My little boom-gate has made it to work now and been hooked up to the test automation harness. This pic should explain the spaghetti reference in the post title… This may all look a very unsophisticated , but the systems behind this are industrial strength and pretty comlex. It’s kind of humbling to think of [...]

Continue reading about Model Boom-Gate – the sequel (or “More Spaghetti than an Italian Restaurant”)

Simon on August 28th, 2011

My project at work at the moment is a large Physical Access Control System (PACS). We have automated some of the testing of physical devices with an I/O interface and API into the control devices. As a bit of fun I built this to hang off the controller rather than watching events and status updates [...]

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Simon on February 7th, 2010

With the delay from lightening to thunder, the small flash inside my CE device actually came first; followed by me wondering “what the hell was that?”; then the thunder and pretty shortly after was my realisation of what had just happened; followed by my expletive of choice. I am SO glad that I forked out [...]

Continue reading about CRACK; FLASH; F*CK!

Simon on February 6th, 2010

Up to this point, for my embedded SPARK entry, I have been playing with the embedded sensors, actuators and micro-controllers for the Control Stations and RC Cars. Time to get serious about the core code for the Control System (which, incidentally, is what I will largely be assessed on). Before I can start developing in [...]

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Simon on February 2nd, 2010

Physical Setup The hardware to build a quadrature encoder is pretty simple. For the sensors, you need a couple of photo-interrupters and something to do some very lightweight logic and timing calculations (in my case the Arduino). The encoder is a slotted disk, with equal length and spacing of “light” and “dark”, which rotates through [...]

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Simon on January 25th, 2010

One of my feeds recently popped up a post on a competition run by the Microsoft embedded group to develop a Windows CE device with a project that encompasses their theme of “Fun and Games.” The format of the comp is: Round 1 – Write a three page proposal for your project idea. Round 2 [...]

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