CygnusAlpha

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..

Had a great time at the Newbury Radio Rally and an amazing bit of luck finding this Tatung Einstein from 1984 in pretty good condition.  In another bit of amazing luck one of my friends had a bundle of Manuals, magazines and some disks.

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.

Listing Amazon EC2 instances # Class for VM's class Vm include ActiveModel::Validations validates_presence_of :name, :status attr_accessor :id, :name, :dns, :status @@ec2 = AWS::EC2.new() def self.all return @@ec2.instances.inject([]) { |m, i| tags = i.tags.to_h name = tags['Name'] m.push Vm.new( i.id, name, i.dns_name, i.status ) } end def initialize( id, name, dns, status ) @id = id @name = name @dns = dns @status = status end end Listing Amazon S3 buckets # Class for S3 Storage class Storage include ActiveModel::Validations validates_presence_of :name attr_accessor :name @@ec2 = AWS::S3.new() def self.all return @@ec2.buckets.inject([]) { |m, i| m.push Storage.new( i.name ) } end def initialize( name ) @name = name end end https://gist.github.com/CustardCat/7175295 AWS Config config/initializers/aws-sdk.rb AWS.config({  :secret_ac...

Racing last night at Bashley the car was still quite unstable. For the last few races I have been changing one setting at a time to pin down which are making improvements. So far I've stiffened the front springs, moved the shock positions on the rear and toed out the steering a little. The car was better but still quite hard to tame the back end.. If you look closely at the tyres you can just about make out that the insides of the tyres are a little duller meaning that the majority of the cars weight has been on the insides even during dynamic handling. This is a big clue to start looking at the camber adjustments. Camber is the angle of the wheel relative to the track looking from the front of the car. 0 degrees means the wheel is dead vertical. -5 degrees means the top of the wheel is angled toward the centreline of the car. A little negative camber can be useful, but evidently I had too much. I rather unscientifically reduced the amount and in the next heat the car was ...

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...