Spectrum re-fit
Last updated: 24 Jun 2011 - 19:38
At the first British Vintage Computer Festival last week among the bits I picked up were a replacement membrane and a keyboard cover for my Spectrum. The original metal shield was beginning to go rusty, probably because of the years spent in a shed or garage before I got it at a garage sale. The keyboard membrane was also on its last legs, I'd taken the Speccy apart a couple of times and the membrane ends that plug into the main board were on the verge of breaking. Now I could take it apart again without worrying about loosing the keyboard I decided to go the whole way and rip out the modulator and just wire up a composite video output in its place. This is really simple, the input to the modulator block is power and composite video, so to get composite out all you have to do is trace the signal and connect up a suitable connector, I used a phono connector and a bit of angle aluminium to mount it. Previously I had both modulated RF and composite connections with the composite connector on a flying lead hanging out of the back of the case.
Server Monitor
Last updated: 31 Oct 2010 - 21:47
Server Monitor: A picture of the server monitor in place next to a cooling fan.
I've been in the process of upgrading my backup/home media server for a few weeks now. I managed to get hold of an old case from a skip outside a closing down fax/photocopier company. It's a fairly decent case, although it was somewhat 5.25" centric in design. Amongst other things I did to modify this case, I replaced the old drive door with a new completely transparent one with some USB ports and an additional fan for cooling the new compliment of many hard disks. The server is going to be running in a cupboard without a monitor most of the time and I wanted to be able to see at a glance what the system was doing. Inspired by the computer-graphic imaginary servers that are featured in web hosting ads that have a screen on the front, I set about adding a little monochrome LCD.
Portable Power
Last updated: 20 Jul 2010 - 22:13
Booster Box Outside: The complete booster box with lots of labels.
My phone, like many modern "smart-phones" has a tendency to go flat when used heavily for internet browsing etc. Unfortunately this is exactly when you aren't near power to charge it up with, so when I found some old iPod replacement batteries in the local Maplin an idea occurred to me. The idea is fairly simple, put a large capacity battery intended as a replacement for the now almost extinct 1st or 2nd gen iPod into a box with a charging socket to charge it, and a power output so it could charge something else.
Dwarf V0.2 beta 1 release
Last updated: 10 Jun 2010 - 11:11
For the impatient:
I've been working on improvements to Dwarf for a while. Check out the github repo for detailed changes and current development release. This is a beta release, i.e. it NEEDS TESTING. I've used it a little for actual projects and seems to be working okay but it certainly hasn't been extensively tested.
Dracblade Build
Last updated: 25 Mar 2010 - 22:04
While spending time on the Propeller forums I got involved in an awesome project to make a Propeller based complete Z80 system emulator. There are a few different boards about that are "standard" platforms for extended memory applications, all called blades of some sort. One I particularly liked because of the elegance of the design was the DracBlade. The PCBs were sold through the forum at a very reasonable price, I put mine together from bits from Farnell.
PySnakes
Last updated: 15 Dec 2009 - 22:03
pysnakes: Screenshot of a simple snake like game
Pysnakes is a one or two player game of snake written in python using the pygame SDL bindings. It was originally written for a competition in the British made Linux Format magazine. It should work on any platform with a pygame release. It's been tested on Ubuntu and Windows. The design of the levels and the game in general are heavily inspired by the "nibbles.bas" demo program that used to ship with Microsoft Quick Basic.
Dwarf Goes GIT
Last updated: 27 Oct 2009 - 22:51
I've had some code donated to the project, and wanted to make it a more dynamic update process so the code is now on github. If you're interested in the latest version, or want to help let me know. As always contact address is hairymnstr@gmail.com.
Dwarf PIC programming utility
Last updated: 09 Sep 2009 - 13:33
I had a day or two waiting for parts to arrive recently, and started tinkering with PIC programming in Linux. I was really pleased with how easy it was to program a PIC with my PICKit 2 programmer using the available command line tools, but what I wanted was an even easier GUI interface for it. So I wrote one.
It's not very polished and has had only minimal testing so far, but it should be useful. Basically I wrote a PyGTK user interface that executes the most popular command line operations such as compile a source file, program the PIC or power the PIC and release MCLR to test the application. The full details of the software (licensed under GPL V3) are on my open-source electronics site: tuxtronics.com.
Dwarf: A PICKit 2 GUI for Linux
Last updated: 09 Sep 2009 - 12:34
Too lazy to type out the commands every time I wanted to do something to my project and with a couple of days spare before parts arrived, I decided that what I really needed was a little GUI to run the commands for me. I've used gpasm as my assembler (from GNU PIC Utilities) and the PK2CMD program hosted on the Microchip Website as the back end for this application.
Essentially this is a very simple Python powered GTK interface that executes a number of the most common command line instructions used in PIC development when you click one of the buttons. It provides some feedback to the user about how the command went.
Checkout the documentation at the end of this page, and try out the application [see https://github.com/hairymnstr/dwarf for the latest version].
MPASM - memtool firmware
Last updated: 06 Aug 2007 - 22:04
I wrote an article a while ago about making a tool for reading and writing parallel memory chips using a PIC and a USBMOD2 unit. I have finally got around to writing the code out in MPASM (the original was for the PICAXE BASIC programmed PIC.) The code is fairly simple but shows how a PIC can effectively be used in place of complex glue logic.
Contents
- Source memtool.asm file
- Compiled HEX file, memtool.hex
- GPLv3 License