At a recent meeting Scott Hall told us about a $4 Cypress ARM system that his work group intends to use with a port of an ultra-lightweight Linux called uClinux. Coincidentally there was a recent blurb on Slashdot about uClinux on a Motorola 68k and here is the article, the related Youtube page, and one of the subsequent (in my opinion, classic) /. comments about this subject. The Slashdot article is here.
This Monday’s meeting will feature short (5-10 minute) talks/demos aimed at giving us ideas for future, in depth treatments as well as things to chat about during the latter portion of the meeting. If you have something you think would be interesting and can bring *the nub of it* to convey with 1-2 slides or demo gear and a few minutes, please expect to take part in this. If we can queue up/aggregate slide files or come up with other tricks to avoid the A/V equipment being a bottleneck that would be good. Send a line or two to the email list or comments here so the meeting details can be updated.
The TriEmbed community is encouraged to visit the PCB Carolina 2014 web sit. The conference is all day Wednesday. You’ll see fellow TriEmbed enthusiasts there.
Hi all,
I have been working on a parts inventory site for a few years now. It currently permits a single user to keep his/her inventory of parts. It is my intention to expand the code base so that it will permit multiple users to keep private inventories and allow groups of users to have an inventory for specific projects.
The application is written using the Python Django Web Framework. I build websites using this suite of tool professionally.
What I am asking this group to help with are ideas of what may be useful functionality, in other words what would you like as features if you wanted to use such an application. I’m in the gathering requirements stage of the design, so we are still a ways off from a working system.
Some of my current ideas are:
The specific details of the list above are not worked out as of yet. This is something that I could use some suggestion about. For example, how would different user need to interact? What are reasonable categories?
The current site only runs locally on my home computer. It has no security as of now, so I cannot put it on my public site as of yet.
I will eventually add images of what I have now to give people some ideas.
Carl
Some time ago I got one of the cheapo T-962 reflow ovens. It requires good ventilation. After running it in the garage, propped in a doorway and other kludge settings I implemented an effective ventilation system. It actually came out a bit more “enthusiastic” than I intended.
I built a high performance, 8″ axial fan into the basement’s flue vent that had been used with a wood stove. The original goal was to tie this into a simple hood over the oven.
But I got a fantastic lead to an old but still active Craigslist item with a new low price (thanks, Steven Hausman of Splatspace!). I was able to buy a ductless fume hood with a huge carbon filter, squirrel cage fan and large adjustable enclosure for $100. Apart from the side with doors, two other sides are adjustable to create a “window” to suck air away from hand-soldering operations on a work bench.
The one small detail I hit when the hood was sitting in the back of my beater pickup was that it would not fit through any door into the basement. I had to take it completely apart:
But it’s all together now and tied into the flue/fan system and working well.
I finished writing up my project for monitoring a golf cart battery pack. A very basic sketch with logging to the serial output. Cut and paste to Excel and make pretty charts… Look here.
—> Paul MacDougal
The Amp Hour has been terrible for the past couple of weeks. I’ve seriously wished for a refund of the few minutes of attention I paid them while listening and doing other things. ‘Nuff said.
However this week Chris and Dave have added one more data point to the curve suggesting that when they get somebody else into the conversation their podcast shines. This week’s episode is an interview of Eric Van Wyk, an engineer with amazing credentials. The specific Amp Hour web page for this episode contains many interesting details suggesting Van Wyk and company’s “Mooshimeter” will create immediate salivation if you’re part of the TriEmbed crowd.
IEEE Spectrum has a short blurb about a very creative application of quadcopters. The videos are worth a look.
Join Fred Ebeling at the NCSU Triembed meeting on the 13th as he shares a short pictorial history of breadboarding and gives us an overview of his workbench and prototyping tools. Details here.
I posted slides and code for the examples from the Arduino Interrupt presentation I did on Monday, September 8, 2014. There was discussion after the presentation on how to sleep for an hour or a day or … I added another example to show one way to simulate a long sleep with multiple 8 second WDT interrupts.
—> Paul