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Laser Modulation
More fun with lasers!I discovered (why didn't I realise this the other day?) that a 5mm LED fits snugly into the muzzle of this laser module, so I can take very accurate readings of the voltage across...
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Up in Flames
It's Friday the 17th!!!! (cue lightning and thunder).Today I fatally destroyed 2 electronic components and released a non fatal amount of magic smoke from a third.The walking-wounded survivor of this...
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Papilio One 500K
Arrived today...Shown here next to another popular development board that doesn't need naming.I'll do a review of this thing once I've had chance to play with it.
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First impressions - Papilio One 500K FPGA Development Board
I've had a few days to play with my FPGA kit now since it arrived last week.I'm going to get the moaning over with first, don't worry, it gets better later on, stick around...The Papilio website freely...
View ArticleUV Imager - progress made!
Finally got around to making a start on the power-on calibration for the UV Imager.The Flickr page for this video has a brief footnote about the workings of it, but the vid is fairly self...
View ArticleVGA - FPGA - VHDL and other assorted acronyms!
Not since I started playing with the Parallax Propeller microcontroller last year have I found such a goldmine of hacking potential as with FPGAs.My latest challenge has been to display a clear and...
View ArticleVGA - Conquered!
New and improved VGA.vhd source code (VHDL) After much headscratching and frustration I engaged the little grey cells and contemplated the nature of the signal I was trying to generate.VGA signalling...
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Meetups and teardowns
Tuesday night saw Derby Makers' inaugural Annual General Meeting take place at the historic Derby Silk Mill.Lots of positive discussion was had and some exciting new developments regarding both the...
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Enigma Machine Project - Progress!
After making some enquiries at the Derby Makers discussion group a while back, Martin Raynsford got in touch and kindly offered his assistance in fabricating some parts for my Enigma machine...
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More Perspex!
Today's mailbag provided me with some new parts for the Enigma Machine!Martin Raynsford has cut some more parts for me after a significant re-think of the Enigma design. Instead of the "tombstone"...
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Propeller: Synchronising two or more Cogs
Purely out of curiosity I decided to do an experiment into the nature of one Propeller Cog's temporal relationship with another Cog. Is the instruction executions of two (or more) Cogs constant, or...
View ArticleTrue RNG?
I was inspired the other day by a post on Hackaday.com...http://hackaday.com/2013/01/17/hackaday-links-january-17th-2013/I had all the bits lying around so I thought I'd have a go as well. I have...
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True RNG (part 2)
I've added an Ethernet Shield to the Arduino that controls my egg-timer based RNG.It's logging about 52kb per second (420000 bits per second or thereabouts) over a UDP port to my clunky old Acer...
View ArticleInstalling a Propeller Toolchain under Linux
Found a good article on installing linux tools for develping code for Parallax Propeller microcontrollers...http://gpio.kaltpost.de/?page_id=1378Contains instructions for BST and installing a great...
View ArticleUseful links for Propeller Programmers
(1) Parallax's Original Spin interpreter code...http://forums.parallax.com/showthread.php/101336...(2) The Propeller's "Three Bit Protocol" for code...
View ArticleLatest Project - RasPi as a portable Propeller development kit.
I decided to treat myself and get a Raspberry Pi computer, it arrived yesterday and literally within 5 minutes of opening the box I had compiled a hello world C program and proved that I can use a...
View Articlepushprop Project Progress
A quick update to the pushprop application project (see the page heading at the top of this blog page for more info)...----------------Happy to report good progress with this project! My current state...
View ArticleElectron Bothering - I2C
I2C is a neat "little" protocol. The inverted commas are an indication of the magnitude of the technical documents that define this protocol. They are large and for the most part actually quite...
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Bodge of the week
Today's mail bestowed upon me a precious Maxim part (you may well gasp), a DS1077 to be particular. A programmable oscillator for use on an I2C bus. I'm hoping to use this chip in a new PCB design...
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RasPi Model
LINK: RasPi B.skpThrew this SketchUp file together as part of my latest hardware project. There are some additional construction lines left in for convenience for those wishing to align components to...
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