Engineer John Whittington's personal project blog
I recently purchased a Wahoo Headwind as part of my static trainer setup. The device lacks a button remote in favour of App based control. Whilst this works okay in principle, anyone that has used a static trainer knows that in the sweaty heat of the moment trying to use a App is frustrating at best! So I decided to use the opportunity to explore using (embedded) Rust on the Nordic nRF series.…
Minnow is a tool for using DAM (Debug Accessory Mode), providing an interface to SWD or JTAG and/or UART from the device. It expands upon this concept to include a USB-UART and some utility for use within test rigs. It could be considered SWD over DAM with a sprinkling of USB cereal - unlike usb-cereal it does not use the Chromebook UART mapping in favour of maintaining USB-C rotational symmetry.…
I recently had to check a CAN node was providing a cyclic message within a 10% threshold of the defined period. Logging the messages, it appeared that it was slipping by as much as 25% at times. In addition to a hardware specific logger, I was debugging with a SocketCAN ‘gs_usb’ compatible tool and wanted to ensure that the host OS was not introducing any timing error. SocketCAN candump has a flag…
cyme is a Rust CLI tool I developed for listing system USB buses and devices - a modern cross-platform alternative to lsusb . Here is the README intro: The project started as a quick replacement for the barely working lsusb script and is my yearly Rust project to keep up to date! Like most fun projects, it quickly experienced feature creep as I developed it into a cross-platform replacement for…
It’s been six years since my Nixie Pipe project - my interpretation of a modern day Nixie Tube . Whilst the project was successful and has merit as an Nixie Tube alternative, an element of the inspiration was perhaps shying away from the electronic design challenge of a real Nixie Tube project. So I decided now was the time to do the fabled project of an Electronic Engineer: a Nixie Tube project.…
My latest clock project has been the longest and most challenging to complete. There have been times when I’ve been tempted to can it or thought I’d reached a dead-end but persevered. I had to keep reminding myself that I do these projects primarily for the challenge, to learn new things and to further my knowledge: if it were simple I wouldn’t have started. Overall I’m now fairly happy with the…
I’ve migrated this blog from Wordpress to Jekyll. Wordpress worked but since I write everything in Markdown before posting it, Jekyll fits into my workflow better. Wordpress become overkill and slow or my needs; it’s not really designed for power users and I didn’t use most the features. In addition, Wordpress required plug-ins like Jetpack in order to prevent an overwhelming amount of SPAM and I…
Entrée - like a Canapé but tastier…yes the logo is, and name was, Canapé but I didn’t want to face a Trademark dispute over an acute e for a hobby project… The Entrée is a USB-C CAN interface. It is a variant of the open source candleLight platform and its many spawns. Not only does it add USB-C, it brings new features and CAN/USB controlled USB-PD for powering devices under test. This post is a…
With the passing of John Conway, I decided to add ‘Game of Life’ to a Flip-Dot project I’m working on, in honour of his work. I show a couple of random starts, a start from text ‘Hello!’ and a start with some known forms. Physical display is an Alfa-Zeta XY5 28×14. I’m building it into a much larger display (252×56) so I develop with a curses based simulator most of the time. I show Game of Life…
I was having random – or not so random – internet dropouts on a 4G WiFi router. I wanted to ascertain when they occur and if it’s internal wireless or WAN to troubleshoot. smokeping is an old but useful tool to capture this as it sits in the background constantly pinging pre-defined servers. Since I had a Pi-Hole on the network, this seemed the best tool. Getting the web-portal up and running…
Having used my clever serial terminal – the WT-220 – for a few years now, I’d identified improvements I wanted to make. I was never that pleased with the cobbled together electronics (based on what I had laying around and ability at the time) and with PCB fabrication accessible to hobbyists now thanks to China, I decided the main win would be a Raspberry Pi Hat. The rear panel wiring made opening…
In attempt to get started with FPGAs and Verilog, I decided to port Wooden Bits to a Lattice IceStick – selected because of the Open-Source IceStorm toolchain . Counters and flip-flops are the first thing one learns when starting with FPGA design, so the project lends itself naturally. I learnt things FPGAs are good at and things they are not so good at – best done on a microcontroller. As the…
Being part of a generation that doesn’t watch TV…except documentaries and films…and YouTube…ah well, might as well watch it on a big screen. Got a TV, a Samsung Frame – designed to look like a picture frame. It can mount flush to a wall or be mounted on an easel inspired stand , which Samsung sell separately for £500. I decided to have a go at making one myself. The design is simple but required…
UPDATE: I have not renewed the domains for this so it’s now down I had some of my Nixie Pipe displays showing air pollution data collected by the council, using a Python web scraper at an art trail and people seemed very interested and unaware of the data. I considered how good it would be to have live displays at the air monitoring sites for people to see, but decided a web app was more feasible…