The Half Shop

Didn't have a camera handy, but this is a shop I'll have to return to with a camera! After hearing about my trip to buy electronics components in KL, Dad introduced me to his favourite components supply shop in PJ, virtually in our backyard. This shop seems to have everything! Fantastic. Now I don't have to trek all the way to Pasar Road which involves getting past Jalan Pudu on a Saturday.



The shop is divided into 2, length-wise. On the right is the electronics shop. On the left is a locksmith who occupies a small part of the front bit of the left hand side of the shop. The rest of the shop - as best as we can tell - looks like a rubbish tip. Like many Chinese owned Malaysian shops, it has a rather curious sounding name that probably makes a lot more sense in Chinese - PJ Rising Electronics Traders. But bless 'em, the service and prices are good and they literally seem to have everything in stock! Even better, they open till late, so it means I can even drop by on my way back from work.

Virtual Fun

A few weeks ago, we participated in the MDC Creative Week in Cyberjaya organised by the Multimedia Development Corporation's Flagship Centre there. At some point in the afternoon, we were treated to a number of VR demos in the Flagship Centre's Silicon Graphics Virtual Reality Cave, affectionately known among the staff at the Centre as "The Egg".



At the end of the presentation, the staff loaded a flight simulation for the benefit of the 2 kids who were present and invited them to sit in the special flight seat and fly the simulation.



Every kid's dream!

Pasar Road

I finally made it down to Pasar Road. For some time now, I'd been trying to choose a microcontroller to use in some electronics and home automation projects I've had in mind. There is a bewildering array of possibilities and I'd been overworking the mouse and loading Google with search after search for material. Somehow, I'd been unable to actually go to Pasar Road, which everyone had been telling me is the place to buy electronics components in KL.

Finally today, I got off my butt and headed down there with an ex-colleague for a bit of guidance and a shopping list of components. Ultimately after all that fuss of trying to choose the most suitable and economical microcontroller... it all came down to availability. I took what they had in stock! So I bought 4 Microchip PICmicro® 16F84A/4 chips for RM20 each - I had estimated per unit price to be RM35, so that was a pleasant surprise. Pictured below are most of the items I bought, with the bag of 4 PICmicro® MCUs indicated by the red arrow.



Everything else was pretty cheap in comparison to the chips and they turned out to be the single most expensive items in the day's purchases. The idea behind buying 4 PICmicro® MCUs was so that I could avoid having to go back to Pasar Road again for as long as possible as the other items can be sourced closer to home.

The 16F84A/4 runs at 4MHz with a throughput of 1 million instructions per second, has 13 digital I/O pins, 2 serial I/O pins, 1x 8-bit timer, 68 bytes of RAM, 64 bytes of EEPROM and 1792 bytes of Flash RAM for program storage. Most of the items were bought from Standwell Trading Co., who gave me friendly and efficient service. Strangely it was this smaller shop that had the MCUs, while some of the bigger shops didn't stock any microcontrollers at all.

Intel Unwired Gaming 2

Today's the last day of the MDC Creative Week, and being a Saturday, has also been the busiest.



MDC organized loads more activities for today, including a couple of bouncey castles (that didn't quite fit inside the building lobby...



... clowns ...



... a caricature drawing service ...



... and food (sorry, no photo!).

This is the worst part of supporting events like this - you have to hang around the whole day until it's all over, then after the winners have been announced, it's time to start tearing the whole thing down and pack up. It's going to be a late night... To cap this blog off, let me leave you with one last shot of that bouncey castle:

Broadband!

There be broadband at House of Tay at last! I signed up on Friday 27 Aug, they installed it Sept 1st. Didn't even have a broadband router at the time, so it was time to go buy one. Luckily, I was able to try out the Buffalo AirStation 54g and the Linksys Wireless-B Broadband Router from work on my connection (left and middle respectively, in the photo below).



First I tried the Linksys. Despite the testaments of various vendors and friends that their Linksys router worked fine, I had problems with this one. At least once every hour or so I would have to go and reset it by unplugging the power. When I swapped it with the Buffalo, I had no problems whatsoever. Only problem is, you can't buy a Buffalo AirStation 54g in Malaysia as 802.11g wireless radio LAN devices are not yet legal here for some strange reason.

What to do? I decided that since my employer's IT department recommends D-Link network devices, I fully set out to buy a D-Link wireless broadband router this morning... and as usual, came back from the shop with something entirely different. I bought the Netgear Wireless Broadband Router instead (on the right in the photo above). It is priced the same as the Linksys, but additionally comes with a 3 year warranty.



Not only that, but it's also so much smaller than the other routers and stylish too! All 3 devices sport web-based administration/configuration and an integrated 4-port Ethernet hub.

Intel Unwired Gaming

We finished the setup of 9 IBM ThinkPad T40 notebook computers powered by Intel Centrino Mobile Technology for the Unwired gaming experience part of the MDC Creative Week in Cyberjaya this week, plus 5 Intel Pentium 4 PCs with high-powered graphics cards.





Contestants will compete by playing Doom 3 on the desktop PCs and Counter-Strike 3 on the notebook computers.





In the focal point of the semi circle of notebooks and PCs, was the wireless access point. We had originally tried to use the Linksys access point/router, but for some reason, it was giving us connection problems, so we were forced to switch to using the Buffalo AirStation 54g, which performed flawlessly throughout.