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Recently I picked up an Arduino Pro (designed by the guys over at Sparkfun) in order to add temperature and current monitoring to my new Hurricane Power Supply. The Hurricane is designed around Ti Kan’s Sigma22 power supply module but includes a hefty 50VA shielded toroid as well as a secondary 5V power supply (Ti’s Sigma25) for secondary systems such as the Arduino and panel indicators.
The Arduino monitors the air temperature in the Spitfire amp as well as the power supply and displays the data on the LCD display. The colours got a little skewed in the video but in reality the display is a crisp white-on-black number with adjustable backlighting controlled by a PWM output on the Arduino*. The video below shows the boot sequence during which the board enumerates the connected sensors, performs a little calibration and then starts monitoring.
The Arduino also serves a second function though. On the front panel of the PSU are three LEDs that display power, fault and temperature statuses respectively. I picked RGB LEDs for this purpose so that I can experiment with different colour schemes but also so that the temperature light can be dual-purpose, displaying orange for a high temperature reading in one module and changing to red for high temperature in both amp and PSU enclosures. As a bonus this means that I also get full control over the panel indicator brightness with the possibility to enable some sort of “night mode” to dim the LEDs in darker environments.
Presently the data displayed on screen is just there to serve as an example but the Arduino is able to detect and communicate with two Dallas DS18B20 sensors on the 1-wire bus. These are digital sensors with 12 bits of resolution and should be accurate to within half a degree or so. One of these sensors is connected to the amplifier’s dB2 backplane board and communicates over the umbilical cable, the other is connected directly to the power supply’s PCB.
Meanwhile, current sensing duties are performed by Sparkfun’s ACS712 breakout board that can measure up to 5A of current. The Spitfire amplifier should draw about 600-700ma and the transformer has 2x 18V secondaries making 21.6 – 25.2W under normal operation.
Now to get the front panels machined and fit it all together…
* There was some discussion on the Sparkfun product page for the LCD module as to the correct resistance to use for contrast adjustment. I bought a 10K trimpot to experiment but I found that a spare 2.7K resistor did the job just fine with 4.7K being too faint and 600Ohm being totally washed out.
I thought I’d share with you some views of the grounds at IBM’s Hursley Park labs in Hampshire; the offices are located within Hursley Park and the house has several acres of gardens and parkland. The house itself dates back to the 18th Century, originally privately owned it was acquired by IBM in 1945 and has been used as the location for the offices there ever since. Prior to this the site was used to test Spitfire engines during the war.
One of the most notable areas within the grounds is the Sunken Garden, a small paved courtyard with pond and fountain just off the main parkland.
EduSweep 2.2 will be out on Monday and now seems a good time to step back and examine our priorities for 2.3 and beyond. This survey will take less than two minutes and gives you the chance to vote for the features you want to see. It also provides the opportunity for you to flag up any areas of the software that you think are lacking and are in need of attention. Thanks for helping to develop the next version of EduSweep.
I’ve released the source code and written reports for my second year projects from first term. Now that marking is complete I can open them up in the hope that someone else will find them useful. The first two to go up are the Artificial Intelligence Search assignment (a travelling salesman solver) and the Digital Imaging assignment (a 3D windmill simulator using Java3D). I’m still waiting on marks before I can upload my Distributed Systems work, which is a distributed search server application.
All programmers are playwrights and all computers are lousy actors. – Unknown
I am releasing all my assignment code under a Creative Commons license so that it may be re-used and adapted.
It’s inevitable that in any conversation about video games there’ll always be some nostalgic reference to the early days of computing – not the very beginning but the the glory days of the ZX Spectrum, the C64 and the Acorn that marked the advent of home computing for the masses. Of course, I wasn’t around at the time since I only saw 11 months of the 1980s but it’s fascinating to look back on the hardware that made these machines possible.
An elegant weapon for a more civilized age – Obi-Wan Kenobi
Despite this, I was raised on the BBC Micro as – even in 1994 – we had a couple of these in our reception class complete with ‘floppy floppies’ and dot matrix printer. I think that’s when I got hooked on computing and no doubt you all have similarly fond memories of the first computer you used.
As you might guess, I’ve been watching Micro Men – the BBC docudrama detailing the beginning of the UK home computer market, personifying this through the business adventures of early pioneer Clive Sinclair and his ex-employee (and founder of Acorn Computers) Chris Curry. If you haven’t seen it, you owe it to yourself to track it down on the web.
In a fit of geekiness I splashed out and bought an EasyProp kit, which is the board in the post photo. It’s a development kit based around an 80MHz CPU with 32k of RAM and ROM. You get some modern niceties such as an SD card slot, Ethernet jack and VGA output. The coolest part though is the feeling that you’re stepping into the shoes of the early computing pioneers – no high-level languages here and you can leave your fancy booleans and strings at the door, thank you.
Warning: video ID not specified!
I recorded the quick walkthrough above to give you an idea of what the board offers and it’s a pretty amazing feat to deliver that much hardware (essentially a fully-functional computing platform) for £120 – just a hair over the £100 that the ZX80 hit the market at.
Have a think about what you could write using this board. An arcade game? A text adventure? And that’s just the start – there are IRC clients, web servers, music synths, the works. That’s even before you look at the accessories you can buy such as accelerometers, GPS units and motors.
I’ll be posting updates about my first project (a text adventure game) over the next couple of months, along with source code for anyone with a similar board. In the meantime, check out this blast from the past:
To the North again. I’ve been too occupied these past couple of weeks to post here, instead I’ve been getting settled in my new house.
It’s taken about a week to get a phone line and internet connection in which limited my web browsing to library sessions and the slower-than-dialup connection on my phone. On the plus side, it’s a 30 minute walk from my house to the library building so I’ve been getting plenty of exercise in the process! Luckily we’re less than 1km from the telephone exchange so I’ve finally got a 20 meg link to the outside world that doesn’t drop out every half hour (home is 1.6 meg on a good day).
Speaking of excercise I’ve signed myself up for a yearly swim membership at the local gym along with James (of www.ratssawgod.com). I’m thinking 3 times a week before lectures would be a good plan, though initially it’s probably going to result in me sleeping though all the morning lectures!
On the technical side, I’m going to pitch in with as much development work as possible before the SEG (Software Engineering Project) work starts in a month or so. It’s a group project in which 5-6 people plan, design and develop a commercial-grade application which is then tested and given a grade. Once that gets going I’ll need to put any EduGeek projects on hold for a while but thankfully both are at a pretty stable stage right now so I can continue to provide small patches and fixes.
Finally, I’m committing myself to blogging more often. I know people who aim to post daily but in my opinion that’s not sustainable in the long term and promotes short snippets rather than meaningful prose. I’ll be trying to write something interesting 2 to 3 times per week either on technical topics or anything that’s caught my eye.
AUP Informant 2.0.2 is out today – this is a maintenance release which should fix the bugs you’ve reported over the past week along with some that you haven’t. The full list of changes is available here.
The most major bugs fixed are the issues with sending email notifications, problems with varying date formats, client crash on startup and font removal. I released this update originally as 2.0.1 but one of the issues was not fully fixed so this is the revised version – please update to it if you are running 2.0.1.
Important Notes
A word about upgrading from version 2.0.0. You can perform an in-place upgrade, there’s no need to uninstall the old version first. You will need to upgrade both client and server – the software may well work without doing this but I cannot support anyone who is running mismatched versions. I will aim to write future releases so that you only need to update the server application.
Your database will be preserved, however, this time around your settings will not be so please note them down first. If you have been affected by the date bug, you may need to remove and recreate your custom reports if you have any.
Finally, if you have been affected by the font removal issue that was reported, I have a repair MSI available here that you can deploy.
Head on over and grab yourself a copy. I also updated the manual so you might want to download that again too.
In late 2007 I began working on the original AUP Informant. It was only a simple program, designed to work on my school’s network alone. What we wanted was a way to show our usage policy and to automatically gather our pupils’ responses to it; so I pulled up a chair and set about coding AUP Informant.
For our small network it worked perfectly, even if it was a little rough around the edges, but then I was encouraged at the BETT conference to join EduGeek. Like many techs I read the forums from time to time but never got around to signing up and contributing but it was Diello who twisted my arm (gently, I should add!) and convinced me to start posting.
Soon after, I made the AUP Informant software available on the forums and was surprised by how many people were looking for this sort of tool. Despite the simplicity of the program I saw a rush of downloads which prompted me to carry on developing it. There were plenty of feature requests for things such as a second policy, a help window and actions such as logging the user off or restarting the computer if the user declined the policy. While it wasn’t too hard to add these in, it became clear that the software wasn’t designed to be extensible and I had plenty of help requests.
The trouble was that it was designed for one network, not the many variations that it was being used on. The configuration was stored in an XML file that needed editing by hand, the user responses were saved as hidden files in their network shares, to change any settings you had to redeploy the clients. It quickly became clear that I would need to start fresh and make AUP Informant 2 much more flexible and reliable – but how would I go about it and what did people really need?
I spent almost 3 months on surveys and talking to schools to find out what the priorities should be and this is what we came up with:
Easy to deploy and configure with an MSI package available
Improved reliability
Better support for multiple policies
Responses should be recorded centrally and not scattered around the network
And so here we are today, almost a year after the last AUP Informant release. It’s been a long road; longer than I’d planned at least. Faced with my student fees I considered going commercial with the software and my degree studies put a stop to any development from May through June.
My financial situation is a little better now and I can’t bring myself to charge for what is essentially a labour of love. So here it is, free of charge and free of ads – AUP Informant 2.0. It’s been taken back to the drawing board and written from the ground up – all 7000 lines of it- to be simpler, more stable, more flexible and feature rich.
I focused on deployment first of all, working towards a seamless method for both vanilla and CC3 networks. I think you’ll really notice the difference when you try it out! There’s no configuration file to edit, just an MSI installer for the server and a package for the client. The CC3 package wizard can convert the client MSI into a CC3 package without needing a package build machine, just a few simple steps and it’s done. What’s more, the client is less than 1MB when installed and even the server installation should take at most 60 seconds.
The server application helps you configure all settings through the user interface, no text editing required this time around. Any changes to your policy or options are reflected immediately and seamlessly pushed out to clients. Clients will also detect the server automatically so you’ll never have to set the IP or hostname even if you move the server application. It’s now also a snap to define when the secondary policy is shown.
User responses aren’t saved as files anymore (long overdue!) which helps reliability an awful lot. Instead they’re saved in the server database where they are used to produce an overview chart and report data. If you can write SQL queries then you can even create custom reports and save them.
And that’s just a selection of what’s new. Have a look at the feature table to see exactly what’s changed – you won’t be disappointed!
The site has been up and down way too much recently because – quite simply – I’d run out of bandwidth. Well I’ve moved hosts and along the way tripled the storage space and doubled the bandwidth of the site. You’ll find it loads much faster and downloads are now all in one place rather than being mirrored across the net.
There might be some disruption to the software update feature in EduSweep and to the RSS feed but I’m working to have those smoothed out over the next few days. I’m currently sorting through archived posts and beginning to add that content to the new site.
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