Andy Clark's Blog

  • Technology Museums in Cambridge

    Workshopshed
    The other weekend I had the chance to visit both the Centre for Computing History and the Cambridge Museum of Technology. We first visited the Centre for Computing history, the entrance houses a small shop and seating area, serviced by a tuck shop....

  • Testcard generator revisted

    Workshopshed
    Back in 2016 I created a test card generator to help check a small composite monitor that wasn't working. For an upcoming project I need to test a HDMI monitor so I thought I could just use that again. But when I came to dig it out the SDCard was...

  • Year in review 2024

    Workshopshed
    I've not been that active on Element14 the last year due to working on fixing up the new house. Have found some "shocking" electrics such as this socket which was live but the loose wire was not. So the socket tester go a good work out...

  • Moved again

    Workshopshed
    Just finishing packing up and moving out of Scotland. New home will be in Ipswich, expect some photos of the new workshop in up coming weeks

  • Makers Central

    Workshopshed
    Makers Central is on this weekend at the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham. When I last visited in 2019 it was mostly focused on woodworking. But I thought I would check it out again as there's quite a lot of other types of makers there t...

  • KiCAD-GPT is here

    Workshopshed
    I’ve been experimenting with a Beta version of KiCAD that adds an AI based interface to the a popular electronics design application. It has been trained on example circuits found in datasheets, old magazines and discussion forums. Rather than ...

  • Setting the default hardware for Pulse Audio

    Workshopshed
    Mycroft.AI recommends using Pulse Audio for audio inputs and outputs. This can be installed using: sudo apt install pulseaudio Once you've plugged in your hardware you can configure the default devices for input and output so that ...

  • Simple Fan Controller

    Workshopshed
    As mentioned at the end of my last video for the remote temperature monitoring, I've a problem with the base unit having a noisy fan. So I designed a simple control system to reduce the fan speed when it's not needed. https://github.com...

  • Coil Winder

    Workshopshed
    So that I could wind 6 identical coils, I needed some way of counting the turns. So I made a simple addon to my milling machine. This consisted of a few 3D printed parts. Firstly a cam that could be bolted onto the milling machine spindle. And also a...

  • A big RGB LED

    Workshopshed
    Whilst I was building the book nook project I got reading about the WS2811 chips, these are the controller chips behind the NeoPixel RGB LEDs. And that got me wondering if I could make a big version of an RGB LED in a similar way to I'd created o...

  • MBed and magic red light

    Workshopshed
    I was in the Arduino forum the other day, in the Portenta section and I read something rather odd about a bit of MBed software. It's called, as I understand it... Serial crash dump. I have been experimenting with Arduino Portenta and an Adaf...

  • Cross Compiling Micropython on WSL for STM32

    Workshopshed
    Following on from my posts looking at the Portenta H7 Vision Shield I wanted to see if I could get the dual boot working with Micropython running on the M7 core and C running on the M4 core. So I posted in a bunch of forums and got some help from Ibr...

  • 2020 A Year in Review

    Workshopshed
    When looking at 2020, I have mixed feelings.I started January on a high note, I had just been published in Popular Science for my Dancemat project. I'd also been looking at power management in the TMC2300 Stepper Motor driver. And had successfully us...

  • New Workshop

    Workshopshed
    Having moved house back in September I'm slowly getting the workshop into shape. I've bought some benches and given the first one a coat of "garage floor" paint. This should make for a hard wearing surface. I've also decided tha...

  • USB Keyboard / HID

    Workshopshed
    I've been experimenting with the Arduino MKR Zero board and wanted it to act as a USB keyboard. This board is based on the SAMD21 processor core which has a native USB wired to one of the sercom peripherals. But when I tried it out the keyboard w...

  • VNC2 - Getting to Blink

    Workshopshed
    After experimenting with the V2DIP1-48V2DIP1-48 from FTDI connecting over SPI, SPI Slave on an Arduino MKR Zero, I wasn't sure if the Arduino code or the FTDI firmware was the problem. After some more experiments I concluded that there was definitely...

  • SPI Slave on an Arduino MKR Zero

    Workshopshed
    I've a device which acts as a SPI Master and sends data over to my microcontroller which is acting as a slave. Simple, I thought, there'll be some stuff in the Arduino SPI library that will help with that. But no, that's just for the mast...

  • Using a hash function Tokenization during Text Classification on memory constrained devices

    Workshopshed
    I've recently been looking at machine learning techniques for analysing data, in particularly text classification and sentiment analysis. For this I'm using Tensor Flow Lite which can be run against edge devices such as microcontrollers. Thanks to Si...

  • 2019 Year in Review

    Workshopshed
    At the end of the previous year, I'd been working on an Azure Sphere based project and that drew to a conclusion in January due to the immaturity of the SDK at the time. But the project was reimagined as the enchanted compass using an Arduino MKR1000...

  • PanaVise Jr

    Workshopshed
    I have just been sent a PanaVise JrPanaVise Jr and a few other goodies thanks to Daniel from Element14. From young age I've just soldered stuff on a solder mat, propped up as required, I did try a small plastic vice in the past but it was not re...

  • Azure Sphere Secure IOT - I2C Compass

    Workshopshed
    My experiments with U-Center and the GPS module had shown that the direction indication was not very reliable. Following a link in Kevin Saye's post, I discovered a command that should tell the orientation. But my device did not seem to be generating...

  • Azure Sphere Secure IOT - Connecting Sensors

    Workshopshed
    OptoSensorAs David Murphy mentions, a stepper motor solution needs to know where the arrow is pointing when the device starts up. Looking in the spares box, I saw I had a Omron EE-SY310 reflective sensor from an old tachometer project, I used the pho...

  • Azure Sphere Secure IOT - Device Update

    Workshopshed
    From the Overview in Visual Studio, you can get the "Device Status", from there you can get the application status of the attached device.It's also possible to launch the Azure Sphere developer prompt from here and run the "azspher...

  • Azure Sphere Secure IOT - Connecting Hardware

    Workshopshed
    Updated SDKThis week there was an update of the SDK for the Azure Sphere so I thought I'd download that and the other tools I was using. The SDK now has support for storage, real time clock, storage and external MCU flashing, although it looks like t...

  • Azure Sphere Secure IOT - Connecting to Azure Functions

    Workshopshed
    For my IOTCompass I need to be able to determined the direction to turn in. This can be done by passing the current and target positions to a function which can calculate a bearing. The calculation for this is approximated by the following formula as...