CygnusAlpha

  Found a nice little JVC GY HD100 at a Radio Rally which will become the base of the next Tapeless Hack. This cam at least is HD (only 720p) But has Firewire, So I need to get the nNovia working with that first. Then if that works, will look to upgrade the nNovia to SSD.

Fitting a female to female 3.5mm panel mount coupler to the AT-5555N so that I can expose the programming interface using the stock programming cable.    The 3.5mm socket compatible with FTDI serial cables.  

These flash floppy emulators from Gotek are great. But they are even better when they have the FlashFloppy firmware loaded. The SFRC922D model I have seems to have some extra holes under the serial/boot jumpers. I chose to use the USB/DFU programming method for which you will need a USB A-A cable. Here's how I put the Gotek into boot mode for DFU: Jumpers for boot/DFU mode. Wirelinks above the white connector. Once in boot mode you can program the device using the dfu-util: I'm using OSX, and used homebrew to install the dfu-util. brew install dfu-util dfu-util --list dfu-util 0.9 Copyright 2005-2009 Weston Schmidt, Harald Welte and OpenMoko Inc. Copyright 2010-2016 Tormod Volden and Stefan Schmidt This program is Free Software and has ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY Please report bugs to http://sourceforge.net/p/dfu-util/tickets/ Deducing device DFU version from functional descriptor length Found Runtime: [05ac:8206] ver=1965, devnum=2, cfg=1, intf=2, ...

Acorn A5000 Dirty, very dirty. And Rusty. After cleaning with acetic acid & IPA Disk drive flashes with a fault code:    00010059    CMOS unreadable PC-style IO world detected ARM 3 fitted/ARM ID read and not ARM2 Long memory test performed Self-test due to power-on So some work needed around the CMOS. UPDATE: 2018-09-23 Fixed the corroded CMOS tracks It Lives! Sorted the rust & painted (Needs lettering) Almost the right grey, but shows up the disk drive :-o

Poor old RiscPC suffered the common battery leak from the PCB mounted NiCd. Sadly it caused some damage to tracks around the CMOS clock and memory. The charging circuit for the NiCd was also damaged. Things I know that work now: * Charging - Replaced the failed 180R resistor with a through-hole type as I needed to also get power from the diode and the track had disintegrated. Not pretty. * CMOS I2C - I watched the waveforms on the logic analyser. * Sound & Video from VIDC Battery replacement. NiMh hidden well away from the PCB  Life! for the first time since 2009! Little bit better! Some more cleaning of SIMs & VRAM Passable, but I think the VRAM needs replacing now. Well, that's the most life I've had out of this recently, so I'm a bit happier with it. Still some way to go. Next steps.  Some new RAM and VRAM.

Hacking the Sureflap Dual Scan Cat Flap To get the RFID codes for the 134.2 KHz Cat chip ID's  Aha! A PIC. And an ICD port next to it. PICKit3 at the ready. I'd quite like to get the firmware off this if possible.

Atari ST A good friend found these in the loft and thought I might find some use for them.  There was some interesting software came with them. Transputers! Occam!  And levels of brownness not seen since the 1970's.  This one cleaned up ok though.

Acorn A300 Bit of a Frankensteins Monster. Bits from A300 / A410 and many upgrades. Unfortunately this one suffered a little from poor storage at some point. Luckily most of the damage is just the back panel. Everything else just needs a bit of a clean.  There's some great bits of wire linking and factory mods on this board.  And a few of my own mods for memory and ARM 3  Bit of rust.. Clean up and repaint..

Trying out a 4 in 1 ESC. FETs look a bit weedy but we'll see how it goes. Also added the camera and vtx.

Project Transputer is coming along nicely. I repurposed the board from another project. It's got Bluetooth and Wifi modules already mounted and 5V and 3V regulators.

Getting the Wayback Machine ready for Maker Faire. Since the last update the radio has gone through some drastic hardware changes.  There is still an Arduino driving the LCD and user interface but the backend has been replaced by a Beagleboard running Angstrom Linux.  This has enabled the radio to stream and play MP3 files and also allows the use of Wifi or 3G data dongle. BBC R&D North visited Maker Faire in Newcastle on the 12th and 13th of March 2011. http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/researchanddevelopment/2011/03/bbc-rd-at-the-big-bang-science.shtml http://makerfaireuk.com/

After a few days wait the Xilinx Coolrunner II kit arrived in the post. The Coolrunner is a CPLD which contains Macrocells, which are a step up from the basic gate array of a PLD and the XC2C256 on this board has 256 macrocells configured via an interconnect matrix. Xilinx provide a programming suite, ISE, which is available for Windows and Linux. However they don't directly support Ubuntu.  Here is a brief howto to get the ISE running on  Xubuntu. The main hurdle with the ISE is that it requires a USB driver,  windrvr6, in order to use the Platform cable (DLC9G). However it is possible to configure Xubuntu to use libusb and to get the programming tool, iMPACT, to use this instead. 1.Install prerequisites.. apt-get fxload apt-get libusb 2. Configure the udev rules These load the correct hex file when the device is attached. jamesb@Jalapeno:~$ cat /etc/udev/rules.d/xusbdfwu.rules # version 0003 SYSFS{idVendor}=="03fd", SYSFS{idProduct}=="00...

Started working on the audio board prototype for the Camera A2D project.  It's based around a pair of NE5532 op amps. The input stage converts the balanced line input from the microphone, and the second stage acts as a preamp with level control to supply the correct levels to the nNovia. Should be on to some audio tests shortly so time to dig the signal generator and scope out.

This is an ongoing project I'm working on which started as a circuit that I decided was necessary to be able to neatly interface the nNovia QC120 A 2D2  recorder to a Sony DXC-325P camera with CA-325P studio back. This interface deals with translating VTR start/stop signals from the camera into GPI signals to pause and resume the recorder when it is in record mode. In addition to the device control, there will also be XLR Balanced line input to be converted to unbalanced line level. There is also the possibility of getting it to communicate with the nNovia RS-422 port and using this protocol to control the device. I'm still working on the final design. I have built the PIC 16f872 based circuit that controlls the nNovia via the GPI control lines and this seems to work very well. The next step with the PIC interface is to try controlling the RS232 port on the nNovia to start and stop the deck and get its status. I will be prototyping the Preamp shortly. I have a plan to use the...

For a while I have had it in the back of my mind to pick up on a couple of old projects that are kicking around the workshop. One of them was a project based on the Droids MUIN board with XBee modules. The original project which was going to be around rocket telemetry is now not likely to happen, but I decided to have a go at getting the PIC development environment set up for the Muin board. The MUIN (PN.990.005) is based on a 28 pin PIC 18F2520 with 10-Bit A/D, 32k Flash, two 8-Bit ports and a 6-Bit port. Oh, and to keep things interesting I want to use Mac OSX and an ICD2 over USB. So, on to the first challenge, finding a development environment. Sadly Microchip don't as yet appear to provide an environment for operating systems other than W*ndows. A quick search on google came up with a likely contender in piklab. Piklab is free and GPL and appears to have many of the features of MPLab, and it supports ICD2 among others.  Installation was greatly eased by using Macports. s...

...The Beagleboard, that is. Beagleboard is a fanless USB powered single board computer powered by an OMAP 3530 ARM Cortex A8. http://beagleboard.org/ It's got USB, Serial, SD/MMC, Stereo audio IO and DVI-D (via a HDMI connector) out. There are projects getting Android and Linux running on it as well as other OS's I'm planning on running RiscOS Open on it. http://www.riscosopen.org Fun times...

It was the Acorn and RiscOS show in Wakefield. I've not been before but I have heard about it and now we're not living too far away it's become more realistic to get to. For a platform whose original creating company died 12 years ago, there is still a devoted if small following. Not only are people still interested in using the machines and OS, but people have taken over development of the OS and there are now two streams of RiscOS development, one through Castle Technologies who bought the rights to the OS and hardware designs and also produced new RiscOS computers in the form of the Iyonix, and http://riscosopen.org who are tasked with releasing RiscOS as an open source project. Interestingly the RiscosOpen project has produced ports of RiscOs which run on netbooks and also platforms such as Beagleboard. There were also people exhibiting older 8 bit computers such as the BBC B and Master. There are people out there now producing new storage solutio...