Custom controller for Hannover flipdot displays

I, and others, have been working on a replacement controller for Hannover flipdot displays.

I haven’t had much success at getting the newer version (with Ethernet support) to work yet - but wanted to document that this work is taking place.

However, the old version, based on damow’s work does work well! And has been working well for years.

Jubilee Line Door Button modification - custom PCB

During the event a few years ago I had some spare time so bought some Jubilee Line door buttons from the London Transport Museum online vintage shop. At the time they were very good value and sold unrefurbished.

I wanted to use one to control the Hue bulb in my bedroom, but as the built in circuitry wasn’t suitable I designed my own.

Okay, not so much design, moreso completely overengineer.

Launching a Pico Balloon!

Over the last few months I’ve been working on building a pico balloon payload for the university society I’ve been president of, TinkerSoc.

This has been my first foray into designing PCBs and writing code for (just) the ATMega328PU, so it’s taken a little while! For communications, I decided LoRa (the 433MHz version, and not to be confused with LoRaWAN - this is raw LoRa) would be the best choice - it’s in the licence free ISM band, modules are relatively cheap and it has great range. For processing the ATMega328PU was chosen simply because I have experience with the Arduino ecosystem. For temperature, the LM75B was chosen - again because I have experience with it. And the serial Ublox NEO6M GPS modules, which are very easy to find cheaply on Aliexpress were chosen simply because of their price.

SCSI2SD - an easier way

I got a SCSI2SD v5 board the other day for a Macintosh Quadra 700 as the original hard drive had finally died.

Unfortunately this machine (at the moment) has basically no I/O - the floppy drive is not functioning properly and I do have a SCSI CD drive, but not SCSI1.

So… I needed a way to install Mac OS 8 without using the floppy or CD drive.

I decided to use the SD card as both the HDD and the installation media. To start with I hooked up the blank SD card to my modern computer, downloaded a Mac OS 8.1 ISO (https://winworldpc.com/download/7724D496-62C2-11E6-977E-525400B25447) and wrote the ISO to the SD card, like I’ve done before with USB sticks. eg diskutil list # to get SD card identifier dd if=MacOS8_1.iso of=/dev/[SD card disk identifier]

TAPAS

TAPAS is the Timepix Analysis Platform at School and is a web platform I’ve been developing over the last couple of years for analysing radiation data from CERN’s Timepix detectors.

I originally developed it for my Extended Project Qualification but now have extended it massively.

TAPAS is now used by many schools and organisations around the country - and is ready for over 300 schools and their students to analyse scientific data. TAPAS will also be the home to data from the LUCID payload on TechDemoSat-1 that is currently in orbit.

Developing for GridPP - grid-analysis

Since getting access to the UK Grid, I’ve been starting to write some of my own software to run on it. Initially, I have been working on a simple analysis system, using lucid-utils for actual analysis, to run through a folder of XYC frames and output a CSV file that is similar to that of what TAPAS (https://starserver.thelangton.org.uk/tapas) produces - but designed for a much larger scale.

The system uses Ganga to easily submit jobs to the GridPP DIRAC instance, requiring you to only enter a ZIP path and a couple of other options. You can even submit a job with a ‘one-liner’ really easily! The analysis software is avaliable on CVMFS at the following path: /cvmfs/researchinschools.egi.eu/software/grid-analysis It can also be found on Github: https://github.com/willfurnell/grid-analysis