Ah, there’s nothing quite like the feel of a fresh, crisp OS install. It’s just that the OS I’ve just installed is Windows XP. Now that makes no sense… Or does it? As I’m now playing with my BBC Master again, I felt the need for a Windows machine to have alongside it. There’s a bunch of utilities that run… Read more »
Does anyone still use flowcharts for programming? What with today’s complex development frameworks it seems unlikely that anyone’s stopping to draw diagrams on paper. But maybe if they did we’d have fewer security vulnerabilities – just sayin’. My addiction to computers, in the early 1980s, was driven in part by ‘30 Hour Basic‘, an introduction not just to the language… Read more »
While idly mulling over how one might create a control panel for an eight-bit microcomputer – something I plan to do for my (very) slowly progressing Zolatron 64 project – it occurred to me that there might be occasions when it would be useful to send a brief pulse. I didn’t have a specific use case in mind. In fact,… Read more »
The best projects are the ones you finish. And as projects go, this IoT room thermometer – and, for good measure, clock – was one of the easier ones. To recap, I wanted a thermometer in my office to measure the temperature and compare that with how I’m doing, at any given time, in terms of hand pain. I have… Read more »
In many ways this is Part 5 of my four-part series on SMD soldering because it addresses problems I had with reflow soldering and TSSOP ICs. I used two TSSOP chips – the TXB0104 and TXB0108 level shifters. Both have pin sizes of 0.3mm and a pin pitch – the distance from the centre of one pin to the centre… Read more »
On the Raspberry Pi that I’m using to control my DottyMatrix serial-to-parallel Centronics printer interface there are two main software components – a web-based PHP/JavaScript front-end UI and a back-end server programmed in Python. So these need to talk to each other. Here’s the overall architecture of the solution: The matrixSvr.py program is intended to run permanently on the RPi… Read more »
It’s one thing building an interface – it’s quite another working out how to use it. My DottyMatrix serial-to-parallel device is designed to drive my venerable old Epson MX-80 F/T III dot matrix printer (although it should work with any printer using a Centronics parallel interface). So far, I’ve mostly spoken to it using a terminal, sending text directly from… Read more »
My BBC Master micro is alive again, thanks to a generous donation. So what was wrong with it before? Buggered if I know. The Beeb suddenly developed a fault a couple of years ago. On powering on, it would show the OS greeting and sometimes the disk filing system greeting but would then hang. I tried a few things but,… Read more »
The DottyMatrix project began when I thought, ‘It would be nice to make use of my old Epson MX-80 F/T III dot matrix printer’. The problem was talking to it. But then I thought, ‘It’s just parallel printer interface. I’ll make a microcontroller-based device to act as an interface. How hard can that be?’. The answer, it turns out, is… Read more »
The PCBs arrived from the fab house and I was impatient to try them out. They’re nothing clever – just a way of saving a bit of wiring for my ESP8266-based IoT room thermometer. Aside from headers, there are just four components (not including the pullup resistor I don’t need anymore because I made a mistake). I hand-soldered on the… Read more »
Over the past three posts I’ve looked at three ways of soldering SMD/SMT components on to a PCB – by hand, reflow soldering with a hot air gun, and reflow soldering with an oven. Now it’s time to draw some conclusions.
If you’re working with solder paste, as I was in the last post, there’s an easier method of applying heat than blasting the PCB with a hot air gun. And that’s to put it in the oven. This is how most commercial soldering is done these days. But this reflow soldering is easy to do at a hobby level, too…. Read more »