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Bitcoin Adventures
I’ve been following the Bitcoin ecosystem for a few years now, and seeing as a coin is now worth well north of 100USD, I decided to finally explore bitcoin wallets and mining under OSX. What are Bitcoins? A lot has been written about Bitcoins over the past weeks as they’ve broken the $100/฿ mark. Without […]
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Agilent E3631A Power Supply Accuracy
During the course of my thesis, the need for distraction – plus the need to save some labor inspired me to develop automated testing methods. I wrote a little previously about setting up PyVISA on OSX, but didn’t show any real examples of its use. Here, as a proof of concept, I measure the linearity […]
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PyVISA on OSX
So after some persistance, I’ve managed to get PyVISA working under OS X 10.6.8 Snow Leopard on a late 2008 MacBook Pro. Download and install NI VISA 5.1.2 for OSX In your home directory, create the file .pyvisarc with the contents [Paths] VISA library: /Library/Frameworks/VISA.framework/VISA Download and untar PyVISA 1.4 Install as root with easy_install […]
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Keithley 2000 DMM Repair
I’ve been shopping around for a nice bench DMM for a while now, so I bought a busted Keithley 2000 off Ebay thinking that it would be an easy repair. I assumed that all the input protection in a modern DMM should fail first to protect anything important, and all I would need to do […]
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GIT URL Changed
I’ve started using Cloudflare and this has required a small change in my git url. I’ve fixed the url in all posts describing my repositories. If you have been collaborating with me on a project, read on to update your repos. In the past, you might have checked out a repo from me like git […]
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LaTeX on WordPress!
Yay, now I can blog like I think… in !
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Teaching Brewing
Photos from the brew courtesy of Micah Eckhardt This Friday and Saturday the Media Lab hosted its first Festival of Learning and I volunteered to teach beer brewing. I’m hoping to use this post as a repository for some of the content covered and some of the information I skipped over in the handout. This […]
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Anduino
The Anduino is a pretty streightforward clone of a Sparkfun Arduino Pro Mini and Ed Baafi’s Fabkit/Fabduino. Just as Ed did, since there is no 8/16Mhz oscillator in the fab inventory, I used the internal oscillator. This is an 8M oscillator that fits on this board. I felt compelled to put together an Arduino clone […]
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EAGLE Tools Revisited
I revisited the tools I previously put together to process EagleCAD files for manufacture. I extended my export tools to generate all the gerbers required for most major board houses (like Advanced Circuits) and PNGs required for Fab modules (used by the Media Lab’s Modella). As icing on the cake, I also wrote a python […]
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FabISPkey
This semester, I’ve been fortunate enough to take Neil Gershenfeld’s How to Make (Almost) Anything. For one of the first assignments, we’ve been tasked with fabbing (routing on the modella and stuffing) Neil’s FabISP which is based on David Mellis’s FabISP which is based on Limor’s USBTinyISP which is based on Dick Streefland’s USBTiny. I […]
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EAGLE Makefiles
After getting a a little frustrated with generating boards for manufacture (particularly Advanced Circuits barebones), I banged out a quick Makefile to speed the compilation. This of course will work best on Unixy systems, I use it on my Macbook Pro with Macports. The makefile depends on (of course) GNU Make, gerbv, and EAGLE. I […]
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Instek GDS-820C Teardown
Teardown of the Instek GDS-820C oscilloscope on a lazy Friday afternoon. It’s a fairly interesting design, two layer boards, no parts are leadless. The finest pitch components are the Altera FPGA and the Freescale CPU. Definitely “older” technology than a modern Tek or Agilent scope. Looks like a prototype I might build. It’s a good […]
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Cypress FX2 on OSX
Getting Ben’s (derivative of David’s) SSRP to work under OSX with modern GNU radio libraries, and have a few notes. To build firmware for FX2 chips – which are 8051 cores, you need SDCC. I got it from MacPorts. sudo port install sdcc To program FX2 parts on Linux, use fxload, a part of the […]
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Documentation
I put together a rig to document what runs across my desk, so hopefully more posts in the future! The setup is composed of a Magic Arm attached to an AutoPole with a Super Clamp. The camera I’m using is a Canon A710 IS modified with CHDK. I built a simple USB remote release based […]
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MIT CBA Fab Modules on OSX
So, I’ve managed to build the MIT CBA Fab Modules on OSX. After many requests, I’ve put up a brief description of how I did it. In Niel’s code, the makefab script builds the makefile which in turn builds the code used to generate tool paths for the Modella, vinyl sign cutter etc. First, using […]
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GNURadio in OSX
After a little effort, I got gnuradio running under OSX with MacPorts. Thankfully, there is a fairly nice package in macports which contains most of the dependencies needed to install everything for gnuradio. Unfortunately, the most recent version of sdcc is not compatible with usrp. So, to install gnuradio, you need to first install an […]
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EagleCAD and Advanced Circuits
UPDATE I have posted an automated tools for gerber export here UPDATE So congratulations! You just routed 3000 nets and placed 250 components! You are probably going a little crazy, seeing things that could be placed more efficiently and thinking about how you would route them. Well you’re not out of the woods yet! You’ve […]