Out with the old... First things first, the CCFL tubes had to go! In with the new... We decided to bite the bullet and order 40 meters of white 5050 LED strip. When it arrived the build began. Considering the current requirements for the amount of LED strip we were planning on using (~36 meters), we decided on a 24v rail for LED power. This meant each 12v LED strip would be placed in [...]
At this point, with the TV in peices, there was a few of us who had gathered around. Primarily fellow engineers and lab techs. That was when an idea was born, whilst talking to each other, Bill Backhouse (lead lab tech and close friend) and I had a brain wave. This is somthing other young engineers would enjoy looking at. So we decided to make it a show peice. A hanging exploded, hopefully working model of a [...]
So, one of the bigger perks associated with working in a multimedia research lab is that you're surrounded by a ton of multimedia equipment. After a long day of fighting with an LTE simulator, its nice to have a 65" 3DTV to watch a film on after hours. Sadly a few weeks ago one of our passive 3DTVs in the lab gave up on us. This was regularly used for subjective assessments by other researchers and, after being [...]
Chinese Dish Name = Being on a low carbohydrate ketogenic diet at the moment means cooking whilst trying to keep carbohydrates to an absolute minimum. Yi-Ling suggested a Chinese dish with string beans and minced beef. Ingredients: Beef Mince String Beans Salted Black Beans (Local Asian foods shop) Spring Onion Garlic Cloves Chilli Salt & Pepper Sugar (Sweetener for low carb) Soy Sauce Begin by chopping your string beans into 2cm pieces. Chop up the garlic, spring [...]
So, this is more of a test than anything else. I want to start getting video up on my site more easily, but I'd like these to be small edits rather than just recorded in one take which can make things a little boring. I took some short clips I shot of Michelle (Yi-Ling) cooking a while back just for fun and together we came up with this as a kind of template / presentation style. I [...]
Some casual snaps from our graduation day. A few more to be added shortly... Louis: Gabi, i need you, I need a good intro for my graduation photo blog post Gabriel Acorda: Don't worry dude, I've got you covered. Do you want standard cheese, or pungent cheese, which stings the nostrils... Louis: The latter, naturally Gabriel Acorda: It's coming to me.... Gabriel Acorda: 5 years ago, we came together in a place that gave us the hope and desire [...]
As i was designing the menu system it quickly became clear that all of the strings required for display would need quite a bit of program memory which simply was not available. Storing these in program memory as variables also meant they were loaded to the ATMEGA328's 2k of ram which will already be managing an array (no pun intended :p) of other variables. This was also a good time to begin considering where settings would be [...]
The Issue When initially turned on the driver would happily receive commands and act on them. If the device transmitting the commands was interrupted then restarted it would cause the driver to freeze. The issue was reliably replicated. The Cause Using an array of serial messages to debug the code it was apparent the issue was the driver getting stuck in a loop governed by a "millis" function. The millis functions are part of the radio library for the Alpha modules [...]
There is an issue with the previously shown fade mathematics which only appear on the Arduino. What seemed strange at first soon became clear. Micro-controllers are inherently more comfortable performing integer mathematics over floating point. After analysing the results of the equations which were output to the computer via serial, the issue became clear. Rounding error of floating point arithmetic. The reason behind this rounding error is a cumulative error build up by recalculating repeatedly with an already error vulnerable result. [...]
A C++ program was written to aid the design of code to be used to calculate and then implement fades on the driver unit. The program reads in all of the values which would be sent over a standard radio packet. This is | BAR | RED Val| GREEN Val | BLUE Val | Fade Time | . It then collects some information which the system will already know, this is the current values of the selected [...]
