Developments

Posted by stephen on Tuesday, 27th March, 2007 @ 21:22

My NSLU arrived at the weekend, and I promptly flashed it with the official Debian port (using a freshly purchased £11, 2Gb USB memory stick in one of the ports) and it's all ready to be tested with a camera or given some other interesting purpose. I'm tempted to make it the flight computer for the balloon as it's cheaper and easier to replace than the OSD is, while still being quite a capable little computer.

I also visited Maplin in Milton Keynes and picked myself up a USB Experiment Interface Board. I'd intended to buy the pre-assembled version for the £5 premium, but they didn't have it in stock. So I thought I'd try my luck at assembling it myself...

So lots and lots of soldering later and it works! And thanks to libk8055 which handily features a Python library, I can control all sorts of electronics from a computer via 5 inputs and 8 outputs of the digital variety and 2 ins and 2 outs of the analogue variety. And said computer could be the NSLU. A plan comes together... Using this board I'll be able to activate the cutdown device for the balloon, and probably make my recently created camera shutter control circuit redundant.

And another potential use... to control servos to make our timelapse cameras pan and tilt. Technology is so much fun :-)

Stuff's been happening with the site too. I upgraded Django to version 0.96, which includes some handy new features I plan to explore soon. I've also changed the photo gallery somewhat, creating a tiny and large image size for all photos, and have begun creating nestable photo albums, mostly so that Richard can eventually migrate his site to Django too so we can save about 1Gb of RAM on the server for Plone/Zope. Not to mentioning speeding his site up a couple of notches.

And finally I've been in London today to begin handover of a couple of new clients' systems, all Windows and ASP based. We're now looking for our first non-founding employee to look after them and some other stuff. In the mean time I'll be brushing up on my Windows and ASP skills. Amazingly I think it's coming back pretty easily.