Connor

a space for my professional and personal development.

4Sep

Arris NVG595 Break-in

Arris NVG595 Break-in

This all began with my curiosity surrounding AT&T’s requirements as a subscriber to their networks. Unlike many cable carriers, AT&T demands you use their piece-of-sh*t equipment just to hop onto their sub-par networks. For this particular model, NVG595, the most common limiting factor that degrades user experience is the whopping 8,000 state table limit which triggers the most infamous hideous-don’t-need-know-you’re-a-piece-of-sh*t-device page that forces everyone to open the said page explaining that Arris had a potty accident and had to reset itself.

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29Oct

Rugline RT62H 6″ Windows 10 PDA Barcode Scanner w/Bluetooth Pistol Grip

Rugline RT62H 6″ Windows 10 PDA Barcode Scanner w/Bluetooth Pistol Grip

These devices are really worth ~$600 when they work properly compared to other similar products on the market that sell for 2-3 times the price. With this being said you’d hope they come working out-of-the-box perfectly fine. However this wasn’t the case. Below are all the issues I ran into mine upon arrival and fixes. All the files and installers were obtained by my vendor who I purchased from on aliexpress.com. I take no credit for them, just helping out others in similar situations.
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12Jul

Rewriting an MT7628AN Bootloader

Rewriting an MT7628AN Bootloader

This article will provide an easy DIY guide on rewriting the bootloader on many cheap eBay wireless routers sold under the names of “WAVLINK” or for those who buy wholesale quantities they’re sold by “WINSTARS”. Continue reading →

18Jun

Issue with QT_QPA_PLATFORM on Ubuntu 17.04 Zesty

Recently I upgraded from Ubuntu 16.04 to 16.10 and then to 17.04. Along the way to Zesty, neither Qt Creator or Virtualbox would start as a normal user but would upon executing it as root.

"Unable to select module, using null backend.
Segmentation fault (core dumped)"

"This application failed to start because it could not find or load the Qt platform plugin "ubuntumirclient"
in "".
Available platform plugins are: minimal, xcb.
Reinstalling the application may fix this problem.
Aborted (core dumped)"

After digging around I noticed that in my env QT_QPA_PLATFORM was set to ubuntumirclient which was already hinting an obvious fix. Change the value of QT_QPA_PLATFORM to xcb so:

$ export QT_QPA_PLATFORM=xcb
6Jun

MS43 CAN BUS Decoder

MS43 CAN BUS Decoder

As part of an effort in converting an analog cluster to a digital dashboard I’ve been slowly taking steps to approach the project to successful completion. I wanted to make sure I was a bit familiarized with Qt’s several APIs and I wanted to see the performance of Qt displaying real time information. I’ve put together a simple program which opens a serial connection to an arduino with a pre-loaded arduino sketch and reads the data, computes them to readable human units (RPM, MPH, etc) and displays them. Since this program was developed around by reverse engineering CAN BUS data packets from multiple BMW models, I found that during my initial test the speed (MPH) to be off by a certain degree, at one point I was speculating that the formula used to compute speed was being reported in KPH. More testing has yet to be done. The github page for this program can be found here. Improvements, questions, and concerns are always welcomed.