Recent content by blake

There's not much to the 'electronics' of it. It's all software. Plug this into that, and a few bare wires here and there. Serial line between the Motec and the Gumstix. USB or Serial between the Gumstix and the Display. As I develop the software I'll try to keep things so the Motec and Display...

You'd be surprised. Just plugging something like this into one of the serial ports gives me a data stream that includes my ground speed. It's something I've already tested with my Garmin eMap. Where as the Vehicle Speed Sensors need to be attached to a frequency counter (not just a voltage...

If I didn't have the gumstix with its display(s) I'd be installing an ADL. One of the data channels I haven't been demonstrating is the one from the M600. Since the M600 has been sitting in a box at SP I haven't had a chance to test with it. The Gumstix + LCD + LabJack all together cost maybe...

I found the other camera. I'll have to play around with the settings a bit to see what comes out best, but a quick stab in the dark is still better than the iPhone: Rough draft of a different gauge (there might be a better name for it but I'm calling it a Ramp Gauge). More suitable for at a...

Don't know if I'll get any coding in before I pass out tonight. Long day.

I'd show you a photo of just that, but I'm at the office right now =)

It looks "archaic" because in a way it is. There's graphics library built into the display is very rudimentary. I'm building my own library on top of it in Python by drawing rectangles and lines and so on. But on top of that layer I'm adding another layer of intelligent elements like gauges...

My answer is: Very. Are you doubting my mad coding skillz? =p Seriously though, Python is really great about exception handling without crashing. I'm quite glad to have moved those C drivers out of my main code base so my main program is extremely unlikely to crash in a way that can't be...

More Progress: The real camera is elsewhere at the moment, so you get blurry stuff for now. Those are menu items, the phidget scrolls through them and selects them, press to activate. You can kinda see where I'm going with the user interface. However the concept hasn't totally solidified yet...

I wasted 2 days chasing an issue with the drivers for the UI-encoder crashing. After digging through their C code I think I know what it was. It would crash whenever I imported their drivers into any non-trivial codebase. So what I did is have my main program call a tiny little program that runs...

I'll see if I can find those 6x RTD probes I got from AEM a while back and won't be using, if you're interested. No promises on when I'll actually get around to it though ;)

This is hopefully as arcane as this project's programming gets. I don't plan on making posts with hexadecimal values in them in future =) I said I might post some Python code. I thought a simple example of the way I'm working with the display right now might be interesting. I have it...

That yellow wire is the "External Warning Option". As described in this sheet it is simply switched to ground when you hit the warning level you have set on the gauge (with the twist dial). It doesn't provide a 0-5v signal. It's a handy feature (though the radioshack buzzer I used was a...

Unfortunately I don't think I have enough onboard flash to install the package to support Python without the use of the microSD card on the expansion board. So even though the connections to the display and input dial are USB, without Python that means no display or input device development...

link to gumstix mailing list archive entry Short update. I think one of the expansion boards (the one that does the ethernet, wifi and microSD) might be defective. ::Grumble::