Thomas shares makes

I designed a simple door handle during COVID-19 lock down. After my kids slammed the kitchen door against the radiator a few times, I had to glue the existing handle again and again. I didn't feel like installing a door stop (also, shops were closed) for this old door that will be replaced at one point in the coming years. I did feel like modelling a replacement object...

I have Raspberry Pi's in different rooms, and one thing I use them for is to play music to speakers.

Each of them has two music player services on it (MPD, Spotify), and it's a bit annoying that I have to stop a player when I want to listen to the other one.

Since I'm running home assistant as an automation hub, I wrote two short automations that stop the already playing service when the second one kicks in.

In the summer of 2019, I bought my first 3D printer, a Prusa MK3s. I've been super happy with this sweet toy, it works like a charm.

Let me tell you a bit about my experiences with it...

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.

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

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.

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.

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...

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 basic functionality and buttons+LCD interface working.

I wrote a special Linux (character) device driver for the AT91RM9200 microprocessor's built-in UART's built-in UART. This device driver provides a simple and straightforward way to use the AT91's UART on a DMX-512 universe.

This article is meant to provide some information about the project. It is not complete and will be written up on over time.

Ssh ideas for the power user.

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.

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 kid. I didn't have any programming experience, and literature I got from the library.

I compiled a list of the things I created in VB6 when I created my website years ago, and for nostalgic reasons I still keep it here. Be warned these programs are childish and useless. Fortunately there is none of its nasty code here to look at.

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, to provide an interface to some functions.

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.

Here are some screenshots (anno 2006).

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).

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 given a nice color. Also values that are entered are only highlighted if they are valid. Note that the colors depend on the color theme you choose in Vim, no fixed colors are used. You can easily add extra registers specific to your 8052 to the .syn file, the file should be self explanatory.

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 time, since most ISP's only relay mail from computers directly connected to their network.

These two problems are solved by fetching and sending your email via an encrypted connection between your laptop and Internet gateway at home. If you run Linux and have a WRT54G, and it's running OpenWRT, you're almost there. Just follow this guide and you'll be set in under half an hour.

This is a summeray about how to about using an 8051 assembler used in a college course with POSIX compatible operating systems using Dosbox.

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