News

2010-04-22 - Lots of USB

What started out as a project to build a USB Performance Monitor for my buddy Darren turned into an epic USB hacking session lasting several weeks and resulting in Building a PIC18F USB device as a beginners tutorial, then a more complex Open Source Visual C++ Class for USB Generic HID Communication. Finally after a lot of research and coding this turned into the complete Open Source Framework for USB Generic HID devices based on the PIC18F and Windows based around C#.

I still have a little way to go with this since I would like the C# class library to be able to support more than one HID device (so if you have two of the same plugged into the computer you can use both). I'm also planning on moving over to the new 2010 edition of Visual Studio, so a little more learning curve there also.

I've already built another USB reference device for testing multiple devices, so hopefully I will find some time to get this sorted soon.

-- Simon Inns

2010-03-28 - General updates and some Commodore magic

After a lot of work (and reading CSS books!) the site update is now complete and I hope you like the result! I've now included a Commodore SID 6581 Datasheet on the site which I converted to text and graphics using a combination of OCR, manual copying, scanning and Powerpoint (to create some clearer diagrams). I hope this will be useful. Thorsten Klose over at the midibox SID project added in a link to it from their project page, if you like 8-bit music then check out the project.

-- Simon Inns

2010-03-20 - New look and feel

I've changed the look and feel of the website somewhat to allow for a fixed width body. The default mediawiki monobook skin was difficult to read on large wide-screen monitors, so I've now fixed the site to 1024 pixels. Furthermore I've made some changes to the overall graphical layout whilst trying to keep my previous 'yellow' theme intact. I hope you like the new look!

-- Simon Inns

2010-03-19 - Paying the bills

I'm gradually integrating Google AdSense into the website at the moment. Need to pay the hosting fees somehow! Hopefully it won't distract too much from the content. Any complaints, let me know.

-- Simon Inns

2010-01-27 - Faster Stronger Better!

I've just finished moving my website over to a professional mediawiki provider and host... Hopefully the site will be much faster now as there is much more bandwidth available (it was previously running over my DSL connection on a machine in my house). There shouldn't be any issues, but please bear with me if there are!

- Update (2010-01-28): I just added in embedded YouTube videos to the site to make them easy to access and view

-- Simon Inns

2009-05-18 - Projecting projects

There's more in my blog now including details of a recent flight in a helicopter. I've also updated my projects pages with information about my on-going robotics projects and some other bits here and there. You can also view a gallery of my collection of retro computers in the projects section. I've recently got some more, so hopefully I will update this section soon.

-- Simon Inns

2009-02-20 - Still typing away

I've been adding information to my blog about my various computer restoration projects as well as updating the project pages of this site with the progress on a few of my more 'modern' endeavours. I will probably add a 'retro computing' section to this site some time soon so I can keep track of all the hacking I do on my old computers.

-- Simon Inns

2009-01-18 - Lots of additional content

After some serious learning-curve issues with mediawiki I am now getting the pages in order. I've just added a template to deal with news articles. Hopefully, before the end of the century, I will get this site together correctly!

I've also added a guestbook where you can leave comments. (and then removed it later because of spam)

I used to blog quite a bit over on Facebook, but haven't seemed to be able to keep up the pace (only 2 entries in 2008...) So I've now transferred all my blog entries over to this site and I will try to remember to update it!

I have started work on the 3D house model project page. I should have all the images uploaded shortly.

-- Simon Inns

2009-01-16 - New mediawiki site online

I've finally got round to sorting out some new software for my website. I'm hoping that a wiki driven site will allow me to do more updates and put more content online. Life's been crazy with too much travelling, so I need something I can adminster from afar.

I've also installed this on a completely new (and improved) linux box, so I can add more features as I see fit. All that's left it to add content, so watch this space.

Update: I've just added 2 sections, one about my arcade machine which I built and another about the arcade machine I restored. Take a look in the projects section.

-- Simon Inns

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