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.
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.
A couple of weeks ago I went to the Dutch PHP Conference 2010 and I had an amazing time. The event was held in Amsterdam at the RAI centre. The primary sponsor was iBuildings and the entire event was organised by the totally awesome Lornajane.
When DPC 2010 announced the call for papers I submitted both a proposal for a tutorial on PHP extensions and one for a talk on web services. Both were excepted. I had proposed both half day and full day versions of the tutorial the organisers chose the full day version. This turned out to be a lot of work. Basically I would be talking for 6 hours in four 90 minute slots.
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I am still at the Dutch PHP Conference and very enjoyable it is too. I have now given my two talks. The first was an all day session on writing PHP extensions in C. The second was a regular 45 minute session on Web Services For Consumer Devices.
This tutorial covered writing PHP extensions from the very beginning right through to writing objects and classes in C. I think this went well. Its a lot for beginners to cover so naturally some people got lost towards the end but I have had some good feedback. Links to the slides and examples are below.
| Slides | PHPExtensions-Final-20100612.pdf |
| Example – Hello World | hello_world-20100612.tgz |
| Example – Hello World (Extended) | hello_world_extended-20100612.tgz |
| Example – Memory Stream | memory_stream-20100612.tgz |
| Framegrab (PECL) | http://pecl.php.net/package/framegrab |
This talk covered what to consider when writing a service to be used by an application on a consumer devices. I agree with the commenters who felt it was a little light. Yes it needs revision before it gets reused.
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…)
Rather belatedly I am delighted to announce that I have been accepted to speak at the Dutch PHP Conference in Amsterdam this June. DPC is the premier European PHP conference and is sponsored by iBuildings.
I will be running a tutorial Writing a PHP extension in C and speaking about Web Sevices for Consumer Devices. I look forward to seeing you there.
I found I had a need to capture and process still video images from video devices using PHP so I wrote the Framegrab PECL extension. This post introduces the basics of Framegrab.
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