Here are the slides to the talk I gave at Wuthering Bytes 2013 at Hebden Bridge, here in the UK.

http://www.cyberspice.org.uk/downloads/HardwareCurious.pdf

There is a Flickr group for the Open Source Hardware User Group (OSHUG) and photos from this years camp have been uploaded to it. The photos below are courtesy of Carrier Detect. The group can be found at http://www.flickr.com/groups/oshug/pool/.

Me speaking

Hippiegunnut interfacing to her Pi

Here are the slides to the talk I gave at Open Source Hardware Camp 2012 here in the UK.

http://www.cyberspice.org.uk/downloads/EmbeddedLinux.pdf

As part of my BBC Micro PC project (more about this later) I need to turn the keyboard in a BBC Micro in to a USB hid device. I could just rip the insides out of a PC USB keyboard and solder wires on to the back off all the key switches but that seems somewhat messy. So I decided to design a micro-controller circuit to read the keyboard and to appear as a standard USB HID device. The neatest solution is to have the micro-controller drivng the keyboard circuitry the same was as the BBC Micro main board does. This post explains how the keyboard circuit works. (more…)

I’m currently developing a new project. Its a bluetooth enabled bracelet. I wanted to write an iPhone app to control it. However, much as I like my iPhone 4, Apple’s policy about locking the thing down sucks. So I then looked at writing an Android application for my G1. The problem with that is that bluetooth support only arrived in Android 2.0 and T-Mobile/HTC ceased upgrades at 1.6 on the G1. Since my G1 is two years old and out of contract I decided to be brave and upgrade it to Android 2.2. Note the G1 is called the HTC Dream in many markets.

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I am pleased to say that I have finally gotten around to starting to publish details of the hardware projects I have been working on.

I have created a new site http://projects.cyberspice.org.uk/ which contains all the details of these projects. Over the next few days I will be updating it with the details of Beebthernet, my programmable earrings and so on. Each of the projects will be described in detail and links to software and schematic downloads provided.

The first documented project is my ethernet for a BBC Microcomputer project known as Beebthernet.

So in the middle of March I was panicking about whether I would get everything ready in time for Maker Faire UK. Like last year Maker Faire UK was held at the Life Science’s Centre in Newcastle-upon-Tyne as part of the Science Week there. Unlike last year, this year I had been accepted as an exhibitor and was going to display a variety of projects, so I took the Friday as vacation for final preparation and I needed it. (more…)

While I’m announcing appearances I am excited to announce that I am presenting an Arduino workshop at Manchester Geek Girl Afternoon Tea this month at Madlab, Manchester’s Hackspace in the Northern Quarter.

I will be bringing a long several Arduino-a-likes together with a variety of components and CDs of the IDE so that we can get together in groups, code and play.

I am delighted to announce that I have been selected to exhibit at Newcastle Maker Faire. The theme of my display will be crafty geekery.

I am intending to take along items which are a mix of traditional crafts such as knitting and jewellery making combined with tech. For example programmable earrings, a temperature sensing hat and a bag that has a proximity detector and RFID tag so it can detect its owner.

I am also going to show off a couple of my other projects like an ethernet adapter for a BBC microcomputer and a “Mood Wall” (It analyses twitter tweets for the mood of the content displaying patterns and colours which reflect the prevailing mood).

Hopefully I will see you there!

I like snakes. This weekend I will be collecting my new snake, he’s a baby Royal Python. I have been worried about the temperature in the vivarium I will be housing him so I built an ethernet enabled monitoring device to do a science!

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