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”)
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]