Back in business

By -
It took a couple of days to sort out the hardware problems that hit me last week.

It seems that the CPU in my workstation has fried itself. I think I know why, and I'm hoping that a new CPU will fix the problem.

At one point it looked as if two servers had also failed, but it turned out to be a problem with my aged UPS. I had to do a bit of re-cabling but both servers are ok.

I removed the hard drive from the workstation and mounted it in one of the servers. All the data was there, which was a relief. The drive was reasonably well backed up but I would have lost a day's work - annoying rather than catastrophic. As it is I've lost nothing.

I am using my Toshiba laptop as a temporary replacement. Its major disadvantages are that it's a Windows 7 machine and has no parallel port.

I got back to Arduino development on Thursday; on Friday the USB to TTL cable arrived from Oomlout, and I now have my Veroduino working. I'll write about that soon. Meanwhile, I'd like to give due credit to the UK suppliers I've been using for components.

Bitsbox supply a good range of useful components, and provide a fast mail-order service. They charge a flat rate of £1.50 for postage and packing within the UK, which is great value. I've placed several orders with them; everything has turned up in the next day's post.

.:Oomlout:. (link to UK company) specialise in Arduino and Arduino-related bits. Their excellent ARDX starter kit is a great way to learn about Arduino fast.

Oomlout are committed to open source; all their board layouts, manuals, guides and programs are downloadable and published under a creative commons license.

I've only dealt with the UK subsidiary. Oomlout's parent company is based in Vancouver and supplies the North American market. Oomlout offer great technology, good value and fast service. My Veroduino is based on their Arduino-compatible component bundle.

I still use my local Maplin shop for common components that I need right away. Maplin also offer a mail-order service, but their postage and packing charges are quite high. If I need to order specialised components I normally buy from Farnell who offer keen prices and a very broad product range. Farnell now own CADSoft, developers of the widely-used Eagle PCB layout package.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Controlling a Raspberry Pi Pico remotely using PySerial

By -
Image
Update : I'm using thie code below in another project, and found that I had not correctly fixed the reported bug. The new version passes automated tests, and I am pretty sure it works OK. I have changed the name of the class to Talker  since it can both send and receive information. Apologies to all concerned for the bug! Introduction You can use a Raspberry Pi Pico as a powerful peripheral to a host - a Raspberry Pi, a Jetson Nano, a laptop or workstation. In this article you'll see how to interact with a Pico running MicroPython or CircuitPython by writing some Python code that runs on the host. The software is easy to use. It enables you to send a Python statement to the Pico and read the results. The statement can be any valid MicroPython code. Setting up the host and the Pico For this article I've used a Raspberry Pi as the host, but any computer running Windows, Linux or Mac OS will do so long as it has Python 3.5 or later installed. In particular, you can use this t...
Read more

Five steps to connect Jetson Nano and Arduino

By -
Image
Yesterday's post showed how to link a micro:bit to the Jetson Nano. One of the members of the (unofficial) NVIDIA Jetson Nano group on Facebook asked about connecting an Arduino to the Jetson. Here's a simple recipe for getting data from the Arduino to the Jetson Nano. It should work on all the Jetson models, not just the Nano, but I only have Nanos to hand. On request, I've added a recipe at the end of this post which sends data from the Jetson Nano to the Arduino; it turns the default LED on the Arduino on or off. The recipe for sending data from the Arduino to the Jetson has just 5 stages: Program the Arduino. (I used the ASCIITable example). Connect the Arduino to the Jetson using a USB connector Install pyserial on the Jetson Download a three-line Python script Run the script.   Programming the Arduino I used an Arduino Uno, and checked it on a verteran Duemilanove (above), but any Arduino should work. You'll need to do this step usi...
Read more

Raspberry Pi Pico project 2 - MCP3008

By -
Image
This post show you how to drive the MCP3008 8-channel ADC using a Raspberry Pi Pico. I'll start with a personally embarrassing and annoyingly relevant story. I'll also tell you about a minor 'gotcha' when using SPI on the Pico, and how you can avoid it. Finally, I've include the code and fritzing diagram I used to test the interface. First, the story. Back in 2012, when the Raspberry Pi was fresh and new, I was running a startup called Quick2Wire.  We made add-on boards for the Pi. Just before Christmas we sent out our first batch of boards to a small army of beta-testers. The beta boards didn't work. Somehow a single trace on the pcb had got deleted and one of the GPIO pins was isolated. The boards were still usable and it wasn't too hard to solder in a jumper wire to replace the missing trace, but it was very embarrassing. It wasn't just that we'd shipped boards with a defect. The really annoying thing was that I'd set up an  automated loop-bac...
Read more