Saturday, May 23, 2009

Hardware hack + trip to city

It was the evening when Uncle suddenly asked whether we should go to the city and get some electronic components for a project (;)). It had just stoped raining .. The weather was perfect. We called up the taxi guy and off we went in search of hardware. The trip took us to a well known hardware place / galli in Kanpur where one can mostly find the Chinese fakes of Ipods, Cellphones , etc. We searched for an hour to get a decent sized LCD to interface with the beagle board , which was a fail.

Later we got a micro SD card and went in search of any exotic ( read as strange ) hardware we can get our hands on. We bought a couple of tiny switches ( ~ 1cm x 5mm) and my eyes fell on some sim unlocker mods , the vendor was more than happy to explain to me how the sim unlocker mod worked , turns out that the thing does a good old Man In The Middle ( MITM ). I asked the guy about the information path through which the guys in a small city like Kanpur get hold of cool ( The kid in me calls it cool :P ) hardware mods and hacks , his reply "I go to China once every 3 months", L0L. We quickly jotted down the guys mobile number in case we needed a few more components in the coming months.

This was followed by a good dinner and then 8 hours ( Which brought about the next day and one sleepless night ) of failed attempts in getting the Atmega32 to recognize the new micro SD card. After having gone through all the registers and command set info manually , I gave up at ~6 AM and opened the Wikipedia page to for look at any interesting info on the things.

Turns out that the SD spec says that SPI mode for SD cards is must whereas the microSD spec says that it is optional and the damn Taiwan folks who made the card I bought yesterday decided to not have it.. Bleh!

Breakfast is at 8 AM - with a burn out brain and 90 minutes to burn - I write this post

1 comment:

biplab said...

shit happens!...btw, I am happy that i decided not to wait for your eureka moment with the SD card.