Solderless Drawdio
The Drawdio (created by Jay Silver) combines drawing with audio. You can get kits to build one, or you can solder one up on stripboard. But I wanted to make one without faffing with a soldering iron - using screw …
Parallelpoints · A personal notebook
Ideas, experiments
and things learnt.
Writing about engineering, computing and the details that make things work.
Latest writing
View archive →Bah Ubuntu Lucid upgrade
Just upgraded my desktop from 9.04 to 10.04LTS. I’d skipped 9.10 because of the Intel graphics shenangigans - there’s 133 pages to that thread - gives some idea of the level of aggro that seemed to be …
Nonlinearity makes people do strange things
Control engineers know that non-linearity causes problems - the rest of the world could maybe take note… What is non-linearity? Non-linearity is where the response of something is out-of-proportion with the change …
Executable comments
Comments in code are very useful. But not as good as executable comments… I write image processing code at work. One of my FPGAs has a piece of code which generates a signal which has a hard-coded number of clock …
Making a hot-wire polystyrene cutter
We found a load of polystyrene in the garage this afternoon, so we decided to make a hot-wire cutter for it. Basically, you take some wire with an ohm or two resistance and pass a few amps of current through it. The wire …