If you’ve been reading this blog in cronological order, you’ll know about the FTDI adapter I made for the Z88. If you don’t read this in order, you’ll know about the Minimus programming I’ve been doing and what the Minimus is (note that I’ve not blogged about that yet… be patient!) Now to turn […]
I have already blogged on here about how awesome the Z88 is, and how ahead of it’s day it was. Well, being awesome in your own right doesn’t cut it these days – so you’ve got to be able to communicate and talk to things to be considered worthwhile. The biggest weapon the Z88 has […]
One of the great things about the Raspberry Pi is the general purpose input output (GPIO) pins. They allow it to interface with other circuits. The Arduino, however, is all about connecting with other stuff, and with analog input and PWM output, it’s better at it than the Pi. But the Pi has more processing […]
I have seen the future of computers. Yes, really I have. What would you say if I said the future would be something about the size of a pad of paper. Which runs off of 4 AA batteries, giving it about 20 hours of use or 100 days of standby. Storage is solid state with […]
A machine is a device that does something useful, right? Well, what about if the thing it does is useless? Well, here is my useless machine
First of all, allow me to apologize. I set up my Tweeting front door at the end of 2011. Its only about 6 weeks away from 2013 now! So, what is a Tweeting front door? Well, its a regular front door that sends a tweet every time it is opened. Why would anyone want to know […]
A while ago I started logging temperatures to Pachube via a Nanode. For the most part this works fine, but sometimes something breaks and I might lose a few hours or days worth of data. It might be the Nanode that’s gone down, or Pachube, or (most likely) my Internet connection. So I decided to […]
If you have seen my previous blog entry, you’ll know I have been playing around with an ATtiny85 for an upcoming project (more on that later…). Using an Arduino (or, in my case a Xino from Ciseco) is easy enough, but when a sketch needs lots of tweaking to fine tune it, it means the […]
As regular followers of the blog will know, I love Arduinos and all the stuff they can do. Those that know me will also know that I don’t love Christmas, particularly the seasonal decoration stuff. So this project was a nice mix of the two! I decided to make myself some Arduino powered Xmas lights […]
This week I… Built a Xino Basic for Atmel as sold on http://shop.ciseco.co.uk This is sold as a kit that anyone with even the most basic of soldering skills can put together. This is just about the cheapest way to get an Arduino compatible board that fits the standard Arduino shields. It also boasts a […]
I’ve been messing about with Arduino derived micro controllers, and have been looking for a way to get them to send simple messages to and from each other. Something simpler than TCP/IP (which requires special hardware and relatively large libraries to run it), but more generic and flexible than just connecting an output pin on […]
A couple of days ago I got a Xino board like this one. Not is this about the cheapest way to get an Ardunio compatible microprocessor, but it has the benefit of a nice little prototype area on board too. So, although it fits standard Arduino shields, many simple projects can be completed on just […]
A decent multimeter is great, but there’s times when you just want to have a quick check to see what signals are high, low or neither. A logic probe is ideal for this, but the cheap ones are about £15+, so I decided to build my own. For less than a quid!