AVRs on the lighting desk

I've been looking at Amtel's AVR microprocessor chips and they look like the next step for my search for a simple cheap lighting desk...

According to this wikipedia page the smallest amount of RAM that an ATtiny has is 32 bytes... now I have 15 8bit fader channels and 12 boolean channels... by my maths that makes 132 Bits... According to the Wikipedia entry on bytes it says that 1 byte ~ 8 bits on most systems... using that conversion I need 16.5 bytes of RAM for my variables, having about half of the RAM in the system means I don't have to worry too much about having to make my code too compact even on the smallest of microcontrollers... I hope...

As to the problem of needing more ADC channels then are provided I can use the I2C bus or 2 wire bus to attach extra ADC chips to the AVR.

That's all for now... exams are almost over and I have a job coming up shortly that should give me some money to spend on this stuff so I can finally get this desk working properly...

Cheers,
Rex

New Motherboard

Yesterday after my exam I picked up an old motherboard that the IT guy said he was going to give to me. I'm not exactly sure what it is but it has 8 DDR(1/2?) slots and as far as I can tell 4GB in it so far. It also appears to have 2 PCI-X slots and 3(I think) normal PCI slots.

The really exciting thing about it is that it has 2 separate CPU's!! So naturally when I got it home my brother asked if I was setting it up for gaming... not yet...

I'll try and get some good pics and upload them sometime soonish too...


I plugged it in today and discovered that my PSU's are all really really old... as I only have the 20 pin connectors... but I do have a few of them so I'm going to see if I can hack a few together and get them to drive the board... The biggest problem at the moment is there is another socket next to the main 24 pin ATX power plug, this means (according to wikipedia) that I need an EPS type power supply. on the Wikipedia page for PSU's there is a reference to a .PDF calling itself the EPS design guide so hopefully that will help me hack together something that will work...

MDP Done

Pending testing at school in a few hours my project is done, just needs some error trapping to be implemented though...

EDIT: It does actually work now, the response time is rubbish like I thought it would be, and it seems to drop events occasionally on the PIII that I have the system running on... Might(Maybe) try running it on a Celeron(2.4GHz I think) if I get a chance, just to get it running a bit faster...

DT MDP

Here is the first picture of my DT project, it is a lighting desk that communicates with the program QLC through a serial port. I have everything working except I need to make a separate thread for the poller to run on.

Company proposal

Here's my proposal... with any luck it may shake some of the computer industry around...

A company that makes hardware(starting with CPU's or motherboards perhaps) but works with the open source community... sharing all info about the devices, making them repairable and selling them as cheaply as possible...

If anyone ever reads this and thinks it may be worthwhile or that I'm crazy and need to be brought back down to earth email me at rexoregan20 at yahoo dot com dot au

Cheers,
Rex

Future Plans

I know I haven't actually said anything on here yet but it will eventually...

By the middle of November I should be finished all of my exams and school for a while, then I can get started on some of the projects that I have been planning to work on, namely my Bedini Monopole Motor and homebuilt cpu or homebrew cpu which will probably end up being more of a homebuilt computer rather than just a cpu...

Cheers,
Rex

Just started my new blog account type what's it...

I'm just going to put random comments occasionally here, and maybe if traffic is high enough split out into different blogs for things like minecraft or engineering or whatever I am doing at the time...