The big day (Hackerspace GO launch) is getting close, and I’m quite busy! Today I’ll be presenting the project at the Slovenian School center here in Gorizia! There won’t be much time, I’ll be doing it during the break, but I hope I can capture just a little bit of attention, so more people will attend the big presentation on Friday.
About Friday, we still have some things to sort out, but we’re basically ready. We already had a meeting with the guys from our hackerspace beta in our headquarters, and we brought some stuff in. Nothing fancy, just basics! Oh, and we have a server! :-)
Our site is finally online! It’s not much graphically, but I hope it will be full of content soon!
So, this blog was long time silent because I have some things going on: I’m about to start a hackerspace in my home town, Gorizia. By now we have 4 “founding” members and we are growing fast. We still have to:
Hey!
Unfortunately I’m quite busy this weekend, I still have an exam to pass! So the big post with measurements of the LC200A will have to be delayed. However, my plans to start a hackerspace in my hometown Gorizia are sailing smoothly, and soon I’ll do a talk on hackerspaces to gather some followers! Wish me luck!
I just stumbled across this, I’m digging in the physics now… If this thing works, it will surely be a major breakthrough!
So, I’m currently working on a cool Cocoa interface for my shiny new multimeter, that has a USB connection, but no program for Mac! :(
Fortunately, upon taking it apart I discovered it uses a quite standard multimeter chip, the ES51922 from Cyrustek. It has a RS232 (TTL level) output, which is then passed to a opto-isolator and then fed into a RS232 to USB converter, Silicon Labs CP2102.
Fortunately, I was able to obtain the ES51922 datasheet, which includes the RS232 protocol. I will summarize it here:
One measurement packet is 14 bytes long, and you usually receive them at a rate of 2 Hz.
I made a quick-and-dirty python script (I will post it on my github) and the reading works fine. Then I tried to port it in Objective C, and trouble began. It looks like there’s no IOKit-way of reading from a serial port, you just have to use the POSIX calls. Then i came by the nice AMSerialPort package, from Harmless Code. Yay! Just what I needed! I patched up some code, and tried to get some measures.
The horror! It just spits out bogus data! I think I stumbled upon a bug in the AMSerialPort source, possibly one I introduced when I ported the source to use ARC. Looks like it’s hardcore debug time!
I’m almost done with my exams for this semester, so it’s finally time for some electronics projects! My to-do list is:
And that’s all I think… Oh, and I have to build a keyboard stand for my Keystation! Gonna post some pictures maybe ;)
Sorry, no post this week ‘cause I was on a last-minute trip to the CERN institute in Genève. I had lots of fun, the LHC is an incredibly BIG machine. I won’t be able to ever forget the multitude of wires and switches and OMG, the screens in the control room! Anyways, the second part of the LC200A review is postponed to next week. And now, back to my dear neural networks…
