Villard Cascade Voltage Doubler

I recently watched an interesting EEVBlog video about Villard Cascade Voltage Doublers. I have had some neon tubes (NE-2) in my parts collection for a few years now. I have always wanted to drive them from a relatively low voltage DC supply. I decided to spend the afternoon/evening designing a circuit to drive the neon tube from a 12V supply.

The Glowing NE-2 Neon Tube

Homebrew Solder Fume Extraction System

Over the past year I have been slowly building a solder fume extraction system. It has been a slow project because there was no real push for it. I have been doing a lot of soldering lately and decided that it was time to wrap it up and blog about it.

This system is based upon a vacuum cleaner. I am using a vacuum that goes by the trade name Shop-Vac. They are well known for their tremendous reliability on construction sites and other rough applications. I chose this vacuum because I assumed it would be up to the task of extended run times under medium to high load.

Here are a couple of pictures of the completed system:

The lab side of the completed fume extractor.

The garage side of the fume extraction system.

Here is a video demonstration:

Creating a Glass Circuit Board

I was inspired by CNLohr to create my own glass circuit board. I decided to create a 2D LED matrix because the layout is simple enough to fit onto a single sided board.

I decided to take a different approach than CNLohr took. Rather than adhering a layer of copper to the glass and etching out the traces, I used copper tape and glued each trace to the glass. Unfortunately this takes away the printed aspect of PCB manufacture but it allowed me to complete the project using parts that I found in a local craft store.

Here is a picture of the completed project.

Completed Project

Here is a video demonstration:

Graphing the Links between Articles on Wikipedia

One of my summer projects last year was to graph the links between Wikipedia articles. I was inspired by the Wiki Wars concept and wanted to see if I could programmatically beat the game. I used C# and the Mono .NET runtime to build a Wikipedia pathfinder.

Here are a couple of graphical representations of the results. They make great wallpapers!

My Current Wallpaper

A Zoomed Out Link Graph

Designing a Window Manager for an AVR Microcontroller

I have been experimenting with the uVGA-II VGA controller for the past couple of weeks. It is an amusing piece of hardware that is capable of drawing graphics onto a VGA framebuffer. The VGA controller takes care of line drawing algorithms and helps to hardware accelerate the drawing of geometric primitives (squares, circles, triangles, polygons, lines).

Once I realized the power of this hardware I decided to implement a window manager like you would expect on any standard desktop PC. I have used a mouse for user input to the system.

Close-up of the Default Configuration

The default system boots with three applications: Theme Manager, Audio Player and Window Factory. The Theme Manager is used to modify the colors of the system theme, the Audio Player is used to playback some audio files stored on an SD card and the Window Factory is used to create new windows for the purposes of demonstration.

Slightly Blue Theme, More Windows

Here is a video demonstrating the system.

Enlightenment Desktop on Fedora

I have been a full-time Linux user for just over 2 years now and I have never looked back. In the world of embedded software, web development, database design and electronics design it makes a lot of sense for me to run a free operating system.

Just today I was watching a very entertaining video about a shell named Terminology. This shell is unique in that it allows images to be "catted" to the interface. I did some more research and discovered Enlightenment Desktop.

Fun with Embedded HTTP Servers

I have been distracted for the past week by an embedded HTTP server. I am currently taking a very exciting course entitled Internet Embedded Systems taught by Senior Embedded Software Designer Robert Laswick. The end goal of the course is to achieve web based control and status of hardware.

Olimex MOD-IO with ENC28J60 Module

After I completed the core objective of the course I decided to run absolutely wild with the concept. I created some Makefile targets that minify, gzip and convert web resources (HTML, JavaScript, CSS) into C header files which I can then serve up to the browser.

AVR VGA Generation

I have always wanted to create a VGA generator. It has been a personal goal of mine for some time. Over the past couple of weeks I toyed with the idea and finally decided to implement one. I decided to implement it as a framebuffer to allow for general purpose display rather than application specific display. I implemented my own small colour gamut to be memory and CPU efficient.

I have made the source code available on Github.

Daft Punk from Tron Legacy

VGA Controller on a Breadboard