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Just returned from a two hour after work meeting with the local school governors and business representatives.

The whole aim was to establish links into the school to promote 'solution engineering' and to expose the kids to some real life problem solving.

Is it me? These guy's spent the entire two hours talking a DIFFERENT language than me. Education 'speak' is obviously something I didn't learn while I was at school!

I'll let you know if anything actually happens, I'm planning to keep this going for the rest of the year, after this I'll make a decision whether to stay involved or walk away.

Just installed a new tool chain on my dev PC, I'm going to experiment with communicating over USB via the Cypress FX2 high speed chip. This is the chip used on Hermes, Ozy and my new fpga dev board (I'll be ordering this week) XYLO-EM.

Yesterday I finished the schematics and PCB layout for my fpga based stepper motor controller. I'll be ordering the boards after the 15th (payday), so I guess I should start work on the main controller board.

So many things to do, not enough hours in the day.

Crap, the white stuff is back!
Roads are in chaos, took an hour to get home (6miles).
Let's hope the rain forecast will wash it all away over night.
Chores now over, time to do some 'proper' work :)

New watch, freebie from my stationary supplier, probably last about a month!
But it is a Timex :)

Monday work over, chores over, and tea on the table :)

Almost time to play.

I did find this today, VERY cool geek thing :) I want one....

http://www.calcwatch.com/index.html

OK all the building blocks for my Magnetic Loop Controller are now working on my development platform.

I've created a short video, so you can see it in action:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2w69H2S1wY

I can now start detailed design, with confidence that this project will provide the solution I'm looking for :)

Haircut! & progress on my mag loop design.
Shown here is the dev platform for the stepper motor and driver circuit, I've just finished putting together, I'll be hooking this up to the PIC dev environment this afternoon :)

Thank God it's Friday! It's been a VERY long week. Good news, hair cut in the morning, and as you can see I REALLY need it :)

My Mag loop controller is taking shape nicely, all PIC functions are working on my dev board, the last piece in the puzzle was to design a stepper motor controller, I've decided to use a dedicated driver chip, SLA7024M, but was looking to couple this up with some programmable device to implement the state logic.

After looking at professional boards, most seemed to use a GAL16V8 chip, unfortunately I don't have the programming tools for this chip, so was forced to look at other alternatives. Yesterday I decided to try using an fpga, perhaps completely over the top, but I have the MAXII dev board here used as a Byte-Blaster.

I've never written anything in Verilog, let alone played seriously with Quartus, however after studying Altera's application note 488, I now have code that not only compiles, but runs on the dev board driving LED's, clearly demonstrating the state logic to drive the SLA7024M.

A small step perhaps, but I'm over the moon :)

I can now start the schematic with confidence that this interface will work.

OK, lets get practical....


I want one of THESE!