In this small tutorial or better called experiment we take a look at touch sensors.
Touch sensors are used for faucets, industrial switches and so on. You can imagine a nice solution..

So to get started we look at the components
- QT113-D Touch Sensor (parallax)
- 5 V voltage regulator (if you use a 9V battery
- 1 led for testing
- off course some wires and a test-board
- 2 resistors.
- cap 103 or 104

* additional look at the parallax scheme in the data-sheet on the page:
http://www.parallax.com/

Or just connect the parts like the picture to make a switching touch sensor:

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I recently released PHP4 RPM’s for CentOS 5, claiming they worked fine alongside the stock PHP5 that comes with CentOS 5.

Okey, that wasn’t entirely true. I had forgotten about php-pear! If you install php (stock version) alongsides my RPM’s you would get some errors, this has been resolved

After a few days of playing around with my RPM’s, I’ve finally managed to have a php4-pear RPM to work fine alongside php delivered by CentOS. Below an example of my results:

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I’ve upgraded my previously mentioned version of wp-update. A simple bash script that only updates the files that were changed in the latest wordpress release.

The following bash script works with Wordpress 2.3.1 and 2.3.2 and upgrades it to the latest 2.3.3 version.

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In my earlier post regarding KDE 4.0 on Fedora Core, I said that I achieved running KDE4 by running an early release of Fedora Core 9 (rawhide). For the people interested, there is an official pre-release of Fedora Core 9 available!

I would definitely recommend people to grab it and give it a glimpse! Don’t forget to fill a bug report if you find anything!

Today i was wondering if it’s possible to developing a low cost GPS tracking device. After playing around with the basic stamp, I found a GPS module that outputs the standard world coordinates in NMEA0183. For more details read the wikipedia page.

The GPS module can send coordinates of your current position by means for an SMS module to another mobile phone which can be attached to the PC. The easiest way then is to store the data in an XML type of file.
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As some of you visiting this blog have noticed, currently the RPM’s I made for PHP aren’t available in any yum repository, making you have to check our blog every time for updates. Although I’m quite happy to have you visiting our blog more often, things really should be easier

I’ll take you through the steps I took to setup the yum repository for labcoding.com; with my next PHP update I’ll repost the instructions on enabling this repository (as described below).

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