Here are the slides to the SPI and I2C talk I gave at Wuthering Bytes 2014 at Hebden Bridge, here in the UK.

http://www.cyberspice.org.uk/downloads/SPIandI2C.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

I am currently working on a project that comprises several components individually managed in SVN. These components are built and then linked in to the final binary. To makes things easier I wrote a release script that creates an editable commit message with the SVN revisions of the components and commits the final binary. I thought it might be useful to others so generalised it.
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This will be my first blog post in a very long time. Life has been busy and, in my day job, productive. Unfortunately this has meant that activities outside of work have been somewhat curtailed. But today I am ‘bunking off’ early as it is the monthly PHP NW meeting in Manchester so I am on a train heading across the country to it. This is giving me a chance to write this! (more…)

The BBC Microcomputer is 30 years old. The BBC News web site had an article about it but from the article you would think that only males benefited from it. Well it wasn’t just the boys who had fun with them! (Photo © Anachrocomputer) (more…)

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.

Flickr provides a comprehensive API to access its data. It also has a very neat notes facility that allows you to add notes to a region of an image which pop-up when you mouse over the relevant area. Flickr provides API calls to add, edit and delete notes but not to enumerate notes associated with an image. To do that you have to do a little more work.

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