CygnusAlpha

Each year on Fathers day the Newbury and District Amateur Radio Society organise their rally which has been at the Newbury Showground for the last few years. For anyone not familiar, radio rallies or hamfests as they are sometimes known are a show organised by an amateur radio society. They usually take the form of a field with trade stands, a club stand and a car boot section. There is often a very varied mix of things on sale from old wartime radios, military surplus, old broadcast equipment, telecom equipment, components to computers and all manner of bits and pieces.   This has always been one of the nicest rallies and one which has been on my list of favourites since about 1993, so I thought I'd share a few photos of the day. We got there a little late, but it was still a good day. I picked up a few bits for the DATV station I'm planning on building, an NDS CSR820 MPEG2 IRD and some L-Band filters and splitters. I also met an old friend which was nice. It wa...

  Maker Faire Newcastle, UK 2011 Last week Makers and Hackers from all over the world converged on the Centre for Life in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne for the UK's third Maker Faire.  Maker Faire is an event organised by O'Reilly's Make magazine to bring together art, crafts, technology, engineering and science projects and to celebrate and encourage the Do it Yourself mindset. The BBC's Research and Development and Television Platforms groups were there meeting the public and making friends with other Makers. We had several exhibits ranging from the fun Blink-o-tron with its trapped Weeping Angel, Conduct your own orchestra to the more serious Universal Control which allows subtitles to be sent to mobile devices.  The Maestro demonstrates in an entertaining way our ability to interface to the Microsoft Kinect and to use thedata provided to control video playback. Basically you use the baton and move your hands in the manner of an orchestral conductor and you ca...

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  There is still an Arduino driving the LCD and user interface but the backend has been replaced by a Beagleboard running Angstrom Linux.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/

Been using Git lately.  Much goodness to be had, but some commands are a little unfamiliar if coming from Subversion. So, here's my crib sheet of handy Git recipes I think will be useful. Configure your Git bash-3.2$ git config --global  user.name  "CustardCat" bash-3.2$ git config --global user.email " custard@cpan.org " bash-3.2$ git config --global -l user.name =CustardCat user.email= custard@cpan.org Create a new project and commit your code... # Create a project and cd into it.. cd my_project # Make the project a git project git init # Add all the files in the project to git git add . # Commit your local files git commit Get status, logs & diffs # Status of changes git status # Diffs git diffs # Add more files git add file1 file2 etc.. # See what's been happening git log git log --stat --summary git log --pretty=oneline # See diffs between versions. nb. only need first few chars of version git diff 16f8..8bd2 g...

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.

...Just for a laugh... I'm reading this amazing book at the moment,  http://www.dspguide.com/ and thought it would be fun to code some stuff in Ruby. The code... #!/usr/bin/ruby require 'complex' class DFT         def initialize( size )                 @freq = Array.new( size, Complex(0,0) )         end         # set data         def data( data )                 @data = data         end         # get frequency table         def freq                 @freq         end         # reset the frequency table         def reset                 @freq.map! do |...

The unit... #!/opt/local/bin/tclsh proc fib {n} {         if {$n==1}  {return $n}         if {$n==2}  {return [expr {$n-1}]}         if {$n==3}  {return [expr {$n-1}]}         return [expr { [fib [expr {$n - 1}]] + [fib [expr {$n - 2}]] } ] } The test... #!/opt/local/bin/tclsh package require tcltest 2.0 namespace import ::tcltest::* source ../src/fib.tcl # 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 test fib-1 { Test first is 1 } {         fib 1 } 1 test fib-2 { Test second is 1 } {         fib 2 } 1 test fib-3 { Test third is 2 } {         fib 3 } 2 test fib-4 { Test fourth is 3 } {         fib 4 } 3 test fib-5 { Test fifth is 5 } {         fib 5 } 5 test fib-6 { Test ninth is 34 } {         fib 9 } 34 test fib-7 { Test f...

Todays T-Shirt choice reminded me of the Six Characteristics of Shorinji Kempo. Ken Zen Ichinyo – Body and the mind are one. Riki Ai Funi – Strength and power should never be separated from compassion. Shushu Koju – Defence comes before attack.  Fusastu Katsujin – Defend and protect without killing.  Goju Ittai – Use hard and soft techniques together, in balance. Kumite Shutai – Pair work is fundamental.   And Live Half for yourself, Half for Others. http://bit.ly/mo_custardcat That is all.

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...

Today we had a discussion in the office about the current TDD (Test Driven Development) course we are following and it has to be said there is more than a little confusion over it. One of the main sources of this confusion seems to be 'why' we are doing it.  And I can see where the confusion creeps in. Quite a few of the members of the team have years of programming experience and may already or have been practicing TDD in some guise or another so those people already know the benefits and have adapted the process to their way of working. To me this is fine. Perhaps they would be better served with working on some other very useful principles such as the SOLID principles. [Robert C. Martin] Some of the other members know of TDD and are perhaps reluctant to use it because of past experiences or whatever.  These people need to know what the goal is, what will they be good at at the end of this? At this point someone started explaining that it was like learning Karate. In some ...