Bluetooth + GPS + ActionScript - Part 1 - Hardware

Overview
For this project, my goal was to get GPS data into my Mac for some visualization experiments with ActionScript. After some initial prototypes that worked well using an RS232-to-USB converter, I decided that wasn’t slick enough and had it too many wires. I like things nice and clean around my desk, so I opted for adding Bluetooth in place of a USB converter.

After experimenting with some different methods, some using microprocessors and some not, I opted for the simpler route, eliminating the microprocessor. A microprocessor doesn’t add anything other than cost for the basic purpose of this project. Although stay tuned for another posting about integrating a similar configuration with the Make Controller and Arduino microprocessors.

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Remount an External Hard Drive in Leopard

This may seem like a fairly outlandish edge case for external hard drives, but it’s one that I’ve run recently. Suppose you have an external Firewire drive connected to your MacBook Pro and then daisy-chained via Firewire to that, you have several more Firewire drives. Then suppose you’ve accidentally ejected that first drive that everything else is daisy-chained to. Then suppose that you’re currently in the middle of a render to one of the other down-stream drives and really need some files off of the drive that was unmounted. That removes the possibility of physically disconnecting the first drive to then reconnecting it to remount it, since the act of disconnecting would fubar the render.

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