A collection of ramblings from Tim.
Written by on May 28, 2011 .
I've started building my DSE signal generator kit. I bought the thing literally years ago, when I still worked there - before Woolworths destroyed the staff discount.
It will be built into a nice sloped console box and will include the DSE frequency counter kit.
Written by on May 27, 2011 .
Finally, my 10 turn pot has arrived from Element 14, I can complete my EEVBlog based active load! It was out of stock and had to be shipped from the US. Last week I got the rest of my stuff from Element 14 including a 0.1R 25W aluminium clad resistor, an LM3302 comparator to fix Dad's strobe tacho, some CMOS 4000 series to play with - 40106 (hex schmitt inverter), 4030 (quad xor), 4027 (dual J/K flipflop), 4081 (quad and).
Written by on May 7, 2011 .
Added photos to gallery:
Written by on May 4, 2011 .
Written by on May 3, 2011 .
I've started on a big project involving a LAN design and implementation. I'm going to be busy for a bit! This is the first project of this size that I have taken on. I'm sure it's going to last a month or two. The electrician team (yes there are about 8 of them, this is a big install) F%@king hates me because there are over 250 outlets and 3 45U racks of gear. The project is actually for a gaming arcade, so the layout needs to be flexible and cover the floor space. I will be designing the LAN, speccing the outlet requirements and once the sparkies are done - I will be installing and configuring the 2 servers, 6 POS systems and Elastix (Linux Based) phone system.
I will also have the opportunity to use a few TG watchdogs for environmental monitoring. They will be tied to nagios running on the Elastix box, which will also be monitoring the LANs.
Today I've been setting up the racks from scratch. The cement floor isn't sealed, which may kill some gear with dust - they seem aware of this and want to push the deadline. It took a lot of time (more than I expected) to unpack all of the switches! I'm putting in 9 24 port switches. The reason for this is that all 250 ports will never be patched at the same time, there is just a huge amount of them to cover the floor area.
The other minor (hah!) problem I have is that there is no f&*^%king power. Minor details. It looks like there won't be for some time.
Written by on May 2, 2011 .
Lots of work on my site today. Cleaned up a lot of old PHP crap, primarily deprecated functions.
I found earlier today that I could not log into my sites admin page. This is because it displays an event log when you log in - which should be fine right? The problem was, not having logged in for ages, that there was a substantial (15,880,000+, 3.8GB) of database table that the poor admin page had to join the user table against! Oops. All of these messages were about PHP deprecation. I must have been crawled by google or something, most of the problems were in my galley. There are over 2000 images in there, each image and gallery generating multiple warnings. So, after lots of careful ereg() and eregi() and split() replacements it's all good.
Written by on May 2, 2011 .
I have managed to get my 16f877 working with an LCD at last. The ICD2 definitely had a hand in getting it to work...
Written by on May 2, 2011 .
May Already?!
Kel had lot to do today so I looked after the Kids. If only I could get them to dig in their sand pit and not in the dirt.
I showed Liam an episode of The Mysterious Cities Of Gold, both he Emily were GLUED to it. The Mysterious Cities of Gold is a cartoon that was on when I was little in the late 80s. I used to like it alot. Liam even said that he likes it better than BEN 10!
I had some time today to build an ICSP attachment for programming 18 pin pics. My JDM serial programmer doesn't seem to cut it any more. I designed the link cable from the ICD2 so that it fits the headers on the attachments for the JDM so I can now do 18, 28 and 40 pin pics. The JDM has become unreliable for some reason, I have trouble verifying the code once it's written - and it takes aaages to write. The ICD2 takes only a few seconds.
I built up another MAX232CPE serial prototype circuit on the breadboard for my next round of tinkering with the 16f88. Although, tonight I did manage to get the UBW firmware D (USB CDC) to compile after lots and lots of messing around on and off over the past few weeks. If I can get that built and the bootloader then I can go direct to USB rather than serial. I have a Sparkfun UBW with the 18f4550 on it and also two 18f2550s for breadboard work.
The workflow using the ICD 2 is going to be different. I am used to pulling the chip out of circuit to program it. The next target is to test the ICD functionality - I've never tried it before.
I added mod_python to apache on my server at home so I can play with Django. I went through the first two parts of the tutorial and it was pretty cool (using the dev server). Under mod_python the paths are screwy - I must have misconfigured it. Will go back to it later! Oh - the built in dynamic admin functionality is just awesome. It takes so much crap work out of putting up the back end of a site - forms, fields, validation etc etc (all the tedious stuff)
Written by on May 2, 2011 .
I've got myself a freshly imported Rigol DS1052E! It's got a Chinese manual, but meh. There is a PDF version of the manual in English if I really want it. I guess watching Dave play with all his scopes over at EEVBlog convinced me to get one.
The thing is awesome! I love it. DSO is entirely new to me. I've currently got a Dick Smith 60MHz CRO. I think my favorite thing so far is the single shot triggering and the timebase zoom it has, where you can show a magnified (by time) view of the triggered waveform below the normal display.
Written by on May 2, 2011 .
I have just put my first order into Mouser. Most of the TG board is based around what I can get from Electus and Mouser. I also got a few extra bits to play with.
I am building a dummy load based on Dave Jones' design from EEVBlog, so I need a 10 turn 50K linear pot.
Other goodies:
Written by on May 2, 2011 .
I've just sent the gerbers into BatchPCB for my first run of TG Watchdog boards!
Written by on May 2, 2011 .
I found an awesome project for the kids. On picprojects.org.uk there is a mood lamp by Pete Griffiths.
On the last trip to Shenzhen, I asked my boss to get me a few handfulls of 10mm LEDs in colours. They will work great for this.
I've built it up on vero and programmed the chip with Pete's code. It works great! Even managed to get the ICSP to play nice.
Written by on May 2, 2011 .
I've finally found a use for these DPDT switches which I've had stashed for aaaaaaaages. They are DPDT, but one side is momentary. So they are ON, Centre OFF, MOMENTARY. I will incorporate one into the LED downlight display. I will also add a 40106 to the selection to help de-bounce for me. I tried a plain RC de-bounce, but I can never get them to work properly.
The customer will be able to switch the 'cycling' of the lamps from up 'Auto', to centre 'Stop' and also multiple presses on the momentary side they can manually select the lit lamp.
I am considering whether it's worth it putting an ammeter and volt meter on there.
Should be pretty cool.
Written by on April 7, 2011 .
The new CRO (er, DSO) is great! I am using it while I design a circuit to help promote our range of 12V hallogen replacement LED downlights. They look damn boring in white boxes. My idea is to have a strip of aluminium angle with 10 MR16 porcelain sockets fitted to it. Each lamp will have it's own transistor to turn it on, mounted next to the socket on the strip. The circuit will serve as a test bed for new lamps that we get. It will have a PWM based dimmer and a voltage control. Each down light will be lit for a second or two (adjustable) and then the one after, down the line.
This should add some interactivity for customers, as well as some animation to catch the eye. I think having all of them lit at once would not only be blinding, but just as boring as white boxes.
So far my design is going to incorporate two 555s, an LM350 and a handfull of 8A transistors in TO220s. To do the stepping between globes I am going to use a 4017 decade counter.
Written by on June 11, 2010 .
I made these with RRD Tool using a piece of software called DigiTemp. It is a pretty standard Linux package that allows you to read a 1-Wire LAN using a serial port. I first had to make a serial adapter which consisted of about 4 diodes and a few resistors. I soldered these directly into the back of a 9 pin serial plug and covered them with the back-shell. I terminated this cable with an RJ45.
My 1-Wire LAN is run partially over flat phone cable and partially over CAT-5. I have two on CAT-5 running about 30 and 50 meters and two on flat phone cable, one about 150mm and the other about 10m.
Digitemp maintains the RRD (Round-Robin Data) files and I periodically generate the graphs on these files. They are updated every 5 minutes for internal viewing but are updated externally (What you see now) every hour.
The sensors I have are DS18B20. They are small. The ones that I have are the TO-92 packaged versions.
I will include some more data, circuit diagrams etc later; probably in the wiki.
Written by on April 6, 2010 .
Easter long weekend was good. I made some wood bits and pieces and cleaned up a little in the house. Saturday I went and saw Mum and Dad for tea. Sunday I went and saw Brad - we sat around with some other geeks and talked computers/messed about with computers. Monday was for vegetation.
Written by on March 28, 2010 .
One of my side projects has kicked off at last after a bit of a rocky prototype phase - the pre-prototype (for nailing down micro controller code) is now in testing - hopefully we sell some. Having a real product that I custom engineered in a production environment at 30+ sites would be really cool.
Saturday and Sunday were very productive. Saturday I cleaned out the strip next to the driveway and swept the patio. The patio was covered in toys and sand because Liam had his little mate around and they made a mess.
Today I cleaned the side passage. Removed all the crap [All the house owners shit - tin, ute tray bits, tiles, wood scraps, window assemblies and blocks of concrete that I've pulled out of the yard]. That's taken me most of the day. I also cleared the side garden, trimmed the rose and the aloe looking spiky cactus looking plant as well. There is a crappy tree in the corner that I trimmed and removed the extra stumps around it - you can't get the mower next to it otherwise. I should have just trimmed it back a bit more - to about ground level.
Hopefully the rose at the front makes it, it produces nice fragrant red roses. The brickies that did the front fence next pushed it over. I think the trunk is broken, there are parts of the trunk that are also rotten. I put in a steel rod and its sitting on that now. I even found another rose in the garden at the side - there was just so much crap, plus before the wall, there was a low branch obscuring it. I think if the roses cark it, I'm going to disappear the garden and grow the grass up to the new brick wall. There isn't anything worth while growing in there any way - plus the tree in there has destroyed the concrete edging. Less maintenance == win.
The new fence is up at last! The brickies will be back soon (hopefully) to put a few courses of bricks under the colourbond fence. I'm very glad they're doing that, I can whiper-snip right up to the wall without damaging anything next door.
Written by on March 6, 2010 .
Took the kids out for dinner tonight. They behaved really well and had a great time - except when they were home and it was time to dress for bed!
Why can't I get the Disco Valley remix of Astral Projection's Ambient Galaxy out of my head?! Probably because it suckered me in by sampling one of my favorite movies (and games) Dune.
Written by on Feb. 22, 2010 .
Had a great weekend. Mowed and cleaned up a bit on Saturday and went to Mum and Dads on Sunday for a BBQ where the kids tore up the veggie patch with tonka toys.
You may notice this site is now DAMN FAST... This is because it is nolonger hosted on ADSL. It's now camping out on a dedicated dual CPU box in a data centre in Sydney.
Written by on Jan. 3, 2010 .
I mostly camped out in the shed today. It was too wet for the kids to play outside. Got lots done - Finished bits and pieces on my router table. Built a push block and box joint jig for the router.
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