FunkyNERD

…software and stuff

ECU and Wideband O2 ready to rock and roll…

For the last few months I’ve been planning and working towards turbo-charging my daily driver, a 1996 Toyota RAV4.  Great car, but a bit slow and gutless, hence the upgrade.

Step one is to get a tunable ECU in and running.  I have gone for a DIYAutotune Microsquirt DIYPNP module, which is actually a great little unit.  Now that I’m getting close to having the ECU in and running, I need to be able to tune it, which requires monitoring the Air/Fuel ratios using a wideband O2 sensor.  My car, as standard, only has a narrowband which just isn’t good enough.  So here’s how to fit an Innovative LC-1 wideband O2 sensor to a 1996 Toyota RAV4.

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Pulling PhoneMinder….

I’ve decided to pull PhoneMinder from the Android market.  Turns out I’m the only one using it so there was no point.  If you were using it and will actually miss it (despite there being better other free options out there) then feel free to state your case here.

XML-RPC client class in PHP

I currently have a project that requires communicating with a 3rd party application server via XML-RPC.  Having never worked with XML-RPC before  I went looking for a PHP wrapper class that could help.  Unfortunately I couldn’t find one so I had to write one from scratch.  I have decided to publish it here for anyone else that needs to use XML-RPC in PHP and wants a tidy wrapper class to make life easier.

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Getting Redmine, Git and Gitosis working together

I love git.  It rocks and is my “go to” for source code management.  I also love Redmine and it’s now my “go to” for project management.  They work nicely together when you don’t mind logging into your git hosting server to set up a new public repository.  Why should it?  When I can use the Redmine Gitosis plugin to do it all from the Redmine interface.  The plugin leaves a lot to be desired as far as setting it up goes, so I’m writing this article to get the changes that I needed to make out into the world.

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Threading in PHP

A while back I had a project where I needed to write a server daemon that downloaded account transactions from a bank based on a configured schedule.  This on it’s own wasn’t a very difficult task.  The thing that made this tricky was that I wanted to be able to manage it from a PHP client interface and I had some common code that was already written in PHP that I really didn’t feel like writing again.  As you probably already know, that in order to service requests from a user interface as well monitor a execution schedule, you a pretty much screwed without being to do some threading.  This is because running things in a single thread would allow you to run the schedule OR service an interface request, but not both at the same time.

Therefore I decided to take it upon myself to write a PHP thread class that makes use of the PHP process control functions.

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