Amir Shah’s Blog

Add DIY LED Footwell Lighting to Your Car for About $20

April 1, 2012 – 4:50 pm

These days everyone is offering a thousand different options and accessories with new cars. One of the cool ones offered by Mazda when I bought my car was the LED footwell lighting. I though it was pretty cool and when I was given a Nissan Cube as a rental, it was literally the only thing I liked about the car. Problem was Mazda was charging $200 to install it for me. Screw that, I can buy a few LEDs and do it myself. And since I wasn’t able to find a good write up on how to install the footwell lighting so I decided to do my own.

All my parts are from Radio Shack except the Add-a-Fuse which was from Autozone. Total cost was less than $20.

Parts:

– LEDs: Buy however many you want. I bought four high intensity blue LEDs. Just note what kind of voltage they take

• Add-a-Fuse: Bought this from Autozone a long time ago. Wasn’t able to find it again but Amazon has some.

• 10A Fuse

• Wires

• Solder & Soldering iron

• Electrical tape

• Basic understanding of DC circuits (Really just know that V = IR)

• Wire connectors: I used about 8 of these http://www.amazon.com/Solderless-Wire-Quick-Splice-Connector/dp/B0041PF5QY

• Old car charger that you’re done with

• Resistor: Resistance will depend on the type of old charger you have. I used a 100ohm resistor

Step 1 – Figure out what the voltage of your car charger is.
This can be done two ways. It might be written on the charger and your life is easy. If its not, cut the end of the cable and you should see that inside there are two cables, one red and one black. Strip these so you have some leads to play with.

Plug the charger into your cigarette lighter and use your voltmeter to read the voltage. Mine spit out 5V.

Step 2: Add resistance
Using my vast knowledge of electrionics, I figured I needed to drop two volts in order to not over power the LEDs. My LEDs were rated for 3.2-4V at 20mA. To be safe, I figured I’d run them at 3V, so doing the math

(5V – 3V) = I * R
2V = 20mA * R
R = 100 ohms

So I dug through my resistors and found one that was rated for 100 ohms.

Take this resistor and solder it to the red wire from the charger. I also soldered some really long cables to run to the stripped ends of the charger after adding the resistor (Sorry, no pics of this part)

At this point, my setup looked like this

CHARGER ———Black———>Soldered to new cable to extend range——————————————-> exposed lead

|——-Red———->100ohm Resistor——> Soldered to extend range—————————-> exposed Lead

Step 3: Prep the LEDs
Pretty simple, give the LEDs some wire for you to work with. Remember the anode is +. This is the long end. The short end is Negative.

I bought two types of LEDs because I wasn’t sure what was better. Turns out they’re almost the same.

What I ended up doing was putting one LED on a really long pair of wires connected directly to the charger. I then spliced into these wires when installing the other three. I recommend this approach, its easier I think.

Once you have at least one LED connected up to your charger I recommend resting it in the cigarette lighter to make sure it works.

Step 4: Add-a-Fuse
Add-a-Fuse is a pretty cool thing. Plug it in in place of a fuse and you now have a 12V power source at the rated Fuse amperage. I chose the 10A heater because its almost summer so if that breaks I won’t orry too much for a while. Additionally, the charger is designed to be plugged into a cigarette lighter which runs at 10A also.

Sidenote:
I’ve had a radar detector plugged into the heater fuse for almost a year now with no issues. Went through winter without having heater trouble. These LEDs are only pulling 20mA each which should’nt be an issue for the system but if anyone has reason to suspect that it will, let me know.

The purpose of the charger is to take care of the excess current. Initially I had a 470 ohm resistor dropping the 12V to 3.5V but at 10A it got so hot it melted the solder. Do not recommend. You could get a power resistor but you need to drop something like 99W and I didn’t have anything like that around, so I just bummed off of Motorola.

Anyway, the Add-a-Fuse will give you a wire with a +12V charge on it. To use this, connect it to the metal tip of the charger and ground one of the springy rings on the side. Hopefully this picture will help.

There is a bolt in that little compartment that can be used to ground things.

Step 5: Run the wires
Like I said earlier, I wired one LED to a really long cable first then spliced into it three times for the rest of them. So I took this first LED and ran it down through the fuse box to the footwell area, then behind the center console onto the passenger side. Its tough getting it through the tiny opening to the passenger side but it can be done. Heres proof.

Step 6: Add the other three LEDs
Now that you have a +3V and ground wire running across the entire car, take your wire splicers and connect up the other three LEDs around where you think they belong.

It should end up looking something like this on the passenger side

And something like this on the drivers side

Step 7: Clean up
Now that everything is in the right general location, find a place to tape the LEDs down. Heres where I put them.

Passenger Side

Driver Side (Hard to see, but they’re in the top right and left corners)

Now that they are in place tape up the wires so they’re not in the way of anything. This is a little tricky. Make sure you fully depress the clutch and gas to make sure they won’t be hitting anything when you start moving. I had to rewire everything on the drivers side because I did not think of this at first.

And you’re done!

Questions or recommendations to improve are welcome. These will turn on when you turn the key enough to activate AC/Heat. They won’t turn on with the room lamps, thats for another day.

-Amir

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How the Government is Both Helping and abusing your Digital Privacy

February 29, 2012 – 1:47 am

With the advent of contextual advertising, pioneered by Google, demand for your information has grown exponentially. As the old saying goes, “Theres no such thing as a free lunch.” Google and many other online service providers provide an array of services from the indexing of billions of web pages for easy and quick search, to allowing people to freely upload view high definition video with just a few clicks. Obviously these things cost money, and to run it as efficiently as Google or any other successful service provider, it costs a lot of money. The vast majority of these companies pay for bandwidth, servers, employees and other costs through advertising. In an attempt to do their job more efficiently, advertisers have begun to run “contextualized” and “personalized” ads. The former is an advert designed specifically for the website or subject matter it is presented in and the latter being tailored to sell you the product that you need right now.

(source)

These ads require the advertiser to know who you are and they are willing to pay for it. However, advertisers are not the only people who might want to know who you are. Once your email, youtube videos, blogging data, calendar dates, and favorite TV shows are shipped over to someone else there’s no knowing where it might end up. This is why it is important to protect consumers from the exportation of their information.

1986 Electronics Communications Privacy Act
The first attempt by the government to protect consumers was through the Electronics Communications Privacy Act of 1986, and it is still the precedent when cases of online privacy come up. This law was written to prevent the government from overstepping its bounds and required certain warrants to access digital data. Today, many congressman and companies are fighting to amend this bill with rules more relevant to this day and age. The bill, for example, would require warrants for geolocation information and emails older than 180 days (in 1986, emails older than 180 days were unthinkable).
While (some of) the government and service providers generally support these amendments, the advertisers generally oppose these new regulations, preferring an expansion of the “self-regulatory” system. They cite the Electronic Retailing Self-Regulation Program of 2004. This is a program enacted by the Electronic Retailing Association and National Advertising Review Council. Naturally consumers are always weary of business policing themselves when there is much to gain by not self-regulating and, while the laws have not yet been passed, little to lose.
These regulations are still being debated on but we can write out congressmen to support out preferred course of action.

But what about when it’s the government spying on you?
Since the tragic events of September 11th the government has been slowly eroding our privacy in the name of security. Since 2001 the NSA has had the power to wiretap anyone without a warrant. The current law (which is slightly stricter than previous laws) states that warentless wiretapping is allowed so long as the target is “reasonably believed” to be outside of the country. There is no requirement though that says the NSA or other agencies cannot collect your information in you are a citizen living in these great United States. ACLU has developed a great infograph that can explain these things far better than some blocks of text.

(read more)

So the government is a double edged sword then. While they have the power to prevent others from seeing our private data, they also have the power to allow and see it themselves. This becomes a question of government trust then. If the people trust their government then this is not so much of an issue. However, as of 2011, only 14% of the public trusted the government to do the right thing most of the time while over 40% said the government will not usually or ever do the right thing. We do live in a democracy though and it becomes our responsibility to select leader we do trust and in order to protect ourselves in the long run, this is something to consider.

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A History of our Information Society

February 19, 2012 – 7:21 pm

Since ancient civilization, man has had an innate desire to know. He learned about the stars, God, farming, making tools, hunting, cooking, medicating, sanitation and more. In the past this knowledge was passed down orally then when he developed written language, it was written down. Over the years it has become easier and easier to access information. Once the Library of Alexandria was the place to learn everything there is to know, now it is the internet.

Our society has become accustomed to a constant stream of information. Our smart phones text us when there is bad weather or a crime on campus. Our TVs show the ticking of stock prices 24/7. Our computers are connected to the internet which holds virtually all human knowledge to date. Its mind boggling if you think about it. As of 2009, there were almost 500 billion gigabytes of data on the net. That’s 5 with twenty 0’s.

We use the net for everything. News, social networking, dating, videos, pictures, pen pals, phone calls, reading, writing, you name it. So how did we get here? How did our society and over 2.1 billion people worldwide become so reliant on this relatively new form of information exchange? Like most awesome technology, the internet can trace it’s roots back to the military. Back in the 60s DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) was conducting research into linking computers together to send information quickly between each other. The first successful nodes of this network were based in CA and became known as ARPANET. By 1982 the standards that we still use today, TCP/IP, were developed and the Internet because a real thing, however it was still private and controlled by the government. By 1995 NSFNET (NSF for National Science Foundation) was decommissioned and the internet was made commercial. Since then the internet has exploded and become a part of our lives in a way no one predicted. It was estimated that internet usage grew 100% each year during the late 90s. By 2007, the internet carried over 97% of all two-way telecommunications.

The growth of the internet has been complimented with the huge developments in hardware by the mobile phone industry. My cell phone today, the Motorola Droid Bionic, has a dual core 1Ghz processor, 1gb of RAM, a qHD screen and download speeds of over 25mb/s on 4g. By contrast, my first computer was powered by an Intel Pentium III running at around 700Mhz, with about 256mb of RAM, a huge CRT monitor and a dial up internet connection and weighted a ton. I can now carry around this device that is connected to all of human knowledge and has more computational power than the entire Apollo space program in my pocket.

These two developments have changed the way we interact with each other. First it was just the ability to talk to someone across the world, then they could text that person and now we can video chat with someone in London while walking to class (I’ve done it and it is awesome). This ability to summon information about anything from anywhere has changed the way we live. I speak from experience when I say this. We never have to sit and ponder about why a shockwave is created when an airplane reaches the speed of sound, or who won Super Bowl XLIV. This information is literally just a few taps away on our phones.

As we have progressed as a society our reliance on constant information has grown. From the military’s use of the radio to send attack order at the speed of light during WWI to 24 hour news services on TV to these tiny devices with the ability to conjure up any information ever recorded, this desire to know has become ingrained in our psyche. Or maybe it was always there and we’ve just found more and more ways to satisfy it.

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The GPS and Our Privacy

February 2, 2012 – 12:31 am

This week’s topic in info3pt0 is the challenge we face as a society in retaining privacy while adopting useful new technologies, specifically the GPS in this case. The class brings up two articles and asks the question if we as a society ought to increase or decease our usage of location based technology.

GPS was intended as a military product from the start, allowing the US military to achieve pinpoint precision when planning and coordinating. It was soon declassified for civilian use and now serves as an extremely reliable source of highly accurate location information. So accurate that it often seems like my phone knows where I am to a higher degree of accuracy than even I do.

Since then, the market has been saturated with GPS enabled products from navigational devices to tablets and cell phones, its hard to find a household that does not own some sort of GPS these days. This begs the question, when does location awareness become too involved?

The articles assigned for class bring up the fact that GPSs have both beneficial and some down right creepy uses. From safely navigating a storm at sea to stalking, the GPS certainly does have a wide range of uses however there is really no way to limit society’s utilization of this tech. The market has already been saturated and its unlawful for the government to restrict who can own a GPS or what they can use it for. Therefore the burden of privacy falls on us, the individual. We are transitioning to an open society, something argued by many high profile tech leaders as mentioned in “Privacy: One Step Backward?” This is unfortunate mostly because many young people are naive and do not think they need to protect themselves, and many older people do not know how.

So where am I going with this? The original question was “Do the benefits of the technology outweigh the risks?” One just needs to look around and see that society clearly believes the benefits of knowing where you are outweigh the risks of someone else potentially knowing the same information (Otherwise they wouldn’t spend hundreds on the tech). Without GPS no only would we have to try and use maps while driving again but airplanes and boats would have to use the starts and less accurate INS systems for navigation. Our smart bombs would lose considerable accuracy and put more lives in danger than intended and overzealous parents wouldn’t be able to track their children’s driving speeds.

Now that we love our GPSs, how do we go about being safe with them? My answer for most of the world’s problems is the same; Education. Once people know what is at risk how to protect themselves, they will not be taken advantage of. A perfect example of this is Google’s Latitude service. Many people don’t know that their Androids and iPhones can be used by Google friends to track your location on a map. Its a perfect tool for parents spouses etc, but at the same time its creepy as hell. An ignorant user who accepts and enables everything on their phone may end up showing their not so good friend, Marc, that they are out of the house at a particular time providing him with all the information he needs to rob their house. If our poor friend just read some things before accepting them, or educated himself about the subject he could have avoided the situation easily.

Granted, this does not account for unlawful stalking and those overzealous parents we talked about, aside from banning the technology there is not much we as a society can do to prevent these unethical uses. However this is the problem we face with any new tech. You can’t ban the camera because it has the potential to take unethical or illegal photos, why would you do that to the GPS? With the good comes the bad.

References:
http://www.thenewstribune.com/2012/01/30/2004703/personal-use-of-gps-trackers-growing.html
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/01/25/privacy-one-step-forward/
Google Latitude: https://www.google.com/latitude/b/0

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And We’re Back

January 31, 2012 – 10:16 pm

Its been almost four short years since I last posted about my ground breaking multiplayer Zune game. Since then I’ve graduated high school, held a couple jobs with Lockheed, built some sweet stuff, bought a car, flew a plane, got a motorcycle license and a whole bunch of other cool things.

This blog will be used as an “ePortfolio” for my class Information 3.0 for the rest of this semester. Its about how technology is changing our world for the better or worse and our observations. Enjoy.

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Zune Pong v 0.7 With Improved Physics and Graphical Updates

May 27, 2008 – 10:05 pm

The Pong has been updated once again.
Check out the Zune page to get the latest version:
http://amir.shah.org/index.php/zune-pong/

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Zune Pong v 0.6 With Zune 30 Support

May 18, 2008 – 12:03 am

I’ve fixed the support for the Znue 30 in multiplayer along with some bugs and other small gui stuff.
Head over to the Zune Pong page to get it:
http://amir.shah.org/index.php/zune-pong/

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Zune pong v 0.5 With Graphical Updates

May 15, 2008 – 6:19 pm

Improved graphics
Improved layout

NOTE: Untested Multiplayer! May throw an exception!
Known Bugs: – Ball still rides paddle – Ball does not speed up

Head to the Zune Pong page to download it:
http://amir.shah.org/index.php/zune-pong/

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Zune Pong v 0.4 With Musical Score!

May 14, 2008 – 5:33 pm

Alright, I’ve finally added music! Music starts up when the game loads. Press left (or down if you’re holdin the Zune up/down) to change the song.

Also, some of the kinks with the wireless multiplayer are worked out.

Known bugs:
– Ball still rides paddle

-Sometimes the joining Zune throws an exception. In these cases, simply have that Zune be the host

This list is kinda short. Someone find more!

Download

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Zune Pong v 0.3 With Wireless Multiplayer!

May 14, 2008 – 3:15 pm

I’ve done it! I’ve made multi-player Pong
I believe this is the first public, non-Microsoft multilayer Zune game. Awesome!
Its still pretty buggy and the onscreen instructions lie. Here how to make it work:

Load up the game
On host: Click play, then back
On Client: Click play, then the ZunePad

Host will start playing fist while client joins. Client will join mid-session and they will play!

Known Bugs / fixes
-No way to go back to main menu

Updates
Fixed two bugs!
Added navigation & fixed buttons to work with onscreen instructions.
Press back at any screen to go to previous screen (or pause the game)
Multi-player still has no way to quit nicely (must force quit the game)

New version us up:

Download

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