Thomas shares makes

Housenumber sign

One of the first things I built when I got my 3D printer was a housenumber sign. I made the writing stand out in contrast by using a filament swap at layer height.

Central Heating sensor manipulation

We used to have a gas-powered central heating system that had no external controls other than radiator valves. It had a sun-exposed exterior temperature sensor on the west side of the house that caused it to refuse to heat in the evening.

I wanted to fix the issue and control it via Home Assistant, and since only the newer models had bus control, I resorted to manipulate the outside sensor readings and designed a man-in-the-middle device.

RFID Card Jukebox with Raspberry Pi

When a friend of mine showed the awesome little wooden Jukebox he made for his kids, I loved the idea, and knew I could make a similar contraption by recycling an old Raspberry Pi 1 I had on a shelve.

EspHome LED Lighting

I hand-built several LED strip controllers with Wemos D1 mini boards and prototyping board. We used them to light our living room.

Home Assistant Touch Screen

My 2017 Christmas present was a voucher for the local electronics shop. I spent it on an 'official 7" raspberry pi touch screen display', which is a nice capacitive touchscreen that you can hook up to a raspberry pi.

I 3d-printed an enclosure from Thingiverse for it, and fitted an RGB LED string around the edges as an extra.

Initially I created an AppDaemon HAdashboard configuration to control my Home Assistant instance with it.

Heat Canon (Salamander heater) controller repair

In the winter of 2016, someone gave me a controller board for a heater. The heater is pretty scary, it burns fuel and blows exhaust and hot air out of what looks like a canon. It has some interesting mechatronics; a fuel valve, an ignition coil, and a fan. It has a flame detection sensor input as well, as a safety feature. I succeeded at repairing the board, but had to write the controller software from scratch.

DIY Automatic condensation water pump

In 2015 we moved into a house which had a condensing gas boiler. When the previous owners installed it, they never installed a drain pipe to dispose of the water that it produces. Instead there was... a bucket that had to be emptied every week. I quickly grew tired of emptying the bucket. With no obvious way to direct the water except over the ceiling, I needed a device that would pump the water. This sounded like a fun DIY project, so I ordered some float switches and a 12VDC membrane pump, then got busy and soldered a simple set/reset controller with... Guess which old-school IC...

How I get the job done, using Vim

I wrote down tips and tricks I use with VIM.

Atmel AT91RM9200 Linux DMX Driver

As final project for my Professional Bachelor degree Electronics - ICT, I developed embedded software. I built a custom Linux based device that acts as an 'Art-Net node', converting a serial DMX-512 stream to network packets.

After a few months of work, I was able to present a working system, with …

SSH MacGyver: Ssh for the Poweruser

Ssh ideas for the power user.

Debugging the free_ecb_at91 board using JTAG

For a school project early 2007 (a study of embedded Linux on the AT91RM9200 ARM9 processor) I got familiar with the GNU development tools and setup required to run a Linux based operating system.

Using the setup described here I was able to inspect the inner workings of Darrell loader in real time, set hardware breakpoints, step through the program flow and inspect values of program variables while the CPU core was halted.

Ancient VB6 stuff

Visual Basic used to be an easily accessible programming language for the windows platform. I spent quite some hours and a lot of creativity with it years ago, and the result is a bunch of half-finished programs. I started creating stuff with VB6 out of interest when I was a …

Notes about my old LAN server

My old server functioned as an internet gateway and DHCP and masquerading DNS server. The last two are not necessary, but it's always easy if you just have to plug you cable into the LAN, and don't have to configure your network adapters. It also ran an Apache web server …

PenguinPages Preprocessor

When I started maintaining a personal website years ago, I kept all content in static HTML files which I uploaded. The server didn't support server side scripting and for a while I used a JavaScript to provide a navigation menu.

The JavaScript menu fixed just that, navigation. Devising a publishing …

DenAgenda: De Nayer Timetables

DenAgenda is a webservice written in Python program I hosted on my webserver. It converted my college's online timetable from HTML (screen-scraping) to the iCalendar format, which is a standardized calendar file format.

The obsolete sourcecode is available under GPL 2 license and is available as a git repository:

Embedded artists Game/Bluetooth board

I wrote this article on using a microprocessor board with GNU tools for an embedded software class back in 2006. It's written in Dutch.

JAL Programmable Logic Controller

When my brother was doing his last year of high-school in electromechanics, he came up with the idea of doing his final project using a homebuilt PLC instead of the usual Siemens stuff. I built the electronics and came up with a framework so he could easily implement his GRAFCET state machine for his part sorting robot for the PICMICRO in the JAL programming language.

This was long before Arduino, long before 'all the cool kids were doing it', and JAL was a free compiler for the affordable PIC microcontrollers. The Arduino of its days.

Linux Screenshots

Here are some screenshots (anno 2006).

Using a (Qume) serial terminal with Linux

In this text I explain how to configure a Linux server so that it can be used with a serial terminal (like the Qume qvt101). This document is not Linux distribution-specific, and applies to any recent distribution that uses agetty (other getty programs should work too, but program's parameters may differ).

Skymeter

Tkskymeter 2.1.0 schermafdruk

Skymeter is a utility targeted at Belgacom [1] customers. Belgacom has a very restrictive policy towards the amount of data its customers can download with its broadband internet service.

Skymeter polls the meter webpage of the Belgacom 'Self care' [2] website and presents the useful …

Vim 8051 assembler syntax file

I wrote this syntax highlighting file for Vim because I had an Intel 8051 course in 2005, and wanted to do my coding in Vim. It's totally optional to have syntax highlighting, but it does give you many advantages. This .syn file will make sure recognised mnemonics and registers are …

Using your WRT54 to secure your email connections

Fetching POP3 mail over an untrusted WiFi public access point is dangerous, as the password is transmitted unencrypted (in plain text). Anyone with a laptop and a suited program can sniff your password right out of the air, along with your email. Sending mails is also impossible most of the …

Howto: Intel 8051 assembler .exe onder UNIX

Download page

I use this spot to put links to miscellaneous binaries I provide on my website.

Filename		Comment	Size
	16f84_clock.sch	Pic84 Clock schematic	85715 bytes
	16f84_clock.zip	Pic84 Clock Sourcecode + hexfile	14340 bytes
	JCS_1.0.6_SOURCE.zip	Jal Code Studio 1.0.6 Sourcecode	852150 bytes …

Geek Toys

Gadget-maniac like me? Then how about some electronic junk you hook up to your computer's unused I/O ports? These toys are simple to understand, have few parts and are therefore cheap and easy to build!

Linux on an iBook G4

On one of the last days of august 2005 I purchased a brand-new 12" G4 Apple iBook Laptop. This page is dedicated to this beautiful piece of hardware, I will share my experiences here. You can also read here how I installed Gentoo Linux on it back then.

OpenWRT as a wireless bridge

I usually have more than one computer set up in my bedroom, a whole LAN segment so to speak. I used to network them together using a 10mbit hub (with a coax connector connected over the (75 ohms television coax) to other PC's in the house because it was the …

Alarm clock using a PIC microcontroller

This is an alarm clock I built. It was very effective during the sort time I used it, because I programmed it to play a very annoying tune through a speaker. I actually started to wake up before the alarm went of, so other people in the house didn't wake up from the annoying pitches it played.

Countdown timer with PIC16F84

This is the first circuit I built with the PIC16F84. It can best be described as an egg timer with only the timekeeping code in place. It's got 4 pushbuttons, a character LCD and a buzzer. I started building this clock because I wanted to build my own Alarm clock …

TI-83 Link Cable

At the start of the third year of highschool (or fourth - I don't remember exactly) we had to buy a TI-83 calculator for math class, it was commonly known among pupils that many games were available for this device. One of the kids in our classgroup had some games on …