30/09/2009 by peter.

As you can see one shiny blue box filled with magic.

As soon as I can work out what I need to do to make all this open source and easy for people to build I will post info. Schematics and layouts have been tidied up for release, code still needs comments and everything needs to be slathered with licence thingamajigs.

just need to build a few more units for beta tester(s)

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26/09/2009 by peter.

Right. board populated with 4 mistakes, one transistor round the wrong way, one cap is too small, one track going to the wrong pin of the PIC and the gain resistor of the sensor head-amp a bit too low. Software finished.

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02/04/2009 by peter.

Finally the boards have arrived. now to populate them

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05/03/2009 by peter.

while I was looking at the PCB design I felt it was a bit wasteful of space so I started from scratch and redid it. it is now just 3.5″x1.85″.

After looking for a board house to make up PCBs for this little endeavour I found that crazily if i get them made in the UK there are few people with on-line shops for that sort of thing. if I go to mainland Europe the best I can hope for is still £50+ but if I use Sparkfun’s little side company, BatchPCB, the cost drops off enormously. They only charge $2.50 a square inch plus $10 and then postage. What is crazy though is that it is actually manufactured in china. so my design goes to America, where it is then sent to china for production, then the board goes back to America and then from there to me and that’s cheaper than going down the road to get it done!!!

anyway, boards are now ordered and should arrive sometime this month.

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29/11/2008 by peter.

To machine the various square orifices required for the USB port and the LCD display I need to use my rebuilt Boxford. One problem, the software was still buggy and I haven’t written anything to generate control codes to give it. Simple solution, write a manual controller. That took all of 2 days of spare time to add all the features I wanted and with this I set about making the rectangular hole for the LCD. After much standing and watching the machine produce fine swarf as it slowly ploughed through the metal I had a nice rectangular hole. I de-clamped the box to admire my work when I realised I hadn’t drilled the display mounting holes which would be a lot easier under numeric control. Unfortunately while edge finding the rectangular cut-out, I crashed the machine into the top corner of said orifice (hit “End” instead of “Page up”) then I got the holes slightly in the wrong place but that’s one reason why I will make 2 of them. The first to screw up one and second so that I can test new code and features on my own one before sending the updates of to a beta tester.
The other minor annoyance is the lack of M2.5 nuts to fit the M2.5 LCD retaining bolts. For reasons of stupidity, I ordered M2 nuts. Well it will have to wait until I have a few more bits to order. There’s no point in paying postage on only one tiny bag of nuts.

Anyhoo. Piccies of the box so far

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06/04/2008 by peter.

I just noticed that there have been a spike of hits on my site. After a little snooping through the stats i see that slashdong gave me reference. It looks like someone has been reading what i write. Apologies for anyone else who was waiting for the next instalment. I will try and post some more stuff about the progress as things get done. Comments welcome (they let me know that people are in fact reading this stuff since most of my stats say that the visiting browsers are just search engine robots).

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06/06/2007 by peter.

I have’t written anything here for a bit so i thought i’d rectify that.

I have just bought a new camera, a Canon EOS400D. Here is an example of the capabilities.

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21/03/2007 by peter.

I recently ordered some sample microcontrollers from Freescale. The four little DIP16 chips came all the way from Thief River Falls in the middle of nowhere in Minnesota and in less than 24 hours they were in my hands. Interestingly they were originally manufactured in China. Anyhoo after 5148 miles I now have the little buggers and have to wait for the programmer to arrive which should be coming form where ever Elektor ship from. Below is a pic from google earth of where the UPS tracking data said it went.

EDINBURGH,
GB 03/21/2007 12:28 P.M. DELIVERY

03/21/2007 7:41 A.M. IMPORT SCAN

03/21/2007 7:40 A.M. OUT FOR DELIVERY

EAST MIDLANDS AIRPOR,
GB 03/21/2007 12:50 A.M. IMPORT SCAN

EAST MIDLANDS AIRPOR,
GB 03/20/2007 7:01 P.M. ARRIVAL SCAN

PHILADELPHIA,
PA, US 03/20/2007 8:24 A.M. DEPARTURE SCAN

03/20/2007 6:13 A.M. ARRIVAL SCAN

LOUISVILLE,
KY, US 03/20/2007 4:33 A.M. DEPARTURE SCAN

03/20/2007 12:16 A.M. ARRIVAL SCAN

MINNEAPOLIS,
MN, US 03/19/2007 9:47 P.M. DEPARTURE SCAN

03/19/2007 7:44 P.M. ARRIVAL SCAN

BEMIDJI,
MN, US 03/19/2007 6:40 P.M. DEPARTURE SCAN

THIEF RIVER FALLS,
MN, US 03/19/2007 1:08 P.M. ORIGIN SCAN

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16/03/2007 by peter.

I stumbled across this on the CIA website. It is the official report on what was found in Iraq and makes for interesting reading. I have yet to finish it but it seams that Saddam was not producing NBC weapons yet but was in the process of developing the delivery system. The confusion seams come from his constant hinting that he had these capabilities to various bodies as he wanted Iran to think he did or they would most likely invade him. Also a lot of scientists claimed they were working on things that pointed to the productions of big weapons however much of this research had been cancelled or was not as advanced as claimed. So basically this ended up being a premtive attack. This then raises the question of whether this kind of action is justified or not.

Overall it seams that since the sanctions were imposed on Iraq by the UN they were adhered to less and less and had this continued any longer then perhaps a few years latter there may have been middle eastern nuclear turf war. Given the intelligence presented here, invading seams like a good idea even if they found no functional weapons and only bits, (bit like busting the guy who all the drug dealers says is the Big Cheese and then finding that he was only selling the bags they used to distribute it).

Of course there is the “Do you trust the CIA?” question….

North Korea (Democratic Peoples Rrepublic of Korea to its friends) could be next target since hating the US is the national past time, motto and party line. China may also become dangerous as the government is weakening and nuking the US navy and major manufacturing centres may be in their interest.

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11/03/2007 by peter.

The US has been the worlds super power for the best part of last century and has little to fear but China. Although it is unlikely that China will ever declare war on America and if they did, the days of good old fashioned camo and trenches has been replaced with the “Big Red Button”. However assuming that someone has decided it is not BRST yet and it’s time to do things the old fashioned way, there is still one problem, they are outnumbered.

US population: 298,444,215

Chinese army: 667,657,509

If each American was to fight hand to hand with 2 members of the Chinese army they would still be out numbered. Lets just hope the Americans are better trained/equipped to make up for this deficit in numbers.

Of course Inda is also big with an army of 556,075,946.

(all figures taken from CIA )

Just a little thought for you…

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