After a successful day's hacking on the Arduino line-scan image sensor at the Dorkbot Bristol Hack Day, I can now claim FIRST LIGHT! I had the sensor working earlier in the week, but I now have a way to actually see what it can "see" (all 128 pixels of it). I thought about installing and learning a C++ graphical framework like Qt or GTK+, but ( Read more... )

Last week, I received a copy of Donald Alcock's Illustrating BBC BASIC, another in his series of hand-drawn programming books. According to the dedication, the manuscript for this one was saved from a house fire by the Fire Brigade. It seems to go much deeper into implementation details then the generic Illustrating BASIC. I suppose that's to be ( Read more... )

On FreeCycle, I have acquired a very fine Kodak Carousel slide projector. It's much nicer than my dad's old Gnome projector, which is of the type that literally slides the slides into place behind the lens. The Kodak has an infra-red remote control, auto-focus, a zoom lens and an 80-slide magazine ( Read more... )

I'm starting to get things ready for several things that will happen in 2009: Dorkbot, Tech Adventure, the Maker Faire and the 30th anniversary of the Compukit UK101. So, naturally I need to do a web site update for the UK101 site, which has been largely unchanged since 1998 when GIF images with JavaScript roll-over code was considered state-of- ( Read more... )

I've been working on the little rotary encoder gadget that I took along to last month's Dorkbot Bristol. It's a CD-ROM hub/motor, stripped out of a broken drive and repurposed. I've wired up the three hall-effect sensors to give a signal that represents the rotation of the hub, and connected it all to an Atmel AVR ATmega8 microcontroller. I've ( Read more... )

I showed off a little circuit at Dorkbot that I'd made up on a breadboard. It's basically just a brushless DC motor from a CD-ROM drive, hooked up to three comparators and some LEDs. The three hall-effect sensors in the BLDC motor generate about 150mV, and change polarity as the motor is turned by hand. This makes a contactless rotary position ( Read more... )