I am really a fan of Gnome Desktop , have been using it for years now . Last year the Gnome-Shell was introduced and i love it very much , i think that the developers of the project did a great job . I have tried to use Unity as part of Ubuntu distribution but it doesn’t feel as natural to me as Gnome-Shell does it . I know that there are many opinions on this subject , but it’s not what i want to talk about . I want to talk about Shell Extensions .

Since introduction of Gnome-Shell there are hundreds of extensions have been available at the new extensions page . There are many great extensions coming up lately . But , sadly there is no nice GUI tool for extension management , lets say i want to disable or enable an extension : the first way is to install gnome-tweak-tool and use it every time you want to change extension state , or you could open up a terminal and manage extensions with “dconf-editor” . That’s just doesn’t seems right to me .

So i thought to write some simple Python GTK script to deal with my problem , but instead i found myself writing an extension that does that for me in simple way . When i began to read about Gnome-Shell Extension System i found that extensions are written in JavaScript with Gnome Bindings ( Gjs ) . That was very tempting , because i never really got a chance to write JS .First i wanted to make an extension App written in Gjs so i wrote an extension manager class but then i decided to make simple extension to make it easier to use . From here it was a matter of days and a lot of Source reading from Gnome-Shell Git repository . Sadly for the moment there are no proper documentation available regrading Extension Development . If you want to start developing new extension i suggest to check this blog first , the guy has a lot of really usefull information to use as a starting point .

There is a screen-shot of the first version :

As you can see it is really simple and easy to use . I have uploaded it to gnome extensions site , so if anyone is interested here it is . After uploading it , i got some user feedback emails and i think i should add some features to it, because now it looks really basic and does only what it intended to do for me ( only user extensions are visible , and i should add a scroll for maniacs with 30 extensions ) . I hope that i can make some free time to continue the work on it , but the source is there .. so anyone is welcome to contribute , thats the beauty of linux.

I really hope that the Gnome team will work on some Documentation soon , it will make work much easier for people to make contributions in future .

After downloading a Linux version of the installer i ran into a problem . When trying to run the installer it gave me back this error message : “error while loading shared libraries: libpng14.so.14: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory”.

After a quick search i realized that Ubuntu only has libpng12 in their repo’s . Well i thought that it’s not a big deal since i can build the latest version from source , after downloading and building from ftp://ftp.simplesystems.org/pub/libpng/png/src/libpng-1.4.8.tar.bz2 i ran into another problem , because my Ubuntu 11.10 system is 64-bit the installer where complaining about wrong ELF type . That made me a little nervous , but after another quick search i found slackware libpng 32-bit binaries . You can download if from here : http://slackware.osuosl.org/slackware-current/slackware/l/libpng-1.4.8-i486-1.txz . Then after downloading and unpacking the archives go to  “/libpng-1.4.8-i486-1/usr/lib” and link “libpng14.so.14.8.0″ to “/usr/lib/libpng14.so.14″ .

That made the trick for me and Eagle installation went ok from here .

Usually i make a lot of small projects like this led blinking and play with some sensors but i have never documented the process only YouTube uploads of some to share with close friends , but from today i will start doing it and i will post each project on my blog .

I realized that with all of my projects i find myself googling a lot for piece of information and almost all the time i find the info i need on Forums or Blog’s of other people that decide to share . Now i think it is a time to stop only using the machine and start contributing to the whole thing .

I sincerely hope that this information will come handy to anybody or just be interesting material to read , thats my first attempt to write a blog about something , so wish me luck on this

In the first post i want to show you how i got Breadboard Arduino assembled . i was thinking about it for a long time , because i want to make a finished project and put it in my collection but buying an Arduino board for each one is not an option for me . Also before switching to Linux only i dropped the PIC programming deal and started a new clean page with Atmel chips . What i liked about Pic is that i could stick this one chip to breadboard and start messing with a lot of wires , its just seems more right to me , i don’t know why .

Anyway as i decided to stick Atmega 328P to my breadboard i realized that i didn’t have any programmer on hand and lucky me , i bought a Bus Pirate from SparkFun about year ago .Great tool that another time proved to me how great it is .

The Bus Pirate 5.10 is fully supported by AVRDude from version 5.8 and could be used to load Arduino bootloader to my chip .

After some breadboarding as described on Arduino site i got it assembled and it was time for Bus Pirate connecting .

As i found earlier there are two types of ribbon cable used by SparkFun and Seeed Studio . Mine was purchased from SparkFun so the cable colors are backwards from the Seed Studio arrangement . Adafruit probe set has identical colors to Seeed .

Here are the color codes for both of them :SparkFun Cable , Seeed Cable .

I dont have any ISP headers on hand so i just connected it with jumper wires directly into the Bus Pirate’s cable . The connections for Arduino ISP are as following :

After all connections are set its time to program a bootloader using AVRDude . New Arduinos come with Optiboot bootloader that you can get here , i have downloaded optiboot_atmega328.hex but you can choose the right one for you .

It’s time to check if the connections are right and i have not messed anything . To do this i am running a command from a terminal : “avrdude -c buspirate -p m328p -v -P /dev/ttyUSB0″ .

If everything went ok we should see output something like this :

avrdude: Version 5.10, compiled on Jun 29 2010 at 21:09:48
Copyright (c) 2000-2005 Brian Dean, http://www.bdmicro.com/
Copyright (c) 2007-2009 Joerg Wunsch

System wide configuration file is “/etc/avrdude.conf”
User configuration file is “/home/rapt0r/.avrduderc”
User configuration file does not exist or is not a regular file, skipping

Using Port                    : /dev/ttyUSB0
Using Programmer              : buspirate
AVR Part                      : ATMEGA328P
Chip Erase delay              : 9000 us
PAGEL                         : PD7
BS2                           : PC2
RESET disposition             : dedicated
RETRY pulse                   : SCK
serial program mode           : yes
parallel program mode         : yes
Timeout                       : 200
StabDelay                     : 100
CmdexeDelay                   : 25
SyncLoops                     : 32
ByteDelay                     : 0
PollIndex                     : 3
PollValue                     : 0×53
Memory Detail                 :

Block Poll               Page                       Polled
Memory Type Mode Delay Size  Indx Paged  Size   Size #Pages MinW  MaxW   ReadBack
———– —- —– —– —- —— —— —- —— —– —– ———
eeprom        65     5     4    0 no       1024    4      0  3600  3600 0xff 0xff
flash         65     6   128    0 yes     32768  128    256  4500  4500 0xff 0xff
lfuse          0     0     0    0 no          1    0      0  4500  4500 0×00 0×00
hfuse          0     0     0    0 no          1    0      0  4500  4500 0×00 0×00
efuse          0     0     0    0 no          1    0      0  4500  4500 0×00 0×00
lock           0     0     0    0 no          1    0      0  4500  4500 0×00 0×00
calibration    0     0     0    0 no          1    0      0     0     0 0×00 0×00
signature      0     0     0    0 no          3    0      0     0     0 0×00 0×00

Programmer Type : BusPirate
Description     : The Bus Pirate

BusPirate: using BINARY mode
BusPirate binmode version: 1
BusPirate SPI version: 1
avrdude: AVR device initialized and ready to accept instructions

Reading | ################################################## | 100% 0.06s

avrdude: Device signature = 0x1e950f
avrdude: safemode: lfuse reads as FF
avrdude: safemode: hfuse reads as D2
avrdude: safemode: efuse reads as 5

avrdude: safemode: lfuse reads as FF
avrdude: safemode: hfuse reads as D2
avrdude: safemode: efuse reads as 5
avrdude: safemode: Fuses OK
BusPirate is back in the text mode

avrdude done.  Thank you.

if returned an error check your connections and try again . if everything was ok then you should unblock bootloader section on the chip by entering this command :

“avrdude -c buspirate -p m328p -P /dev/ttyUSB0 -U lock:w:0x3f:m"

After the chip is unlocked you should set the fuses and burn the bootloader :

"avrdude -c buspirate -p m328p -P /dev/ttyUSB0 -U efuse:w:0x05:m -U hfuse:w:0xD2:m -U lfuse:w:0xFF:m -U flash:w:optiboot_atmega328.hex"

Now you must lock the bootloader section again :

“avrdude -c buspirate -p m328p -P /dev/ttyUSB0 -U lock:w:0x0F:m"

Thats it , now you can burn arduino sketches to the chip . Also worth mentioning that for Fuse bits you can use this Fuse Calculator if you plan to make changes in this design or just burning a blank atmega chip for the first time .

Also i would like to mention that after doing this i found another way of burning the bootloader but this time from Arduino environment itself . You can choose the way that looks right to you . As i said earlier i just like to mess with stuff

To do this you must make some changes to Arduino IDE configuration files . First go to your arduino folder , usually it can be found at “/usr/share/arduino” if not there just type “whereis arduino” in terminal window . From there you should go to “ARDUINO_FOLDER/hardware/arduino” and you will find 2 files there that we will need to make changes to : boards.txt and programmers.txt . First lets edit the boards file , open the file with your favorite text editor , i just use Gedit for this kind of stuff . Also make sure that you have a permission to write to this file .

After the file is open just add the following lines :

#############
 
jkdBP32816.name=Bus Pirate Atmega328 16MHz

jkdBP32816.upload.using=buspirate
jkdBP32816.upload.maximum_size=30720

jkdBP32816.bootloader.low_fuses=0xFF
jkdBP32816.bootloader.high_fuses=0xDA
jkdBP32816.bootloader.extended_fuses=0×05
jkdBP32816.bootloader.path=atmega
jkdBP32816.bootloader.file=ATmegaBOOT_168_atmega328.hex
jkdBP32816.bootloader.unlock_bits=0x3F
jkdBP32816.bootloader.lock_bits=0x0F

jkdBP32816.build.mcu=atmega328p
jkdBP32816.build.f_cpu=16000000L
jkdBP32816.build.core=arduino
#############

############
jkdBP32808.name=Bus Pirate Atmega328 8MHz

jkdBP32816.upload.using=buspirate
jkdBP32808.upload.maximum_size=30720

jkdBP32808.bootloader.low_fuses=0xFF
jkdBP32808.bootloader.high_fuses=0xDA
jkdBP32808.bootloader.extended_fuses=0×05
jkdBP32808.bootloader.path=atmega
jkdBP32808.bootloader.file=ATmegaBOOT_168_atmega328_pro_8MHz.hex
jkdBP32808.bootloader.unlock_bits=0x3F
jkdBP32808.bootloader.lock_bits=0x0F

jkdBP32808.build.mcu=atmega328p
jkdBP32808.build.f_cpu=8000000L
jkdBP32808.build.core=arduino
#############

This should add the ability to select Bus Pirate board from boards list in Arduino IDE . You can use Bus Pirate to program your Arduino chip or connect a FT232 USB to Serial if you have it on hand , i prefer to use it over a Bus Pirate for everyday programming , but if you don’t have any of these on hand you can program it with bus pirate only , i find the speed to be little slower but it should do the job fine .

next you should edit the programmers.txt file and add the following lines :

########################

buspirate.name=Bus Pirate Real
buspirate.communication=serial
buspirate.protocol=buspirate

#########################

Thats it save the file and go to your Arduino IDE to check if everything works as it sould , Select Bus Pirate Atmega 328 from The Tools > Boards menu , set the Serial port and Burn a bootloader with Bus Pirate option .

Here some Photos from the actual setup : Image1 , Image2 .

It is too late now so i am going to think what to do next with the board tomorow . stay tuned .