Welcome...

...to the private homepage of Robert Loos.

Here you can find information about my first public project, the

rleibd,

a homeserver-daemon for the european installation bus (KNX/EIB).

I built a house with eib inside in 2003 and programmed a daemon for visualization and control which has reached a state it might be useful for others now. If you also have an eib installation and would like to make more of it, you are invited to try rleibd.

rleibd currently runs stable on my homeserver based on opensuse 10.2 and probably will on other linuxes as well.
Just download the package and follow the hints you will find in the doc directory.
If you have special information on how to compile/use it on any other linux, please email me.

Meanwhile, some other projects have been added, namely

• An ultrasonic level meter for stormwater cisterns. In fact, it actually is an ultrasonic rangefinder that measures the distance between the fixed sensor and the water surface and uses it to calculate the volume of water contained.
• Some electronic calculators I wrote during my work to make repeating tasks easily solvable.
• An article about HTML and Javascript, including a script that converts values with SI-prefixes to numbers and back.
• A little fun with photo diodes. Work has to be fun! A small experimental board allows experiments with photodiodes in photovoltaic or reverse mode.
• Experiments with load cells that finally ended up in a digital kitchen scale, that could surely serve other purposes as well.
• A Pi4 green NAS hosts my videos and photos. The hard disks are switched on and off as required by bipolar relais without additional power dissipation.
• I also made some thoughts about constant current sources with a special respect to temperature influence. Eight different circuits are compared with respect to their special characteristics.
• I also want to mention some articles about Linux and the open source PBX Asterisk. Especially the Samba-Migration costed me a lot of distress.

Have fun also browsing the menu!

All artwork on this site has been created with Ink­scape. Inkscape is, in my experience, the open source equivalent of Corel Draw. So if you don't need special features of the current Corel Suite it should be quite sufficient.

Inkscape uses SVG as its native format, which can usually be used directly in web pages without conversion. I have made extensive use of this on many of my pages...

Dimensional drawings have been created with Libre­CAD. My first experiences with MCAD were commercial systems but at least the 2-D systems I've worked with offer only little more capability than LibreCAD.

Librecad uses DXF as native format that can be easily converted to other CAD formats.

Both programs are quite good, partly simply genious but still have teething trouble.

Pictures and photos have been partially post-processed using Irfan­View. This is an incredible slim and powerfull tool, I'm an absolute fan of it. It has the best straighten out function I know, lossless JPEG rotation etc. Please support this tool if you use it for your business.

Meanwhile, I developed some PCBs using KiCad and I want to say, I'm impressed what open source software can make. Of course, some of these multi thousand Euro suites have their advantages but you should really think if this buy is necessary.

I created some of the 3d models for KiCad using FreeCAD. The learning curve is, just like with any 3d tool, relatively flat (you need much time for even basic knowledge) but it is worth while.

The partially surreal depth of field of the photos has been created by CombineZP from several images, partly without a micro-positioning sliding plate what takes a lot of susceptibility when focussing but it is manageable! Meanwhile I have a Manfrotto 454 wich makes stacking photos much more easy. Costing about $100.- it is quite affordable and offfers a quite good quality.

I can only encourage you to support these projects.

I would also like to recommend the Saleae Logic Analyzer. This is just based on a simple application note from Cypress, but the guys have written a fantastic interface that offers all the possibilities of much more expensive devices for little money.

I find it just interesting that it was much more easy to get the permission from Saleae to use their logo than any reliable information from any of the other open source projects... For some of them, the necessary efforts were so high that they are simply not worth trying.

The soft­ware for the ATMega-controllers has been written in ATStudio 6.2 (today Microchip Studio). This is an excellent IDE, especially the simu­lator can simulate almost the entire circuit (Usarts are very difficult to simulate) without real hardware, including time measurements of subroutines etc.
I did not try version 7 since it requires a newer version of Win­dows !
Up to now there is no reason to update three development PCs and laptops to Windows 7 or higher. This would lead to extra trouble and extra costs without any obvious advantage.

Indeed, I tried version 7 working on my scale project. It showed no noticeable advantage except a newer toolchain.

So I will continue to use 6.2, perhaps looking at the newer versions from time to time but it will require something great to happen for me to accept the necessary updates. Just for fun or just to keep the thing up to date is not sufficient.

Note: the German version of my homepage may be more up-to-date and may contain more information than the English version. If you understand German language I invite you to test it (click on Loosweb Homepage auf Deutsch or something similar on any of the other pages, right on top of the page). There may be links in the menu carrying the german flag wich will take you to a page in german language. If you find something valuable you do not understand, just drop me an email and I'll translate it as soon as possible.

Note also: English is not my native language. If you find something that could be told in a more natural way, I would appreciate if you would send me a note.
I've learned English language at school and by reading datasheets 😀 and, of course, by reading The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Therefore, I would not panic. But from time to time I feel somewhat depressed 😉.

Hint for using this Site

Some of the pictures on this site show a zoom effect when hovering (moving the mouse over the picture). These are links, leading either to an enlarged version or to supplementing information.

Pictures wich don't are just there. Sometimes such are also necessary...

Especially on cheep mobile device, hovering is not possible. You'll simply have to try. E.g. on Android devices, you have to enable Air View to get the effect by moving your finger an inch above the image.