…lets see what they look like. These days I work with X-Ray systems. I’m just finishing up commissioning and testing of the latest one, so I’m using it to image various things. This is a compact fluorescent lamp. At full size you can see the coils of tungsten wire in the electrodes in the glass …
Category Archives: electronics
Hellschreiber
What do you get when you mix a cheap MSP430 development board with a simple oscillator circuit and blend in a handful of code from various sources? Hellschreiber– a radio transmission mode invented in the 1920s. The screenshot above shows the signal as transmitted across my bench – a distance of about 50cm. The text …
Playing with ImageMagick
For some Slow Scan TV (SSTV) experiments I want to be able to overlay text on images from the command line or within a script. The Swiss-army-knife of image manipulation is ImageMagick, so I’m using that. Starting with a a photograph I took a few years ago, I resized it to 320×256 pixels – that’s …
GPSd and xGPS on OSX 10.6.8
Just documenting how I got GPSd and xGPS running on a Mac running OSX 10.6 (Snow Leopard). First off, install MacPorts – this is a bunch of *nix tools, utilities and applications packages for OSX. After you do the basic install of MacPorts, do a self-update and upgrade: sudo port update [Lots of output will …
X-rays
Now I have an xray machine to play with at work, I can take photographs of the insides of things. I shall make full use of this. Here’s an old transistor to start with. Image details : Mullard OC44 PNP Germanium transistor, glass envelope. 90kV polychromatic xrays, filtered with 1.5mm Al and 0.2 mm Cu. …