messages that would come up)

Firmware version 1.44 on this supercard

have tried 4 different CF cards (all of which work in another supercard that I have)

Then yesturday I carefully cracked open the glue down one side of the supercard in question using a sharp knife and a very tiny flat screw driver.

Pulled out the circuit board - looked fine at first glance.

plugged in a CF card and noticed a small amount of play in the CF socket.
Upon closer inspection I see that when the CF socket is on top of the circuit board with the pins facing you the left solder mount was cracked through (easy enough to fix but doesnt explain the read errors)

So I got out a 10x magnification lense to look at the 50 tiny solder pads attaching the CF socket to the circuit board. Appears that around 4 (estimated) of the connections may have also cracked.

I will be setting up to attempt to solder the cracked connections back together.

Hopefully this will fix my aformentioned problems...

So I have had a Nintendo DS (NDS) for a little over a year now, and the good stuff is finally getting started.

Yesturday I finished obtaining a set of 50 "clean" NDS rom dumps (claimed source was www.nintendo-ds-roms.com - but the torrent file I got was from another place - all the roms give credit back to the mentioned site though)

The original intention was that I figured eventually some one would hack up a device that would play the NDS roms on the NDS, and I did not want to be behind in collecting up the roms (just try to get some of the old GBA (gameboy advance) -- the old ones are hard to get)

Well I was messing around right before christmas, and realized that my supercard had updated firmware available and new software ... and claimed to be able to run NDS homebrew games

I thought "NEAT!", I had bought a passme back several months ago in anticipation that the supercard may one day work with the NDS with the passme. So with the new firmware installed on my supercard I stuck the passme in, and bingo bango it loaded right up. Then I decided it was time to flash the DS with new firmware so I did not need the passme anymore (except for doing this modification for other DS's)

downloaded the latest greatest flashme version and then put that .nds file on my supercard booted it up, put a screwdriver in the hole and it worked perfect.

Now at this point I should mention that I have a version 1 NDS, one of the first ones made, there is a firmware revision somewhere around October 2005, and all DS's sold after then are different (or should/could be), you need a passme2 (which I can convert my passme into a passme2 with a simple upload to the device from the computer)

So like I said in the beginning I downloaded 50 of the roms, well I decided that since the Supercard worked with homebrew and I had seen stuff that said it might be possible to run clean commercial roms with the supercard and flashme installed, I decided to run a "clean" rom through the supercard software and see what happened. (I had roms that I had collected before that did not work with the supercard software so I was only remotely expecting anything to happen)

First I tried MarioKart - US release - I thought well if it wont work without the actual cartridge in the NDS, then at least I have a mariokart copy and can try to run it with the actual cartridge in the NDS. I stuck my castlevania cartridge in the NDS (it said you needed any valid cartridge in the thing I read) and then pushed down the X+Y+B+A combination and turned on the DS, it booted the supercard immediately (as normal - I had run several homebrew programs off the supercard this way) and then I scrolled down the list of thing on the supercard and selected MarioKart. The supercard loader rolls through the memory as it loads and then two white screens (at that point I was like damn! didn't work, and then not a second later the screens go black and the stuff shows up like when you load MarioKart off the cartridge, and then it comes up and asks for my username and icon blah blah that MarioKart does when its brand new.

My jaw was hanging open I was so shocked, I decided I had to see if it was able to save the save data to the CF or if it was just going to forget everything everytime I turned it off (like happens with GBA games alot if you dont save the right way)

Amazingly it saved the MarioKart game data to the CompactFlash card I had in my supercard. Castlevania was untouched...

So I promptly begain in search of the other 200 ROMs that have already been released for the NDS -- I have about 50% of the last 100 ROMS done now, then I will have the complete collection of the first 250 ROMs

The VEX Robotics Kit does not come with a tilt sensor, and none are available.

I have an interest in creating a 2 wheeled robot that balances itself.

looking at digikey.com I found this device SCA100T-D02 made by VTI Technologies digikey p/n: 551-1003-1-ND

With a nice price of $65.88 for 1 ... HOLY COW ... I was hoping to get a tilt sensor for $5 or so. Guess I am SOL.

Looking at the data sheet this device provides all the functionality I was hoping for in one nice little chip. It would take up 2 of the analog I/O ports on the VEX micro controller.

the data sheet here (PDF)

So I guess the 2 wheeled robot will have to wait.....

Well my big 20" Nokia monitor died a couple weeks ago. Kimberly seemed to think it was pretty funny for some reason. I had rigged up the computers to use 1 monitor - an old old 20" HP monitor made in like 1993.

Well these deals came up on slickdeals.net for some Dell monitors -- in particular a 19" E193FP, 1905FP, some 20.5" deal, and a 24" widescreen deal...

Well I wanted to go with a big 20 or 24" screen but they just seemed to cost too much if I was gonna spend around $450 I wanted to get a 24" -- but they were more like $800 on sale.

So I called a friend that had me looking for some good deals on LCD's for her, she thought that the price sounded good so we went ahead and ordered her one of the 19" E193FP monitors. Ordered that on Friday, and it got here Tuesday. I hooked it up to my work computer and it was soo pretty -- awesome picture, nearly as big as the 20" Nokia and the 20" HP monitors I had sitting there on my desk at work. After much debate I decided that I needed to get me one at this good price. Only difference is that I wanted to get the one with a DVI hook up.

Ordered that late Tuesday and amazing it got delivered today!!!
So here I am typing this out on the new screen.
As Karin put it "that is the most beautiful screen I have ever seen."

Bought a VEX robotics kit from the ratshack this weekend. The dang manual is about 1" thick... sheesh

I have pretty much read through the thing. Karin is excited to get to make some robots. She has been a little intrested for a while, but the other weekend I was keeping up with the DARPA Grand Challenge and she decided that robots were really neat. I had been wanting to get a LEGO RIS kit for a long time, but it just didnt have the expandability that I really desired in a robot kit -- you are kind of locked into the LEGO blocks and materials when you go with the LEGO brand kit.

So after much debate, I got the VEX kit.

Well after looking at the pieces for several days I wondered what in the devil is in that microcontroller box, its really light for being the brains -- turned out it was a PCB with a couple chips, a couple LEDs, and a couple connectors.

2 Microchip 18F8250 parts were on the PCB.
stats are 40 Mhz, 10 MIPS, 2KB ram, 32KB data -- one labeled "Master" and the other labeled "user"

The data sheets say it has 68 I/O pins, but they only have hookups for 8 motors, 16 I/O ports, 8 interups and a few TX/RX ports. I guess the probably use all the pins for that stuff -- dunno.

The VEX kit should be much more expandable than the LEGO kit. Since it comes with metal pieces that remind me of erector sets.

Hoping to start the first of many bots soon. The VEX kit also uses some pretty standard connectors for the sensors and motors, so creating your own should be pretty easy too.

Recieved the Supercards from China today ... These cards are essentially Compact flash to Gameboy advance converters so that you can put gameboy advance roms onto the CF card and play it on your gameboy advance (or in my case my Nintendo DS)

We shall see how they work... Hopefully very well.