Blog 2009
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Flying high
Monday, May 18, 2009 at 9:00pm
Well lots of things have been happening in recent months... I have been expanding my collection of Acorn computers, I now have 2 BBC micros, another RISC PC 600 and an Acorn Electron as well as games on disc and cassette (and a cassette player to load them from) and many other new-old accessories. My best pal Ricky visited for a few days just recently so we decided to take a helicopter flight over Stockholm (a birthday present from my wife) and got the opportunity to direct the pilot wherever we liked. So whilst flying over my house I took the attached picture, needless to say it was a great experience and my first ever time in a chopper.
Recently I've been working on quite a few robotics and PIC projects and you can check out Beagle 3 in my projects section. Its still work in progress, but I seem to be getting somewhere with it at last. I've just added an Oscilloscope to my growing collection of electronics gear which I'm pretty happy about since it will allow me to do more advanced PIC projects and work on old computers with a view to repairing them.
Other than that its situation normal in Simon-land, the wife is off to Amsterdam this weekend with a friend, so I'm hoping to get some quality electronics time while she is out partying ;)
What's the weather like?
Wednesday, March 25, 2009 at 5:00pm
This week saw an interesting addition to my chimney in the form of a bunch of weather sensors. I'd been considering setting something like this up for sometime and finally decided to climb up on the roof and get on with it. The sensors detect wind speed, wind direction, rain fall, temperature, humidity and pressure; this all links wirelessly to a box on my desk which in-turn connects to a computer using USB. The upshot of all of this is that I now have a live weather feed.
Eventually I plan on integrating this with a database and including all the information in this web-site showing a whole range of details about the conditions around my roof.
In other news I have finally finished with the restoration of the A3000 (I decided as a final touch to add a CF card HDD to it which could be removed from the back of the case to save me removing the lid all the time) and I have also ordered a new(ish) Acorn BBC Micro (model B) to add to my collection.
All I need to do now is find some more old monitors... as I seem to be running out of them rapidly.
CF Card Hard Drive
Sunday, February 22, 2009 at 10:00pm
Just a quick update on my RISC PC 600 activities... I have constructed a CF Card hard drive for the machine using a standard IDE to CF Card board, a 3.5 to 5.25 inch drive mounting converter and a lot of plastic and glue. Basically this allows me to add CF cards as hard drives to the machine. The advantage of this is that you can remove the card and then take an image of it which can be loaded by an emulator. Handy when you are converting lots of floppy disks into images, or for sharing files between a real machine and an emulator without the hassle of transferring large amounts of information (the card stores 4Gbs). To be honest, I mainly did it to see if I could :)
Anyway, I finally get to use the second 'slice' of the machine for the DVD-ROM. Hopefully I will soon get another IDE podule for the machine and reconnect the DVD drive as well as another hard drive.
Acorn RISC PC 600
Friday, February 20, 2009 at 08:30am
The Acorn RISC PC 600 has been suffering a number of upgrades over the last week or so... I've replaced the 512Mb Conner harddrive with a more modern 60Gb Maxtor drive (which not only gives me more storage but also prevents the machine from sounding like a jet engine when running), the old CDROM drive is now a DVD drive, the RAM has been upgraded from 4Mbs to 32Mbs, I've added an Ethernet card (i-cubed 600) and finally the operating system has been upgraded to RISC OS 4.39. I've also received the Acorn keyboard I ordered which looks real nice :) The whole box has been stripped down and cleaned and I also replaced the battery on the motherboard.
I would like to upgrade the processor (which is currently an ARM610) to a StrongARM which is 10 times faster(!) however I haven't yet decided whether to do this or not. The video RAM is also expandable from 1Mb to 2Mb, so if I can find a card this would allow me to run higher resolutions which would be nice.
I'm planning on setting it up as a development machine so I can do some assembly and C programming. Now it is running RISC OS 4.39 (which has support for filenames greater than 10 characters) it should be able to support all of the cross-compiled GNU tools which are available on the web. I will get this done over the weekend and should be good to go by next week.
More computer restoration
Friday, February 13, 2009 at 08:30am
Recently I've been making a grand effort to get my old computers up and running again. Since I now have a new desk I finally have somewhere to set them up. The sad news this week was the restoration of an Archimedes A3000 (which belonged to my pal Ricky); turns out that the battery on the motherboard had leaked whilst it was in storage and the resulting corrosion has made the motherboard unserviceable since it has killed the keyboard connectors and surrounding components.
My RISC PC 600 is still up and running and I finally got around to fitting new springs to the slide-down covers on the front of the machine, so the covers now function properly (hiding the drives and displaying the Acorn logo). I'm in the process of setting up an Asus EEE PC to act as a PPP server (over serial) so that I can connect the RISC PC to the Internet - believe it or not, but it is possible to do.
The main reason for this is that I just finished repairing my 1986 BBC Master Compact and I finally have the floppy drive working again - This machine I have actually owned since I was about 12 years old...
The RISC PC is capable of reading and writing ADFS floppies for the BBC, so with the help of the 'Internet' connection I should be able to transfer over BBC disc images to the RISC PC and then copy them onto ADFS L-format floppies and load them on the Master Compact. Why? So I can play Elite, one of the best games ever made. The only thing I have to do is make a new RGB video cable for the Master Compact. It uses some strange looking 6 pin DIN plugs, but it shouldn't be too hard to make.
I've ordered an original RISC PC 600 keyboard off of ebay and hopefully I will get it this weekend (a friend is bringing it over from the UK), then I can get rid of the horrible Microsoft PS/2 keyboard I am using at the moment.
Hopefully soon I will have some pictures of the Master Compact playing some games, I will try to remember to post some pictures here when I have them.
A new-ish computer
Saturday, February 7, 2009 at 18:53am
Thanks to the wonders of blocket.se I have a new computer! An Amiga A500 complete with a Commodore monitor and about 200 games (mostly copies). I've been wanting to add one of these to my growing collection of old computers (I have a ZX81, a BBC Master Compact, an Acorn A3000, an Atari ST Mega 4 and an Acorn RISC PC).
I've been testing it out and, as you can see from the picture, it is working perfectly. The monitor is an old style analogue RGB TTL-level VDU which is great because I can use it to get the A3000 running too (there are no RF TV outputs on it). I just need to build a new cable, but that shouldn't be too hard once I stop playing International Karate +...
Travels in the USA
Friday, January 30, 2009 at 10:45am
I've just got back from a trip to Scottsdale, Arizona in the US (work related) and boy, what a long journey it is from Sweden to the deserts of America. Anyway, we managed to have a little fun amongst all the working and the highlight was definitely the trip to a shooting range where I got my mitts on a Colt .45 revolver and shot the crap out of a few things :)
I've travelled quite a bit in the USA but this was my first trip to the Phoenix area. It was nice to see the sunshine again (it's a little dark here in Sweden at this time of year) and the mountains surrounding the area are definitely worth a view. So now it's back to normal with the exception of a little jet lag.
I'm hoping to find the time to work a little more on my SBC project (see the projects link to the left) and also set up a live webcam pointing at the guinea pigs since it seems like a fun thing to do ;)
Doing too many things
Sunday, January 18, 2009 at 4:25pm
Well it's been a busy Christmas period, but a long welcome break from working. I've been doing some 3D modelling (of my house) and hope to put up some details about it in my project pages shortly.
That crazy idea came from the fact that my daughter and I decided to do some geo-tagged photography for Google Earth since there weren't any photos of our street on there. A couple of days ago all 15 of our (carefully selected pictures) were approved, so I expect to see them on Google Earth shortly.
I also decided to revamp my webserver and finally get my website back online, if you are reading this then it is still working ;) After that I brought a new domain name for my daughter so she can get online and publish some of the millions of drawings she does.
So situation normal... Back to work... Let's see what happens next!