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.
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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.
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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...
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I wrote down tips and tricks I use with VIM.
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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 …
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Ssh ideas for the power user.
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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.
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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:
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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.
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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.
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Here are some screenshots (anno 2006).
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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).
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Skymeter is a utility targeted at Belgacom 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' website
and presents the useful …
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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 …
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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 …
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Note
This is a how to about using an 8051 assembler used in a college course
with POSIX compatible operating systems using Dosbox.
It was only useful to my fellow students at the De Nayer institute, so I
wrote this in dutch.
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I use this spot to put links to miscellaneous binaries I provide on my website.
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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!
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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.
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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 …
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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.
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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 …
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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 …
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If you would like to see something added to this page (e.g.: you have an interesting site, or useful links), let me know
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Note
I wrote this piece of advocacy in dutch. Linux used to a thing I explained
frequently and this is where I pointed people to afterwards.
Deze pagina heb ik volledig gewijd aan de vrije computerprogramma's die ik
gebruik op mijn computers. Het zijn professionele programma's zonder ruwe
kanten, waar iedereen direct mee aan de slag kan. De programma's zijn
vrij in de zin dat hun broncode (ontwerpplannen) vrij beschikbaar is
zodat elke programmeur met tijd en zin verbeteringen kan maken.
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This is the final project I created my last year of highschool (2003-2004). It's about
stepper motor control with an AVR microcontroller and BASCOM. I
designed a PCB with AT90S2313 microcontroller and ULN2003 Darlington array to
drive the stepper motor. It has a chapter about stepper motors
that might be …
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