Using Arduino in Eagle schematics with Ubuntu Linux

In electronics projects it is a common task to draw schematic of a circuit that you have designed. For simple circuits, it may be tempting to draw them on paper with a pencil. However, CAD programs are definetely worth learning! One of the best tools is Eagle, which runs on Windows, Mac and Linux. There is even a freeware Light version available for hobby projects. This article briefly explains how you can use Eagle on Ubuntu Linux for drawing schematics especially for your own Arduino projects.

Installing Eagle on Ubuntu Linux

Obviously the first step is to install Eagle on your Ubuntu Linux computer.

The easiest way to install Eagle in Ubuntu is via Applications->Add/Remove…, where you can simply type “Eagle” in the search box to find Eagle from Ubuntu software repository. In Ubuntu 8.04, Eagle is located in the multiverse repository, which must be enabled before installation.

Unfortunately, the version in Ubuntu repository is rather old: 4.16r2-1. You probably want to install the latest version, which can be downloaded with a web browser directly from Cadsoft: http://www.cadsoft.de/download.htm. You should choose the Linux version, right click the download link, and select “Save Link As…”. After downloading is finished, you can install the package (the file you downloaded, e.g. “eagle-lin-5.6.0.run”) by opening a console and running the installation script as follows:

sh eagle-lin-5.6.0.run

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My first mini laptop, Asus EeePC 1000HE

I commute on a daily basis by bus. The travelling time is roughly 45 minutes in the morning and 50 minutes in the evening. I don’t need to change bus, its a direct route from my home door to the office door (lucky me!). So there’s long enough sitting in one spot to actually do something useful.

So far, I have been reading books or playing with my Nokia N95 – ie. listening music, reading daily news, playing games etc. However, after 2 years all this feels quite passive – instead of reading/listening/playing/otherwise consuming some form of entertainment made by others, I would like to be able to create something myself and really make use of that time. A family man never has that much time for himself, so every bit counts.

I’ve been carrying my bulky work laptop occasionally with me, but I don’t really want to use that for my personal stuff. Besides, that old windows installation boots in 5+ minutes… so I bought my first mini laptop. The idea is that I can easily slip it inside my backbag, boot fast, and then do much more than I can with a mobile phone.

I ended up to choose Asus Eee PC 1000HE (black). It’s a typical mini laptop with Intel Atom processor, 1 GB of memory and 160 GB hard drive. However, this one’s got a battery with some extra juice: advertisments claim 9.5 hour usage time! In practise it is likely closer to 7 or 8 hours, but hey -  that triples the usage time I get with my HP workhorse.

I have just finished installing some basic stuff and configured Windows XP to my taste (well, up to the limit where you can tailor any Microsoft product). Of course, I will install Ubuntu on this machine and use primarily that. However, I made an exception and decided to let Windows stay for now too, as occasionally one cannot avoid using it (for example, to update new firmware to my Nokia phone).

So far my experience of this little machine have been very nice. It turned out to be a bit heavier than I thought, but that doesn’t really matter in the bus. Keyboard is nice (to write with), and although I was a bit skeptical about the display size, 10″ and 1024×600 resolution seems to be good enough for basic computing things – like writing this blog.

So perhaps there will be more updates to the blog in the future… I’ve already got a lot of material from my hacking projects that I’m planning to put here, it just needs to be edited and published. Stay tuned.

Spotify revolutionizes music listening

This is not a tutorial, but I just have to write about this…

I’m a music lover. I’ve been listening, playing and composing music since elementary school. For many years I’ve been sad about the situation of the music industry as a whole. Big companies seem to be ripping off both the artists and the consumers with their pricing, and at the same time they have refused to develop new business models, stubbornly sticking to CD sales and hoping for the Internet and MP3s to just go away. Moreover, sending an army of lawyers after their best customers and greatest music consumers is not only bad business, but plain stupid. Attempts to limit civil rights in a global scale and to collect money with tax like unjustified payments from everybody have made people angry, despite of their love to music and great artists. As a result, many of us have stopped buying music at all to boycott these methods. I’m one of them. I don’t want to support what they are doing to people and to our culture. Not with my money.

And you know what? It seems to be working. At least I like to belive that. We have lost many years in this fight without actually getting anywhere, but now I’ve been sensing that there is indeed a little bit of light in the end of the tunnel. Big content is beginning to realize that they need to switch from denial to adaptation, or face consequences of falling business models as CD sales continue to decline year after year. They have started to give up of ridiculous demands for draconian DRM solutions, and instead licensing their content to various start-ups who are creating new kinds of online stores. iTunes first proved that selling music online is viable, and montly payments for streaming music has been clearly accepted by the big record labels as a new business model.

So things are changing indeed. It is now possible to buy music online from many fiercly competing stores, like iTunes and Amazon – although these are still available in only a limited number of countries, which many seem to forget. However, so far the user experience of these shops, DRM, bad audio quality, and closed file formats have effectively prevented many from fully embracing legal online music and actually becoming a paying customer. This includes myself. And what is even more important, it has been easier to download good quality files from, say, The Pirate Bay – for free. For now, it should be obvious to everybody that free music is here to stay, either legally or illegally, like it or not.

So how do you compete with free? You create something that is better than the free alternative. And what that could possibly be? You have to add some real value to it. You have to do something on behalf of the users, serve them better. Something even a huge number of enthusiastic volunteers sharing all their files cannot or won’t do. You bring organization into a chaos. You make all the content available from one shop. And if you make it right, you’ve got a killer.

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