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TEAC FD-235F 4161-U Amiga Floppy Drive Repair

My original TEAC FD-235F 4161-U floppy drive died maybe a year before I stopped using the Amiga 1200. I had to replace it with another drive that was too tall, meaning the case could never be properly closed.

I was never able to fix the original drive. 25 years on, I still have this non-working drive and decided to take a crack at a repair.

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Amiga 1081 Monitor from 1986

I've been looking forward to getting this on the bench for a while now. A friend gave this to me a while back when he sold off his Amiga 1000. I didn't know what state it was in. Like most Commodore monitors, these are worth fixing, with composite in, TTL RGB and SCART inputs.

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Panasonic SA-PT170 Repair

On the bench this time is a Panasonic Home Theatre System, the SA-PT170, or sometimes labelled as an SC-PT170.

This unit was working for a good solid ten years but would no longer turn on.

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Generating VGA with an FPGA (Verilog)

Generating a VGA signal can be a rewarding achievement as an FPGA project. There are loads of explanations and illustrations online on how to generate VGA signals. But sometimes the concept is not clear.

I'll attempt to try and make it much clearer and get you on your way quicker.

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Simple guide to Verilog Wire and Reg types

The aim of this article is to help clear any confusion for beginners when using verilog wire and reg data types between modules. We'll go through all the rules for both a reg and a wire.

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Open Source FPGA toolchain on The Go Board

The Go Board is an excellent FPGA dev board that contains four switches, four LEDs, two 7-segments, a PMOD, and a VGA connector.

I love it for sketching out quick ideas and experiments.

This article aims to take you through a more recent version of yosys, nextpnr, and the Icestorm tools on Windows specifically.

There will also be tips along the way and some troubleshooting at the end for when you don't always get the happy path.

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Samsung 32" S32D850T Monitor Repair

I had a 32“ Samsung monitor on the bench from a friend at work who only used it for four years before the power went out and wouldn't turn on again.

Once I got it into the workshop, I attempted a power on and got a pop as well.

This one was a fun journey.

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Raspberry Pi Pico Setup and Review

Saw the ad for the Raspberry Pi Pico from Core Electronics the other week. At $5.75 each, I couldn't pass it up.

I ordered a couple and they arrived pretty quick in their cool little production cases. I soldered one up and then checked the set up page to see what was required to get it running.

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Passing Vectors of Object Pointers in C++

Learning to use vectors in c++ is fairly straight forward. But passing the collection to a function and returning an instance is not demonstrated as often.

The following code snippet should show a nice complete flow in one shot. Take a look:

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NV-VP32 VHS/DVD Combo Unit Repair

Had an NV-VP32 on the bench during the week. This is a VHS/DVD combo unit that can act as a converter for burning tapes to disk.

I plugged the unit in and switched it on. Pressing the power button only showed F09 on the display.

Thought I'd open it up and take a look around.

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Setting up URL Rewrite on shared windows Plesk hosting

Setting up URL rewriting for Dokuwiki is a little bit of a challenge under shared Windows Hosting. Much easier under linux hosting as the use of .htaccess is pretty straight forward.

This article will help you get the most commonly desired URL format working.

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When ESP8266 is a right pain in the Serial

ESP32 is pretty straight forward when it comes to serial debugging with the console via the USB connection.

However when trying the Amica NodeMCU ESP8266, serial was not a straight forward process via the Arduino IDE.

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ESP32 with SSD1306 oLED display libraries

There's a lot of articles out there already on using these little 128×64 oLED monochrome displays with an ESP32 or with an Arduino board.

The go-to library for working with oLED displays appears to be Adafruit's SSD1306 library judging by the amount of articles written on it. This one is packed with features while being easy to use (but there are others!).

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Charlieplexing LEDs on the ESP32

The ESP32 has a stack of GPIO pins allowing you to attach a whole bunch of LEDs. But it's a neat practice to try using fewer pins with several LEDs using Charlieplexing. There's quite a few things you can learn along the way.

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ESP32 From Scratch

This guide will show you how to quickly set up an ESP32, placement onto a breadboard, wiring, the software, and finally sending code to it.

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Space Capsule Hotel Adventure

In February, myself and a couple of mates from work stayed at the Space Capsule Hotel in Sydney. Some thought what we were doing was dreadful/unconventional but we were keen to check it out nonetheless.

Once inside, there really is an illusion of being inside the sleeping cabin of some ship on route to mars.

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Setting up a minimal Hugo website

I discovered a most excellent thing recently for developing websites: Hugo. More truthfully, a friend got me onto it. At first I couldn't see the point of something that generates static pages from source.

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Oscillators on the PIC16F1455

Oscillators on a PIC can be a bit of a minefield to understand. Especially learning to read through a datasheet. So it can be a little daunting just to get a baseline start.

Hopefully I can help here.

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Minimum setup for a PIC16F1455 on a Breadboard + PICkit3

If you need a quick setup for the PIC16F1455, fast wiring and code to check output from a pin, this article is for you.

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FPGA Verilog simulation using GTKWave on the iCE40-feather

One of the nice things about working with FPGAs and Verilog is the array of open source tools and development boards that are available.

Our aim is to take a verilog file, a testbench and simulate it using Icarus Verilog / GTKWave.

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How to remove harvesting from a new Windows 10 instance

Microsoft has a sea of settings that have their best interests at heart. The biggest one being Cortana, and placing ads on the lock screen.

When receiving a new laptop or PC that has Windows 10 installed, there are a number of things that you can do to shut Microsoft out.

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Single Optional Argument for a LaTeX Macro

I recently needed to create a new LaTeX macro for a User manual. The macro was to output a defined character, but in a colour specified by the author. Therefore, I needed a macro that accepted a single optional argument.

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Simple start with WebAssembly/Emscripten and C/C++

I am really excited by this technology. In many aspects, it's a return to where I started, assembly coding on 8-bit and 16-bit machines. And it's a shot in the arm for the browser, opening up many new possibilities for frontend web development.

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Minimum setup for a PIC32MX270F256B on a Breadboard + PICkit3

My first experiments with PIC Microcontrollers was on the PIC32MX170F256B. But after discovering that there was no USB module on that controller, I then purchased a PIC32MX270F256B which did have one.

This article serves as a reminder for the minimum setup for this microcontroller.

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SSD1306 and SSD1315 oLED Modules for the Pi1541

As mentioned in my previous article, while building the Pi1541, I had a lot of difficulty getting the oLED module to work.

I blamed it on the fact I had accidentally purchased an SSD1315 instead of an SSD1306.

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Building the Pi1541

I first heard about the Pi1541 created by Steve White on Chicken Lips Radio. There had been other solutions in the past for hooking up an SD card to a C64/128 but nothing for the average hacker that would fully emulate a 1541 or daily chain to another real 1541.

Discovering that this project ran bare metal on the Raspberry Pi without any underlying OS was impressive to say the least, exactly what I was hoping someone would eventually produce.

I figured I could build this on perf board easily enough.

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start.1627034702.txt.gz · Last modified: 2021/07/23 10:05 by sausage