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Synology DS212J

I have held off buying a NAS for a few years. With the Gopro Hero2, I’m needing an amount of storage that is bordering on incredible. Finally broke down and get a Synology DS212J. It’s outfitted with two 2tb Seagate Barracuda drives.

This unit offers a lot of options. I got it to export a NFS mount so I can transfer files off my production Linux server. Using NFS, it seems to average 11MB/s transfer rate. I’ve enabled ssh and ftp. I’ve found ftp to be the best way to store backups from my linux machines.

The synology also has several apps you can enable, such as Plex and BitTorrent.

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IoGear GWU627

I’m really starting to not like WordPress. This is the third time I’ve written this entry; and it gets shorter each time.

I chose the IoGear GWU627 to work as a wifi bridge for the BeagleBone. It came with a bad ethernet cable. Took me thirty minutes to figure that problem out. It works. It is small, and gets its power from a usb cable. Still trying to verify that works with the BeagleBone.

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ConnectPort X2 is driving me crazy

Purchased a ConnextPort X2 (model X2-Z11-EC-A) from SparkFun. It took me about four hours to get my collection of Series 2 xbee’s to be discovered. The magic formula is that the S2 xbee’s need to be flashed with XB24-ZB “Zigbee” firmware. The older firmware starts with ZNET and is not compatible with the ConnectPort. I spent a lot of this time battling X-CTU. You have to manually change the Modem type (from XB24-B to XB24-ZB) to see the newer firmware. If you browse Digi’s ftp site, you can get newer (like circa 2010) firmware updates.

One of the problems that continually tripped me up, was needing to reset the firmware parameters to defaults. I run many of my xbee’s at a baud rate higher than 9600. When the firmware update completes with factory defaults, the baud rate is changed back to 9600 and X-CTU can’t the config via AT commands (this would be different if you are using API mode). To get around this, you have to power-cycle or reset the xbee. I really like SparkFun’s xbee to USB dongle, but it does not have a reset button…you have to pull the xbee out of the 2mm headers and reseat it…an electrically dubious action.