Introduction to data encryption

With the recent personal data leaks regarding celebrities, I noticed that I’ve some data on my cloud storage which should have an extra layer of protection. And NO, I don’t have any private pictures, but a document or two with some very sensitive data. You never know when you might be a victim of phishing or from a weak password. In any case, I decided to investigate some encryption algorithms. More precisely, XOR cipher, Feistel cipher and blowfish. In this article I’ll try to give some guidelines regarding these ciphers and example implementation in C++ with Qt. This article should be structured and written in a way, if you don’t know anything about cryptography, at the end you should understand most of the basic underlying theories. Also each algorithm will be introduced in a sequence where the next algorithm described will reference to previous one. Note that the intention of this article is to explain how to use them, rather than analyze their security etc.

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MEMS (Part 2) – Guide to using gyroscope L3G4200D

For most of the people probably the next step in the world of MEMS is to interface gyroscope. Most likely use gyroscope data to fuse with accelerometer data. If you have implanted acc before, you’ll know that acc is very responsive and noisy when it comes to measuring pitch and roll. It is possible to smooth out the data via sensor fusion. In this tutorial I will explain what data we will be getting from gyroscope, how to use the data to calculate pitch, roll and yaw and finally how to fuse sensor data with complimentary filter.

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MEMS (Part 1) - Guide to using accelerometer ADXL345

Recently I’ve been playing with cheap GY-80 module, more precisely 10DOF module with accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer and barometer.  Eventually I’ll write how to use all four of them. I’ll start with accelerometer (accel). This guide could potentially be used for interfacing most of the MEMS accels, and definitely as a guide how to interpret data coming from the accel, not only from MEMS but also how to use the data coming from Smartphone, wiimote etc. They are basically the same thing. However, I won’t be describing features as tap sensing and double tap sensing, this will be only an introduction about the raw accelerometer.

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Programming micro-controller (Arduino) with cheap HC-06 Bluetooth

I and my friend Zenios Agapiou thought of constructing a simple two wheel balancer robot. At the beginning we thought we will just program our Atmega88pa micro-controller through standard JTAG. However, we quickly realized we have Bluetooth connected to the RX/TX device, so we thought whether we can upload Arduino bootloader to the atmega and program it wirelessly.  However it wasn’t that simple as we initially anticipated.

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QHotkey

QHotkey is simple application for changing the MS Windows volume with your prefered keys. Also it will show nice popup with the current level of volume.

Basically, I had problems with my laptops hotkey application, it has a very long response time which renders the volume keys and all the other function keys unusable. So I decided to make QHotkey, so at least I can change volume as quick as possible. There were already some solutions available, but I found them either not looking as good as I want to or lacking key customization.

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