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Jan 02
Love1

Updating Neato XV21 Rev 113 (Cruz) Firmware Offline

By How To 6 Comments

I started writing this blog post, but the same day another user on the Robot Reviews forum (djos) provided his method of updating a Neato XV Rev 113/Cruz board to the latest firmware in a much easier manner.

So, while I am still posting this to share my method and details of how I came about it, I STRONGLY suggest using djos’ instructions on the Robot Reviews forum for setting your Neato XV to a Vorwerk VR100 system ID via the command line.

Djos’ method is available here: http://www.robotreviews.com/chat/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=19005

 

Original method and details on how I came about it are below for reference:

As of November 2015, Neato has stopped providing firmware updates via their previous online updater. I recently replaced the Rev 113/Cruz main board in my XV21 and the new one shipped with firmware version 2.4.

Unfortunately, version 2.4 does not include many of the newest features of the latest XV firmwares, such as corner cleaning/”Corner Clever”. Details on the different versions of firmware are available on Wikipedia here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neato_Robotics#Firmware

I did find an offline updater for the Rev 64/Binky version under heXor’s NeatoControl Bitbucket here: https://bitbucket.org/heXor/neatocontrol/downloads. However, I made the mistake of using that on my Rev 113/Cruz board and… bricked it. Oops…

So, with that in mind, I figured that the offline updater files provided by heXor gave a good starting point… If I could only find firmware files for Rev 113/Cruz somewhere. Fortunately, I saw this note on the XV11 Hacking wikispace (https://xv11hacking.wikispaces.com/Hacking+with+Neato+v3.0) – “The Neatos that are delivered with Firmware 3.0 are a different hardware revision compared to previous models. Previous versions (incl. the Vorwerk VR100) are codename ‘Cruz’.”

With that in mind, I found multiple firmware files on the Vorwerk website here: http://kobold.vorwerk.de/de/service/software-updates/saugroboter/vr100/#. Only problem was – All of the ZIP files on the site were password protected, with no password to be found. After a bit of digging, I found this tweet, which happened to have the password for the ZIP files (VORVR100!%) –

Armed with that, I took each firmware file from Vorwerk’s site, and created an update ZIP file based on heXor’s offline update script for each of the firmware files provided by Vorwerk. I tested each of them on my own XV21 and they worked for me personally. However, I take no responsibility if these cause any damage to your Neato if you so choose to use them. Upgrade at your own risk!

To Upgrade:

  1. Download the necessary file corresponding to the version you’d like to update to from my Github, available here: https://github.com/NoahJaehnert/Neato-XV-Series-Cruz-Rev-113-Update
  2. Connect your Neato to your computer via a MicroUSB cable
  3. Download and unzip the respective firmware ZIP file from this github repo
  4. Double click/execute run.bat
Mar 08
Love0

Convert Gift Cards to Cash Using Square’s iPhone Card Reader/App

By How To, iPhone No Comments

Last night I was perusing Twitter as I sometimes do when I get bored. I came across this Tweet:

 

After reading it, I realized I have had three gift cards (two Visa and one Amex) sitting in my wallet for quite some time. They haven’t done me much good, though, as I could never remember how much was actually on them. So, I never used them…

Read More

Dec 24
Love0

Eye-Fi vs PixelPipe iPhone Apps Reviewed

By How To, iPhone, Review One Comment

I was looking to find an iPhone app that would allow me to upload pictures automatically from my iPhone to my gallery on this site. So, with that said, I googled for a few to see what apps I could find that would allow me to do this. I came up with two (that interact/upload to Gallery2, the photo gallery software I use on this site). They are PixelPipe and Eye-Fi, both available in the Apple App Store for “free” (notice the free in quotes — I’ll get to that in just a few).

PixelPipe

PixelPipe

Eye-Fi

Eye-Fi

So after finding the two, I downloaded them and installed both of them to my iPhone. Up first — Eye-Fi. I went to open it and it asked me for my username and password. Not having one, I returned to the Eye-Fi Website assuming I could register for one. Once there I found that in order to get an account, one must own one of Eye-Fi’s Secure Digital card products. So, in essence, this “free” application actually costs $49.99 (which is the cost of Eye-Fi’s lowest cost product). Read More

Dec 21
Love0

NeXpose and BackTrack 4: “Could not start the nxpgsql daemon” [Fixed]

By How To 7 Comments

UPDATE/Fix Information:
I found out that this was all related to the previous solution of disabling the postgresql instance on the machine. I had (mistakenly) thought that by doing /etc/init.d/postgresql-8.3 stop that BackTrack’s posgresql instance would stop. Unfortunately I was wrong, and a “ps aux | grep -i sql” showed me this. After I did a “kill <PID>” I removed all NeXpose files/folders and reinstalled it. However it still wouldnt run correctly/gave me the same error. After some discussion in #rapid7 on irc.freenode.net, I was informed that NeXpose requires 1GB of RAM. So I edited my VMWare config to provide 1GB of RAM to my BackTrack guest.

However, then I had another issue — the NeXpose server kept crashing after starting. So, again I turned to the guys in #rapid7. With their help, I ran “cd /opt/rapid7/nexpose/nsc && rm conf/nsc.xml && ./nsc.sh” and voila! Success! Read More

Dec 08
Love0

WordPress: Unable to change uploaded image size [Fixed]

By How To No Comments

If you’re having the same problem I did, where when you upload an image to WordPress it does not let you change it from the original uploaded size, then simply do the following (on Gentoo):
emerge gd

For those of you on other distros, try doing the same thing with your package manager, or just install the GD libraries from scratch (you can find them here: http://www.libgd.org)

Of course, this won’t be effective without recompiling PHP to use GD, so again, on Gentoo:
emerge php
And again, on other distros, you’ll have to do some digging yourself to either A) use your package manager to recompile PHP or B) recompile it by hand.

Once that’s all said and done, you should be able to click the buttons to select a small, medium, or large image as well as the original one. Nifty? I think so…

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