In Germany flatrates are available for DSL only, so people, living in areas where DSL is not available, have to pay expensive time based fees for slowly connecting to the Internet. The problem is that M$ Windows and many of the installed tools are known for initiating internet connections although the user did not ask them to do so. Therefore it is crucial to reliably disconnect the ISDN line so that those unwanted connection attempts will not succeed. ISDN routers, which might be of help here, are hard to find nowadays and do not offer the comfort as new DSL routers do. ...

This is a short guide on how to debug applications or dynamic link libraries created by the post free Microsoft C++ compile environment. The following tools need to be installed: Microsoft Debug Tools (13MB): c:\msdev\debug Windows XP with Service Pack 2 symbols (195MB) Then extend your environment’s LIB path by adding the Visual Studio .NET 2003 lib folder. Visual Studio .NET 2003 was installed during the former .NET SDK installation, unfortunately the path, specified for the .NET SDK is not taken as installation path for Visual Studio but the usual program folder is used instead, in my case C:\Programme\Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003. Find out the path’s short name with dir /X and add the following line with your specific path to the setenv.cmd script below the three call statements: ...

I did more reverse engineering on the DataRecorder Windows tool that comes with the TFA Klima-Logger hygrometer in order to find out which serial lines are used as input lines. The evaluation version of IDA Pro Disassembler and Debugger did a great job here. The only thing I had to do was to load the executable DataRecorder.exe into the disassembler and find the places where the Win32 API function GetCommModemStatus gets called. A search for the function name revealed two sub-routines inside the huge pile of Assembler code. Looking at the references to data segment constants it was quite easy to determine which of the two sub-routines was the Assembler version of CI2CDriver::Sda() and which one was the Assembler version of CI2CDriver::Scl(). The first sub-routine was referencing an error message ...

For reverse-engineering the Windows software of the TFA Klima-Logger I tried to analyze the I2C protocol over the serial line by intercepting Win32 API system calls. Searching with Google about the topic intercept Win32 function I stumbled over the Microsoft Research tool Detours which was exactly what I was looking for. Version 1.5 of the tool is freely available for download and already comes with an example to intercept serial API system calls which served as a starting point for my serial communication interception library. ...

Update 2012-03-01: I just ordered 2 outdoor sensors and the plan is to connect the Klima-Logger to a Raspberry Pi Board to make the data available via browser on my home network. Here are some resources I found https://oss.inqnet.at/trac/klimalogger/ http://members.home.nl/xbasic/01c2249c770e62101/index.html http://www.atmel.com/dyn/resources/prod_documents/doc0670.pdf http://www.wetterstationsforum.de/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=7605&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0&sid=472299c23b04447cc15aa92492c4a76f http://web.student.tuwien.ac.at/~e9725348/Projects/klimalogger/ Outdated: I recently bought a hygrometer from TFA-Dostmann, called Klima-Logger. It is the cheapest thermometer and hygrometer with PC connectivity I could find on the market. Unfortunately only a Windows software is provided to get the recorded values for temperature and humidity. I thought a Linux driver would be cool and started searching for resources on the net. Usually the Linux community is very fast in supporting new gadgets of any kind, but nothing could be found. ...