Surface Tension
Last updated: 19 Apr 2023 - 21:43
Just less than a year ago I decided it would be interesting to try out a Microsoft Surface as an alternative to an Android tablet and maybe more portable than my venerable ThinkPad T430. I got a cheap unit from eBay to try it out, it's a Surface Pro 5 so pretty old now. Of course I didn't want to use Windows on it and I was thrilled with how easy getting a nice Linux install was on this very Microsoft hardware. I didn't do anything particularly special to get it running, just followed the instructions on GitHub.
For the most part my experience with the platform was good. Performance was pretty good. The pen and touch screen worked pretty well. I used it for coding, PCB layout, lots of FreeCAD work and even a bit of gaming via Steam. I only had 8GB of RAM which would probably have been okay but the ultra high definition display meant that apps were taking a lot more RAM than I'd expected and it very easily ran out of memory.
Novena Open Source Laptop
Last updated: 30 Apr 2014 - 21:06
The idea of an open source laptop makes me feel the same excitement I felt using Linux for the first time over a decade ago.
Earlier this month Andrew "bunnie" Huang, hacker of the Xbox (read the book) and creater of the Chumby announced a crowd funding campaign for his Novena open-source laptop. I'd heard about the project before and liked the design. In fact I have several almost identical system level designs in my engineering notebook waiting for me to have the time and money to make one myself. Since it is unlikely I'd ever get around to building anything that costly or complex on my own I'm really excited to hear that I can buy one of someone else's design.
This, Jen, is the Internet
Last updated: 02 Nov 2013 - 14:22
The Internet: This, Jen, is the internet.
For OggCamp this year I had the idea of taking along a replica of The Internet from the British TV series The IT Crowd. If you haven't seen the episode, it revolves around a clueless IT manager being selected as the employee of the month. As employee of the month she is expected to make a presentation to the shareholders about her area of expertise. Keen to show her up, the two support guys manage to convince her that a small black box with a red flashing light is actually the Internet.
The box has become a favourite amongst fans of the program with dozens of versions of it having been built. It even made a brief appearance in the final episode of the series broadcast earlier this year.
WiFi hotspot and DHCP from a BeagleBone
Last updated: 28 Jan 2012 - 20:55
The BigTrak project had to be mobile, and that meant having a WiFi card attached. This looked simple on the face of it, a USB host socket on the board and a modern 32bit Linux kernel, however it became more complicated partly due to the lack of sources for the embedded system and partly because of my ambitions.
Hardware Interfacing on the BeagleBone
Last updated: 27 Jan 2012 - 20:28
BeagleBone: The all new smaller BeagleBone ARM based dev-board is a step up in features from the Beagle Board and a step down in price.
The BeagleBone is an ARM applications processing platform that runs Angstrom Linux and provides a lot of 3.3V I/O connections, for more background see my unboxing and getting started article. In the unboxing review I ran a bit of bundled java-script that flashed a light on and off, but there's much more to using I/O on this powerful processor. Like with most embeded controllers these days half the effort is in getting the right function selected and enabling the pin drivers. There are several steps and modes of operation which I'll go through separately. I'll discuss command line tools and python control here, but there is a pre-written javascript library called bonescript.js that comes pre-loaded on the board that provides an Arduino-like syntax and runs on the node.js javascript interpreter, I'm not going to discuss that here as it is under heavy development and has only very rudimentary features at the moment. I'd recommend having a look through the code if you have a BeagleBone, it's accessible from Cloud9 IDE on port 3000 via a web browser.
BeagleBone un-boxing and hands-on review
Last updated: 11 Dec 2011 - 00:27
BeagleBone: The all new smaller BeagleBone ARM based dev-board is a step up in features from the Beagle Board and a step down in price.
The new BeagleBone from Texas Instruments is here! Farnell sent me a review copy this week, and are taking orders. I've prepared a video intro about getting up and running with the new board which is really easy. A few of the highlights are in the review below.
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.
Setting up pk2cmd on Ubuntu
Last updated: 05 Dec 2009 - 21:32
The trickiest part of getting Dwarf installed and working, I think, is installing the pk2cmd program, and configuring permissions for the PICKit2 Programmer. This tutorial runs through exactly how I do it on an Ubuntu system, but it should be applicable to most modern Linux distros as there are no Ubuntu specific tools involved here.
DISCLAIMER: This stuff involves altering system files and settings. I am not responsible for things going wrong on your system even if you're following this guide.
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.