SA MICROPROCESSOR GROUP INC.
(Last updated on 14 April, 2012.)
NEXT MEETINGS:
FRIDAY May 11, 2012 starting at 7:00pm at WEA's "Cottage B" 223 Angas St Adelaide - ARM - THE RISC PROCESSORS THAT POWER ALL THE TOP END iPADS, iPHONES, ETC. Chris Burrows programs these chips as a significant part of his business and will be describing the hardware and software development systems that he uses. The RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) architecture was introduced in such machines as the Acorn years ago and has been undergoing continuous development in the UK ever since. The ARM has now reached the stage where today it outsells everything else because it is very low cost, very fast, has low battery consumption and lots of memory. No wonder it was chosen for iPads, iPhones, etc. One development card Chris uses costs as little as $15. Then there is the ARM based "Raspberry Pi" system at $35 being promoted by the BBC for UK schools that is essentially the guts of an iPad on a credit card sized board. You just plug in a TV, keyboard, speakers, mouse, ethernet cable and USB 5V power from a phone charger to give you just about everything you need as a general purpose computer system. See the site and watch the videos HERE. See Wikipedia and view lots more videos on Youtube. A meeting not to be missed. (Unfortunately, the demand for the Raspberry Pi is astronomical and probably you will have a wait about a year to ever get one).
SATURDAY May 26, 2012 - ANOTHER KIDS' ELECTRONICS WORKSHOP. This workshop will be held at the Hindmarsh Complex (formerly the Hindmarsh Council Chambers). This time the construction kit will be a "LED Sled" that provides a car lighting system for a toy car that includes headlights, taillights, and turning indicators. More details to follow later.
FRIDAY June 8, 2012 starting at 7:00pm at WEA's "Cottage B" 223 Angas St Adelaide - C LANGUAGE PROGRAMMING - to be presented by the LSGA (Linux Supporters Group Adelaide). It is a while since we looked at writing software so this will be a welcome return. Originally the C language was developed between 1969 and 1973 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories just to write and maintain the Unix operating system, but since then C has become one of the most widely used programming languages of all time for writing nearly all other operating systems and writing other languages. It is fundamental to all modern computing.
OTHER NEWS:
3D GLASSES: For those at the March meeting who would like to see the effect of the circularly polarized 3D glasses again click HERE.
NET SECURITY: Here are a couple of links to recent mp3 broadcasts on net security that you might like to listen to in order to discuss them at the meeting: "ABC - Don't Trust The Web", and BBC - "How Safe Is Cyber Space?" .
PAST EVENT REPORTS:
FRIDAY April 13, 2012. - POD-CAR SYSTEM FOR ADELAIDE.- John Foley presented a proposal for an electric Pod-Car system, initially for the inner Central Business District of Adelaide, but with the aim to eventually extend it throughout all Adelaide suburbs. The system uses many small, approximately 3 person maximum, Pod-Cars that run on elevated steel tracks. The cars are powered by linear electric motors under the control of centralised computers to provide the most direct, unimpeded passenger service at an average speed of about 60 KPH from pick up station to the nearest destination station with stations spaced about 600m or less apart. The cars are dispatched on-call similar to taxis, but instead are driverless. The system is expected to be cheaper to install and operate than competing systems and move far more people in a given time.
The cars have pneumatic tyres to reduce noise and vibration with one pair of wheels attached to fixed hubs at the rear and with a movable front pair to enable track selection at junctions. Other electric power, separate from the cars' propulsion, is picked up from the track to provide the cabins with air-conditioning, lighting, music or whatever for passenger comfort. The elevated tracks' electric supply, in addition to supplying all the cars' needs, can also provide auxiliary services such as street lighting.
Many alternative systems use single end-to-end tracks without junctions that radiate out from some central city hub. Other systems can have junctions using change-over points to determine the route. What sets Pod-Cars apart from these other systems is that the tracks can have many junctions throughout the network with every car's route determined by turning the front wheels under computer control to maintain constant speed and traffic flow. Consequently, Pod-Cars can significantly reduce traveling time to adjacent or nearby suburbs by traveling at constant speed and without the need to go through a central city hub.
Being driverless and more personalised this system, in addition to ordinary commuting, will allow cheap and safe pick up and delivery of school children, or the elderly, or the handicapped without involving some parent or other adult. Pod-Cars will also remove many of the fears and risks to vulnerable members of the community who presently are reluctant to use public transport systems, especially late at night. Additionally, without drivers or drivers' time and wages involved Pod-Cars can make fast, cheap deliveries of up to 300 Kg between factories, warehouses, shops, and homes, in fact, any source to destination, even garbage collection and disposal.
John's presentation stimulated a lot of lively discussion. If the Pod-Car system can really deliver all it promises then it will be hard to beat for future city transportation be it in Adelaide or elsewhere.
FRIDAY March 9, 2012 - IMPEDANCE ANALYSIS - Josh McIntyre, Technical Director of TrewMac Systems Pty Ltd will describe and demonstrate an impedance analyser that his company sells. You are strongly advised to look up the TrewMac web site prior to the meeting to get the most out of Josh's presentation. (NOTE: This meeting is in the Adelaide Arts Festival period so venue access and parking will be difficult. One way to ensure minimum inconvenience is to allow at least an extra 1/2 hour to park possibly further away than usual.)
Saturday February 18, 2012 - KIDS ELECTRONICS' WORKSHOP - Another Kids Electronics' Workshop was held at the Hindmarsh Science Centre (old Hindmarsh Council Chambers) in two sessions from 11am - 1pm and 2pm - 4pm with a total of over 60 kids completing the construction of "Tilt Torch" kits that involved soldering. It was a joint venture of Aztronics and Wennig. The torches have several functions that apart from their use as a torch includes their use as an emergency floating flashing beacon so the units have to be water-proof. Nearly all kids finished their torches, got them checked and tested in the 2 hours. Details of the Tilt Torch are at http://www.wennig.com.au/TT-1.html Those that completed their torches with time to spare were able to try the radio controlled boats also from Wennig.
FRIDAY February 10, 2012 - ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING - Election of officers resulted in a few changes - Chairman/Treasurer: Rick M - Secretary: Adam W - Editor: Cliff H - Web Master: Andrew B - Committee: Col H, Peter G, Mark S, Chris B. The any suggestions for meetings will be pursued during the year.
FRIDAY December 2, 2011 - NBN ROLL OUT TO CUSTOMER PREMISES - Col Huckel showed us and described much of the equipment we can expect to see in our homes or businesses when the NBN comes up our streets. Col also provided demonstrations of cleaving and splicing optical fibre joints that at least one member tried for himself. Even with all the very best and expensive equipment it certainly demonstrated that quite high levels of skill are required by the operator to get acceptable results. This complemented Internode's John Lindsay's talk earlier in the year.
Col has supplied these useful links to check out :-
Try this web link to NBN Co In-Home Wiring Guide (presently unavailable while it is being updated) :-
http://www.nbnco.com.au/assets/documents/new-developments-wiring-guide.pdf
General User Guide info :-
http://www.nbnco.com.au/assets/documents/nbn-user-guide_2.pdf
NBN Information pack :-
http://www.nbnco.com.au/assets/documents/nbn-co-information-pack.pdf
FRIDAY November 11, 2011 - COMPARING DOS, PSH, AND BASH COMMAND LINE INTERFACES - Greg Bishop from the LSGA (Linux Supporters Group Adelaide) compared and contrasted the capabilities of DOS, PSH and BASH command shells used by the MSDOS, Windows and Linux operating systems. Those of us not familiar with console commands were impressed how powerful command line shells can be even though they vary between different shells and operating systems. Greg used an example that listed the totals in descending order of every word in a very large sample text file. As it happened, Linux was very fast, PSH somewhat slower, with Windows' CMD quite slow. Users who have tended to rely entirely on the GUI interface realized there are a lot of things GUIs simply do not do that shell programs can. Greg's presentation enlarged on the LSGA talk introducing Linux last year.
FRIDAY OCTOBER 14, 2011: - SOLAR PANEL EVALUATION SOFTWARE - Howard Harvey demo'ed his software to evaluate the long-term cost of home solar panel installations amortized over, typically, 20 years. Howard has written the program in Delphi Pascal so that in a spread-sheet like manner the various parameters can be overwritten causing all the other dependent values to be recalculated. Howard says that the solar panel salesmen he has shown it to prefer it to the software they have been using. Apart from this particular case, Howard's software provides a good example of what Delphi can do.
FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 9, 2011: - QR AND BAR CODES. - We had a look at QR and Bar codes. Here are a QR and Bar code examples to decode.
The following lists software that was used for encoding and decoding on the night except for qrencode that was missing from the demo machine. All the listed software runs on Linux and, in some cases, there are versions that run on Windows. The demo showed how good decoders can dredge the correct codes out of some very cluttered backgrounds.
There is a good description at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bar_code with plenty of references at the bottom.
FRIDAY 12 AUGUST - Because there was not enough time to have a close look at the Maximite at the July meeting then we had a closer look at one of its functions at this meeting. We used the Maximite to write the date, time and mains voltage to an SD flash card at 1 minute intervals. The results were pasted into a spreadsheet and graphed to show how the mains varied over the hour or so of the demo. Other results over a week or so were shown. The voltages measured showed that the 230 volt + and - 6% standard is not being observed.
The Maximite kit is preprogrammed to run a variant of GWBasic, has a number of interfaces (USB for I/O and power, or VGA or composite video plus P/S2 keyboard). It can read and write to Flash SD cards for up to 32 GB of data and/or program storage, has 128 K of RAM, and 500 K of internal flash for program storage. The main features of this kit are very low power (about 1/2 watt) and plenty of analog and/or digital I/O that makes it ideal for portable battery powered long-term data logging as well as many other applications.
The other activity on the night compared the light output from a variety of incandescent and compact fluoro lamps by using a "grease spot" photometer. There was probably more audience participation than we have had at any previous meeting. Thanks to all those who participated.
For those interested in the spreadsheet results of the lamp tests at the August 12 meeting click HERE. For those interested in seeing an acceptable graph of mains voltages over a day click HERE. For those interested in the mains to logger interface circuit click HERE. For those interested in the method of calibrating the Maximite for data logging mains voltages click HERE.
FRIDAY JULY 8, 7:00pm, WEA Cottage 223 Angas St Adelaide - Chris Burrows gave us a report on his recent trip to Zurich Switzerland for a conference as an invited guest to give a presentation on the Oberon-07 programming language as it applies to the ARM series processors. Oberon was developed by Niklaus Wirth who has developed many languages, Pascal and Modular being probably the best known. Chris met and spent some time with Niklaus and had the rare opportunity to see the original development system, still in working order, that Niklaus used to develop his original code. Chris also took plenty of photos during his trip that he shared with us. Chris showed us the video of Niklaus Wirth's presentation. Niklaus seemed very much at ease with English and gave much insight into how he and his colleague developed the languages they are so famous for. A fascinating sideline was to see the very unusual venue at the very top of the huge VisDome, Main Building (Hauptgebäude, HG) ETH Zurich, Switzerland. Some links to Oberon sites are:
Oberon Day www.oberonday2011.ethz.ch
ARM www.arm.com
Astrobe www.astrobe.com
Embedded Artists www.embeddedartists.com
MISRA www.misra.org.uk
NXP Semiconductors ics.nxp.com/microcontrollers
Oberon-7 www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/Articles/Oberon.html
FRIDAY JUNE 10 - ***VISIT*** to Flinders University for a Mobile Phone-to-Phone Towerless Network presentation by Dr Paul Gardner-Stephen who is in charge of this project.
The method Dr Gardner-Stephen and his team has developed makes use of the WiFi hardware that is included in most of the new mobile phones combined with software that his team has developed. It provides a phone-to-phone alternative to the GSM system that all mobile phones normally use that totally depend on phone towers and a working telephone network to be operational. Some particularly interesting features of this system are that the phones use their normal telephone numbers for making or receiving calls and every phone that is switched on and is either in standby or in conversation can relay other phone calls to extend the network well beyond what would be possible just between two phones by themselves.
This project has generated a lot of interest in the wake of recent disasters such as Australia's bushfires and floods and the earthquakes in Haiti, New Zealand, and Japan when the power and normal telecommunications were all wiped out. This method of communicating will still operate in those circumstances enabling emergency services to talk to and more quickly rescue many disaster victims that would otherwise perish. The ABC TV's "New Inventors" program featured this communications' system in a recent program.
Other links for the project are: http://servalproject.org and http://github.com/servalproject
and The Hungry Beast video is available at: http://hungrybeast.abc.net.au/stories/kill-net
FRIDAY MAY 13, 2011 - (1) Software for the PIC32 USB Development and the Maximite Kits and (2) In the light of April's NBN presentation what does it mean for such things as where will your ONT be installed, what route will the street to house fibre cable take, and what equipment will need to be replaced or can some of it be reused? If you have a separate ADSL Modem connected via an ethernet cable to a router or router/wireless unit then you should be able to simply ditch the Modem and then just reconnect the ethernet cable to your new ONT from the WAN port on your existing router or router/wireless unit. But if you have a combined ADSL Modem/router/wireless unit then it may be more complex. With no WAN port on your router/wireless unit you could simply connect your ONT to one of the ethernet ports on your router (although the ethernet cable has to be "twisted" because you are connecting client to client). Tests show some equipment works this way and some does not. How do you test for this? What do you do about firewalls, filtering, etc.? With the NBN project due for completion in 5 years then you will need to give the NBN's effect on you some thought very soon. Places like Willunga are being installed now with Prospect and Modbury about to begin. Do these areas include you? Also see NBN report further down this web page under "Past Event Reports".
FRIDAY APRIL 8, 2011 - JOHN LINDSAY, GENERAL MANAGER REGULATORY & CORPORATE AFFAIRS INTERNODE & AGILE, presented us with a very detailed and comprehensive whirlwind tour of Australia's National Broadband Network, the NBN, that is presently being installed throughout Australia and in which Internode is a very active and integral part. John revealed to us how Internode's network, together with its world-wide partners, reach way beyond Adelaide where Internode is headquartered and extend throughout Australia, Asia, North America, the Middle East, and Europe.
As far as Australia's future local Internet access is concerned, and as John described and illustrated with some excellent photos, it will be mostly implemented with the Fibre To The Premises (FTTP) option using a Passive Optical Network (PON) where single-mode fibres from (usually) the local telephone exchange are extended to passive optical hubs. Each fibre's 1.2 Gigabit data stream is then split into 16 fibres for serving up to 16 customers' premises. The fibres will be terminated at the home or business end on Optical Network Terminals (ONT) to provide at least one ethernet and one phone connector at data rates of up to 100 Megabits/second. To prevent eavesdropping among the 16 who share the last passive optical fibre section encryption will be used on the downstream data feed.
The ever growing amount of home and business equipment that will be able to use the NBN include the things we are very familiar with such as PCs, laptops, smart phones, wired LAN and WiFi networks, etc. John showed us some less familiar items that will make use of the NBN's high data rates such as Femto Cells that are short range IP wireless phones, and Slingbox, a TV relay device, that can capture free-to-air or cable TV and relay it anywhere in the world (for the very homesick maybe?).
John was inundated with questions that he easily handled, although neither he (or anyone else) can be sure what customers will pay for an NBN connection just yet. As for "Who needs the high speeds of the NBN?", John said that video in its various forms is expected to be the main reason, even though the main use of the Internet is presently HTTP as the daily data usage graphs showed us. John emphasised that the NBN will completely replace existing copper cables with no other choice to the end user once the NBN goes down their street. Copper cables are rapidly reaching the end of their life and the choice has to be made to upgrade to an all-fibre network for phone and Internet access or continue repairing and extending the existing copper network. The government has chosen to go with an all-fibre NBN.
John said, apart from his busy schedule, he still likes experimenting with new hardware and writing code so he is particularly pleased with his recently successful solar panel controller design.
We are very grateful to John who, in spite of his heavy workload, was prepared to give us this very timely presentation on the NBN. We hope that you, John, enjoyed the evening as much as we did.
Here are some useful links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Broadband_Network
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_optical_network
FRIDAY 11 MARCH 2011 - AN ELECTRONICS' GOODS MARKET SURVEY - On Friday March 11 we looked at some of the huge range of electronics' goods presently out there in the market place such as notepads, notebooks, laptops, desktops, iPads, iPods, LCD monitors, games consoles such as Wii and XBox, TVs as monitors, fixed phones, cordless phones, home phone networks, mobile phones, Skype phones, LCD TVs, plasma TVs, HDTVs, 3D TVs, projection TVs, portable TVs, USB TV dongles, settop boxes, PVRs with DVD recording, PVRs with hard drives, PVRs with DVD and/or hard drives, PVRs with networking, DVD and/or Blueray players, portable DVD players, photo frames, external USB or eSATA hard drives, external USB burners, USB memory sticks, SD memory cards, networking wired and/or wireless, ADSL and ADSL+ MODEMS, mobile broadband dongles, cameras still and/or video, GPSs, Bluetooth peripherals such as headsets, portable MP3 music players, voice recorders, DAB radios, corded and cordless mice and keyboards, USB video cams, inkjet and laser printers, networked printers, scanners, ink cartridges, all-in-one printers, LED torches, laser pointers, plug packs, NiMH battery chargers, to name just a few.
Many good and bad experiences were discussed. It was a good opportunity to assess what choices we should make for our future purchases.
FRIDAY 11 FEBRUARY 2011 - Annual General Meeting - The February AGM elected our committee and set out the meeting agenda and other activities for 2011. Several vacancies were filled.
A number of potential meeting subjects were discussed.
A project to design a sound warning system for electric cars. The Chairman of the Electric Vehicle Association of SA (EVASA) who spoke to us last year says that a lot of countries are now legislating to make it compulsory to fit electric vehicles with some sound generator to warn people that an otherwise nearly silent electric vehicle is near. Probably a good starting point would be something that sounds similar to a normal car probably determined by vehicle speed. Just turning up the radio may not qualify. This need has become urgent and could be a way to give the SAMG a somewhat higher profile.
Another item also involves electric cars. It is possible we might get a look at and a talk on one of the top of the range electric vehicles this year - more later.
Video, and HD video in particular, has become an almost essential companion for travel and holidays these days. The problem arises when you find out that the video format for HD video is *.m2ts that is not easily handled. We should have a much closer look at the available alternatives for viewing, editing, converting and storing the various video formats.
With the rapid growth of "apps" on many portable e-devices these days there is an opportunity to do some software development ourselves. If you have a great idea then what is involved in implementing it? With this in mind we should do more on computer languages such as C, C++, Python among others.
FRIDAY 3 DECEMBER 2010 - ARM PROCESSORS - The Development Manager of CFB Software, Chris Burrows, presented a talk and demo of some ARM processor history, theory of operation, software, and showed us some development systems at the December meeting held at the WEA's Cottage "B" room at 223 Angas St Adelaide. Chris compared ARM processors with other microprocessors and it could be seen they lie somewhere between top of the range but power hungry Intel and AMD chips, and the lower end simpler Microchip and Atmel chips. ARM processors now completely dominate the mobile phone and similar portable device market (at about 98%). The ARM is a 32 bit RISC, or Reduced Instruction Set Computer. The RISC idea was originally developed for Acorn Computers. ARM devices combine high speed with low power compared to complex instruction set, or CISC, CPUs such as the X86 (Pentium, etc) found in nearly all laptops and desktops. You can see more at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_processor Most of Chris's development work has been with the ARM700 series. The ARM class of chip has never been featured at SAMG meeting before and yet there are so many out there, you probably have lots at home now. Chris has just had an article featuring ARM processors printed in the December issue of the EU-based Elektor magazine and he very generously provided a free copy to all those present.
Friday 12 November 2010 - AUSTRALIAN ELECTRIC VEHICLE ASSOCIATION - The Chairman of the AEVASA, Edward Booth, fresh from the Electric Vehicle Conference held in Adelaide on the weekend of November 5 & 6 provided a presentation on electric vehicles at our December meeting at "Cottage B", WEA, 223 Angas St Adelaide. We have had several electric vehicle presentations over recent years and it won't be long before we are all driving one, so it was not surprising that we had a bigger than usual audience including quite a few visitors. Edward described and showed pictures/videos of his and other AEVA members designs, builds and on-road demos of petrol-electric conversions that they have achieved. This gave us considerable insight into how it is done. Edward's presentation drew a lot of questions from the audience indicating a high level of interest from members. One area Edward admits is lacking in the electric vehicle fraterity is expertise in eletronics that some of our members might be able to assist in. We are indeed indebted to Edward for this presentation particularly as he made such a long round trip from Goolwa to do it.
FRIDAY 8 October, 2010 - A closer look at MULTI-BOOTING. There are many advantages from being able to choose from different Operating Systems at bootup on a single computer such as being able to run software only available on one of the O/Ss, or for trouble-shooting to separate hardware from software faults, or for recovery from some mishap where one O/S is unbootable, or to avoid malware attacks to one of the O/Ss, or take advantage of cheaper or even free software on one of the O/Ss. It can be done from "live" CD or DVD discs without any disturbance to the internal hard drive, or it can be done by repartitioning the internal drive and installing alternative O/Ss on the hard drive, or it can be done from an external devices such as USB hard drives or eSATA hard drives, or it can even be done from Flash USB sticks. Apart from the "live" CD or DVD bootup that are extremely safe there are safety issues with the other methods that you should be aware of. They range from very dangerous to completely "bullet-proof" methods that were covered in this presentation. The presentation included some discussion on boot menus focussing on the Grub (Grand Unified Boot) menu.
FRIDAY 10 SEPTEMBER 2010 - Adam Webb has been working on the Web Server Enhanced in a Box version B, or "WEB-B", since last November and presented its progress at the September meeting. The original Web Server In A Box is an outstanding design, yet Adam has significantly extended the design with many more hardware interfaces and controls. The most attractive features of this PIC chip based server are low power and low cost, but many will also be attracted by the wide range of digital and analogue I/O ports that allow remote control and remote monitoring over the net which are not normally available on traditional web servers. There is one feature that is not available on this server so far and that is CGI (Common Gateway Interface) that allows interactivity with the client end. CGI requires some ability to run a language on the server that can accept data from the client end, process it, and respond with some HTML back to the client's browser. This is possible if PIC executable code can be developed to run such a CGI capable language, possibly a subset of C, Perl, Python, Basic, or other. This could be an SAMG project. A more detailed list of the many characteristics of this web server are HERE. Adam intends to make this project available as kits in the near future to those interested.
FRIDAY 13 AUGUST 2010 - Lecture/demo of Linux and some of its Applications by Hayden the President of the Adelaide LSGA Linux users' group who meet regularly in Sturt St, Adelaide. With the rapid growth in computer platforms beyond PCs and laptops into such things as mobile phones, navigation systems, ebooks, control systems, etc. Linux and Apple operating systems have been growing at the expense of Windows. Then, if you access the Internet these days there is about a 90% chance that you are talking to a Linux server at the other end. If you talk to any Google anything or use any Nokia mobile phone the chance of it being Linux is 100%. We chose the following topics for Hayden to cover in his talk from a long list. (Hopefully, others will be presented on some future occasion.)
* Very brief history Unix/Linux.
* The software stack (Linux is modularised not monolithic).
* Applications
* GUI (several)
* Shell (several)
* Kernel (including Drivers) you can pick and choose components
* Additional Drivers
* Hardware
* Live CD's and Flash Sticks
FRIDAY 9 JULY 2010 - DEMO of a range of Educational Electronic Kits. Our July guest speaker, Nigel, has been working for some time on a range of immaginative, low cost electronics education kits based on readily available, cheap, electronics parts combined with recycled household items such as milk cartons and plastic bottle tops to make a range of different model vehicles and a clever demo water pumping system as shown on his web site. Nigel described to us the processes of getting these ideas from concept to realisation while at the same time including as many basic physics and electronics disign principles as possible. As well as demonstrating the kits shown on his web site, Nigel went on to demonstrate many more kits not shown on his web site so far using ultra-sonics, infra-red and ULF (40KHz) radio remote controls such as the fruit juice bottle paddle wheelers and the beautifully designed vaccuum molded plastic radio controlled model speed boat. Another example was the versatile 2 transistor "long tail pair" that Nigel uses to simulate op amp design and illustrate most of the things op amps are typically used for. Then adding to his extensive collection, Nigel showed us his "peanut paste jar and Alfoil" electroscope that can be used either stand-alone simply as a detector or together with a voltmeter to give reasonable voltage measurements, and lastly there was a Hall Device-based magnetic field measuring instrument that is rarely attempted these days because they are generally regarded as too difficult. There was certainly lots of food for thought in that lot and Nigel attracted a lot of good comments and further ideas from the audience. Many thanks Nigel for a very entertaining and stimulating presentation.
These ideas and kits are candidates for sessions similar to the PICAXE Workshops we have done in the past at the Hindmarsh Science Centre. We may be recruited to combine with him and his kits at a future PICAXE Workshop or help out at separate workshops dedicated to just his kits. We are looking at the possibility of holding more PICAXE classes at Hindmarsh in late August or early September.
FRIDAY 11 JUNE 2010 at the WEA "Cottage B" 223 Angas St Adelaide starting at 7:00pm - FLIGHT GEAR (Version 2). A while ago now we had a look at Flight Gear version 1 and I think we all agreed it had promise, but at that stage, was not too good. Well, we saw the latest version 2 at the June meeting in 2 compilations, one compiled for Windows and one for Linux. It does seem to work a lot better, but because it is intended to be a close simulation of real aircraft it is incredibly difficult to control from a mouse. Nevertheless a lot of the faults we noticed last time have been fixed and the scenery is very impressive. Scenery now covers the entire earth's surface and includes all airports. (The only scenery not included is featureless ocean.) Aircraft choices are virtually anything that can fly and even includes vehicles that can't fly at all that just run around on the ground!
We also looked at some DESIGN ASPECTS OF FUSES. The selection of fuses is not quite as simple as you might expect and nor is the background physics. We had a look at the physics (not included here), but you can look here for the explanation of the tables and graphs and here for the tables and graphs themselves.
FRIDAY 14 MAY 2010 - VISIT to the NEW HINDMARSH STUDIOS of RADIO 5MBS at 4a River St Hindmarsh. We were invited by John Ingham to visit the new Hindmarsh studios of Radio 5MBS (99.9MHz) for our May meeting. You will remember that we previously visited 5MBS at their former Hutt St Adelaide premises and marveled at how they had somehow managed to shoehorn their entire operation into such a small space. Well, they have a lot more space now and were very happy to invite us to see it. John showed us their extensive CD library, several of their recording studios and the tech gear that provides internet feeds, their mandatory program recording and archiving equipment, the PCs that store pre-recorded programs on hard drives for mostly night-time use, and the microwave link gear to South Tce Adelaide where the transmitters are located. John described a problem with radio interference caused to the present analog TV channel 4 by 5MBS's 99.9 MHz frequency allocation. (How ironic - John used to work for chan 4 years ago and now works for a station that interferes with it!) In the near future 5MBS will convert from an antenna pattern that favours the eastern suburbs to one that is omnidirectional when analog TV chan 4 vacates its present channel allocation to its digital one. The station is run entirely by volunteers and is funded by public subscriptions. Many questions were raised relating to training volunteers in the complex operation of digital editing software, obtaining material from various program sources, operating mixer consoles, and preparing and producing radio broadcast programs. The group wish to thank John for this opportunity to see the new 5MBS studios. More details of the station can be seen on http://www.5mbs.com/
FRIDAY 9 APRIL 2010 – CROSSWORD PUZZLES, SODUKO, ETC. John Stevens has been writing software to generate word and number puzzles for over 18 years and is known world-wide for his puzzles that feature daily in much of the world's printed media. John's first version ran under DOS and was known as The Daily Crossword. That led to Windows and MacIntosh versions called Crossword Express. The latest Java offering is a collection of all the puzzles he has developed so far called Magnum Opus that John concentrated on for most of his presentation. The leading puzzle in Magnum Opus is the crossword puzzle with its huge range of puzzle layouts, various language dictionaries, and other options that you can choose from. The other puzzles such as the familiar Sudoku and those with less familiar (mostly Japanese) names are well worth a closer look. You can download Magnum Opus free to try for yourself at http://crauswords.com/ John is an engineer with an extensive background in telecommunications' network design, construction and operation.
For those with an interest in Sudoku you might like to look at this site where the author has written a Sudoku solver in C (with source code) that runs under Linux and solves Sudoku problems at 7,100 puzzles per second on a 2.4GHz PC using an Athlon 64 4000 CPU! - a middle range machine.
FRIDAY MARCH 12, - RISING SUN PICTURES. This was a landmark meeting with Ian Cope, Communications Manager, Rising Sun Pictures with a degree in Design (Visual Communication) from the University of Technology Sydney presenting and describing the Computer Generated Imagery (CGI) and Special Effects (sfx) production methods used by his company for such films as the “Lord Of The Rings” trilogy, the “Harry Potter” franchise [“The Goblet of Fire”, “The Order of the Phoenix” and “The Half-Blood Prince”], "X-Men Origins: Wolverine and Watchmen", "Australia", "Prince Caspian", "28 Weeks Later," "Blood Diamond", "Superman Returns", “Terminator Salvation”, and "Batman Begins". Presently RSP are working on more of the highly successful Harry Potter series “The Deathly Hallows” Part 1 and Part 2, and Peter Weir's “The Way Back”. Rising Sun's filmography has now grown to exceed sixty feature films. You can see more, including a demo reel, at http://www.rsp.com.au/news.htm Ian's presentation generated a lot of interest and intense questioning from an enthusiastic but somewhat depleted audience. (The audience was smaller than usual due to the Arts Festival, car racing and other concurrent events. We might have to review having meetings in future that coincide with those other events in March.)
FRIDAY FEBRUARY 12 - Annual General Meeting. The only changes were to fill a committee and the auditor vacancies. The program for 2010 has got off to a good start with Rising Sun Pictures in March and a visit to radio station 5MBS 99.9MHz FM at their brand new very spacious studios at Hindmarsh and a talk by an Adelaide Hills software developer who produces the software that is used by most daily newspapers world-wide to produce crossword and Soduko puzzles.
Also at the January meeting was a prototype of a web server that Adam Webb has assembled. This unit is along the lines of one featured recently in a local electronics magazine. Its main components are a PIC chip, an Ethernet controller, a MAC chip, and an SD Flash memory card. It holds many web pages (only limited by the capacity of the SD card), can read analog voltages and read/write to digital I/O ports. It only consumes 1 Watt so it could be left permanently on-line at very low cost. A lot of interest was generated by Adam's demo.
JANUARY 2010 - NO JANUARY MEETING as usual.
FRIDAY DECEMBER 4 - SHORT TALKS/DEMOS - We had an aggregate of some shorter items that occupied about 15 to 30 minutes each. (We hope that the advertised DAB+ talk might be arranged for 2010 when the invited speaker is not so flat out.) Instead, the items discussed were fixing radio/TV interference from all new switch-mode power supplies, a clever height measuring device that combines a few simple measurements with a spreadsheet, intro to a local software developer's Crossword, Sudoku, etc generator/solver (with hopefully a full talk by the developer in 2010), and what the CSIRO WiFi patent is (see further down).
FRIDAY NOVEMBER 13 - VIDEO PROCESSING - Howard Harvey discussed and demonstrated the use of video editing and processing to produce very professional results from several digital video sources and formats using Corel's Ulead video editing software. A lot of you were trying to copy down some of the details in the semi-darkness, so Howard has sent on the Power Point slides to make sure that you get the details correctly. Slides in Power Point and in pdf. Obviously there is a lot of interest in video processing so look forward to more soon.
FRIDAY OCTOBER 9 - Meeting was presented by Thomas Sprinkmeier and discussed Arduino micro kits. A pdf of the talk can be downloaded here (including useful links an contact email address). It was a very interesting talk about a very impressive microcontroler development system, thanks Thomas for a great talk especially at such short notice. More info; playground, bits available from littlebird. Another interesting site by Jonathan Oxer is here, well worth a look.
FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 11 - We discussed a number of items that have emerged recently. The first item was a look at the fascinating new operating system, Kolibri available as a live CD iso download. It looks roughly like most operating systems with all the usual features, but at just under 3 MB (can you believe it!) it is by far the smallest O/S ever and it runs more than 50 times faster than any other O/S, especially Windows. It is only early days yet, but it could be a good candidate for embedded systems and phones where size, speed, battery consumption and performance with minimal hardware is vital. It is entirely written in assembler and comes from a Russian team. We also had a quick look at some of the huge number of features of Linux's ffmpeg for video processing. We had a brief look at cyber attacks and privacy invasions linked to all those free email services, we had a look at Lagrangian Points (see Wikipedia) that appear in scifi and are now actually applied in space, we had a quick intro to digital broadcasting (DAB+ and DRM), and we had a Science Week report. There were a number of items left over for other meetings.
FRIDAY AUGUST 14 - REMOTE CONTROLLED MODELS - Adam Webb showed/demoed some components and fully operational remote controlled model racing cars and multi degrees of freedom arms. This was further to Cliff Hignett's presentation in July - see "IDEAS FOR KIDS WORKSHOPS" report below. It was an opportunity to discuss ideas, see some working models. Vehicles and robots that Adam demoed were:- Microbric Viper http://www.microbric.com.au/
- Real Robots two robots
(both of the above as shown by Cliff)
- Lynxmotion hexapod (6 legged walker)
- Lego Mindstorms.
FRIDAY JULY 10 - THERE WERE TWO PRESENTATIONS -
(1) IDEAS FOR KIDS WORKSHOPS - Disillusioned by the direction modern education is taking and disappointed by the lack of exposure and appeal that there is for electronics to kids these days, Cliff Hignett presented some concepts to expand on the idea of the PICAXE kits that we have presented several times to the kids at the Hindmarsh Science Centre. Cliff thinks there is a good opportunity to improve on model car racing by introducing electronic intelligence to replace the real-time human interactive component by making the cars fully self-controlled and auto-responsive to their environment including other cars. Such behaviour is seen "virtually" in many computer games, but so far not seen in the "real world" even though there are a number of venues set up these days for fast model car racing with a variety of tracks and conditions. The challenge for us would be to provide the kids with suggestions, parts, assemblies, development software, etc to achieve this. Apart from being exciting to participate in as well as to watch, it would provide plenty of incentive to learn about the hardware and/or software design techniques that are taking place now and will become so much more important in future. To further develop Cliff's ideas, Adam Webb will bring some components and fully operational models for demo and discussion to the August meeting of the SAMG. What ideas do you have?
(2) JED PRODUCT PRESENTATION - Ed Schoell is CEO of JED Microprocessors Pty Ltd, Boronia, Melbourne VIC. He graduated from the SAIT (now Uni SA) Adelaide in 1968. Ed explained that after working in the electronics' industry here and overseas for a few years he realized that there was an untapped market for microprocessor-based systems featuring low power, user-programmability and with plenty of I/O options, so he decided to set up JED. By previously working for National Semiconductor and therefore being very familiar with their microprocessor products, Ed's early systems were based on the PACE INS8900 16-bit series. To reduce users' development time and effort, the systems were mainly programmed in variants of BASIC that proved very popular then and is still very popular today. Ed tried some Intel based systems, but because of Intel's short production life times for their support chip such as the "Super-IO" they were eventually abandoned. More recent JED products are now AVR microprocessor based. Ease of testing, debugging, transferring the code to EPROMs and more recently to Flash, have been very attractive features. For data logging applications F-RAM (ferro-electric RAM) is now used on many products to buffer the data before transferring it to the far greater capacity of Flash while accommodating Flash's "block writing" requirement. Data projector controllers have emerged as one of the most successful of JED products. These are wall-mounted in class-rooms to avoid using remote controls that get lost, stolen, trodden on, etc. JED's controls select what to view/hear from a variety of video/audio sources. Some other of JED's large product range are the PC/104, STD, Tiny Tiger and AVR based computers, displays in b/w & colour, RS485 comms, and analog/digital I/O "for scientists and engineers who build things". JED products now sell world-wide in a rare Australian success story.
FRIDAY JUNE 12 - NEW COMPUTER HARDWARE STANDARDS. Adam Webb described and demonstrated a dazzling array of new computer hardware standards that included a quad-core Intel CPU fitted to a large, top-of-the-range motherboard with plenty of 16X PCI-e slots and running SATA hard drives configured in a raid array all housed in a large, well-ventilated, multi-fan cooled tower case overflowing with high-capacity power supplies. The nVidia video card covered several PCI-e slots, weighed a ton, and was connected to a wide-screen fast response LCD screen. This is the kind of system needed to run modern computer games or similar high demand computing tasks. The audience was very impressed by the game Far Cry 2, a war game set in Africa, running on this hardware. It showed incredible detail and super-fast rendering that provided a degree of realism not seen and not even possible before this. You would do well to consider at least some of this hardware, if not for gaming, then for very high performance machines capable of connecting to a wide range of peripheral hardware and capable of highly intensive processing such as needed for video editing and processing, virtualization, and servers for busy networks.
FRIDAY MAY 8 - TURING MACHINES. David Tilbrooke gave a presentation on Turing Machines. Alan Turing was a leading British researcher who worked on deciphering Germany's Enigma machines' "uncrackable" coded messages during World War 2. He led a team that developed machines using electromechanical logic (mostly relays) to do the deciphering. After the war he continued his research into the development of early computers such as ACE that introduced programs stored in memory rather than using wired logic. In some of his early papers and presentations he introduced the idea of machines (now known as "Turing Machines" in memory of him) that, in spite of their simplicity and impractibility, can simulate any computer algorithm. While Alan Turing never saw a Turing Machine, modern computers can fairly readily simulate them. Check here and here for more.Here are a few useful book references and web site locations supplied by David for those who may be interested:
References:
"Engines of Logic", Martin Davis, W.W. Norton & Co New York, 2000.
"Computability and Unsolvability", Martin Davis, Dover Publications Inc., 1982.
"The Undecidable", Ed. Martin Davis, Dover Publications Inc., 2004.
Web Sites:
www.turing.org.uk/turing/scrapbook/machine.html
www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_Logic
www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/HistTopics/Beginnings_of_set_theory.html
www.turing.org.uk/turing/scrapbook/tmjava.html
(This latter site has an active Turing Machine simulation.)
(There was NO APRIL MEETING because Easter fell on the 2nd Friday of April)
FRIDAY MARCH 13 - VIRTUALIZATION. Our Chairman, Andrew, presented and demoed Virtualization at our March meeting. This is a method of running one or more different operating systems from just one boot-up and operating them completely separately or, if desired, with various degrees of interaction with one another supervised by the virtual control software and/or hardware. Keeping overall control in this virtual environment is very attractive for testing, checking that updates actually work, the operation of servers, etc. wherever there is some risk of things going wrong or you are running an O/S and want a feature on another O/S without a full shutdown and reboot. Andrew uses virtualization to completely isolate and protect his company records from the Internet while other O/Ss on the same machine.are Internet connected. Virtualization puts some additional load on the processor, so the CPU needs to be fairly quick, and it uses a fair bit more memory than non-virtualized systems. Andrew used VMware running on an Apple laptop with Windows XP running virtually in one demo to be followed by another demo of a desktop PC running Xen as the control for a virtualized server system. With both virtual systems running and connected by a wireless link the situation got very complex and yet continued to operate happily. To get a glipse of the sort of things to expect from virtualization see the recently demoed Nokia N800 mobile phone (see video) installed with VMware that boots and then offers quick swaps between Windows CE and Google Android operating systems depending on what features you want?
FRIDAY FEBRUARY 13 - ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING. The election of officers for 2009 resulted in just one change to the committee - Adam replaces David.
The program for 2009 will add some items to the list left over from last year. Turing Machines, Aircraft Positioning System (ADSB) from last year and now add Python, Bluetooth, new hardware standards (PCI-e, SATA, HDMI), GPS, MIDI, CD & DVD format standards.
Other events that we hope to include are auctions that we have not held for some years of electronic equipment, show-and-tell nights where a number of you can briefly describe and/or demo items that would not fill a meeting by themselves. There is also Bluetooth hardware that is now down to $10 per dongle. See Bluetooth Special Interest Group for explanation of Bluetooth.
Rick demoed an LCD display from Aztronics that connects to his laptop using his interface cabling plus software he wrote in C for both Windows and Linux.
We viewed Peters set of flv videos showing electric cars being assembled and road tested in Sydney. The engines in standard model road cars were being replaced with electric motors just ahead of the gearbox together with lots of special high energy/weight ratio batteries (lithium-iron-polymer - note: it is "iron" and not "ion"), vacuum pumps (for the brakes), heaters/demisters, etc. Even those not very interested in electric cars got very interested in the vidoes. See here for one of the video series. Make sure you check out the others.
Lastly, if you have trouble viewing videos such as those electric car videos then try the Western Australian "live" Puppy Linux that is less than 100 MB download. Being a "live" version, it boots and runs without any disturbance to your hard drive and the real bonus is that it comes with all multi-media software installed and per-configured to display all video and photo formats in common use (ie. video works straight off without the need for a net connection, or downloads, or installation, or configuration - it just works!).
DECEMBER 5 - Virtualization was to be demoed, but will now be held during 2009. (Virtualization is where 2 or more operating systems can run on the same machine simultaneously.) Instead, the December meeting we had a preliminary look at Virtualization and Turing machines that will both be covered in the new year. We also had a look at those maths problems (above) and we had enough time for a Xmas drink in one of the nearby cafes in Hutt St.
NOVEMBER 14 - Peter Rosenthal, Convenor of the SA PIC Users Group, gave a talk and demo of Vapour Phase Soldering that is now used extensively throughout the electronics industry to assemble printed circuit boards. Peter explained that the process was developed primarily for surface mounted (SMD) components. The method solves the problem of providing a uniform temperature sufficient to melt the solder on all soldered connections while simultaneously keeping the temperature as low as possible for as little time as possible to minimize the risk of damage to a boards components. Very expensive and amazingly heavy liquids based on fluorides are used that are heated to their boiling point (phase change). The boards are immersed in the vapour above the liquid for just long enough for the solder to melt and then removed. Most components are usually held in place by a solder paste masked onto the printed circuit during preparation for soldering. Both leaded or lead-free solder can be used in the process, but with different fluoridated liquids because of the different solder melting points (210 C and 240 C). Peter used his video microscope that he developed for SMD work to show us what was happening. Peter also clearly showed us that the home constructor is able to construct electronic equipment using essentially commercial SMD methods.
This web site now has MIRRORS at http://samg.yi.org and http://samg.supremeit.com
reciate anyone who is willing and able to turn general details that was recorded quickly into clear, polished material.
Other links for the project are: http://servalproject.org and http://github.com/servalproject
and The Hungry Beast video is available at: http://hungrybeast.abc.net.au/stories/kill-net
For those at the March meeting who would like to see the effect of the circularly polarized 3D glasses again click HERE.
Here are the internals of 3D games machine, the Nintendo 3DS, that was discussed at the March meeting HERE.
COMING EVENTS:
FRIDAY NOVEMBER 11 at 7:00pm, WEA Cottage 223 Angas St Adelaide: Shell Programming of Linux (BASH) and Windows' (DOS and Power Shell) Compared. Presenter will be Greg Bishop from the LSGA (Linux Supporters Group Australia). For those who have never used command line programming or written shell programs you will be surprised how many things you can do that GUI usually cannot do such as streaming the output from one program to the input of another, automating tasks, or batch processing. Many good programs are aften written using shell scripts and then maybe get a GUI front end afterwards.
FRIDAY DECEMBER 2 (week earlier than usual) at 7:00pm, WEA Cottage 223 Angas St Adelaide: to be announced.
In addition from time to time we will have a closer look at some common computer languages such as C, Python, Perl, and PHP.
SPECIAL ITEMS:
IS THAT SERVER WINDOWS OR LINUX? - download this Perl code to get some idea of whether a web site runs Windows or Linux. It tells you what the server software at the other end is. You will need Perl installed. Perl usually comes as part of a standard Linux installation, but for Windows you will need to download and install Perl from this site. You will also need to download and install the CPAN modules. Once installed use a command line such as:
>perl whichserver.pl http://abc.net.au
You will see that the ABC uses Apache server software and is most likely running Linux. If you check the Microsoft site you will see it runs IIS server software that must be on a Windows server because IIS only runs on Windows.
PAST EVENT REPORTS:
FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 9: QR and Barcodes.
We had a look at QR and Bar codes. Here are some samples that you can try to decode.
The following coding and decoding software is all available on Linux and, in some cases, Windows as well. These software packages were demonstrated on the night except for the QR code generator, qrencode, that was not installed on the demo machine.
The
FRIDAY 12 AUGUST - Because there was not enough time to have a close look at the Maximite at the July meeting then we had a closer look at one of its functions at this meeting. We used the Maximite to write the date, time and mains voltage to an SD flash card at 1 minute intervals. The results were pasted into a spreadsheet and graphed to show how the mains varied over the hour or so of the demo. Other results over a week or so were shown. The voltages measured showed that the 230 volt + and - 6% standard is not being observed.
The Maximite kit is preprogrammed to run a variant of GWBasic, has a number of interfaces (USB for I/O and power, or VGA or composite video plus P/S2 keyboard). It can read and write to Flash SD cards for up to 32 GB of data and/or program storage, has 128 K of RAM, and 500 K of internal flash for program storage. The main features of this kit are very low power (about 1/2 watt) and plenty of analog and/or digital I/O that makes it ideal for portable battery powered long-term data logging as well as many other applications.
The other activity on the night compared the light output from a variety of incandescent and compact fluoro lamps by using a "grease spot" photometer. There was probably more audience participation than we have had at any previous meeting. Thanks to all those who participated. The results can be seen HERE.
For those interested in the spreadsheet results of the lamp tests at the August 12 meeting click HERE. For those interested in seeing an acceptable graph of mains voltages over a day click HERE. For those interested in the mains to logger interface circuit click HERE. For those interested in the method of calibrating the Maximite for data logging mains voltages click HERE.
FRIDAY JULY 8, 7:00pm, WEA Cottage 223 Angas St Adelaide - Chris Burrows gave us a report on his recent trip to Zurich Switerland for a conference as an invited guest to give a presentation on the Oberon-07 programming language as it applies to the ARM series processors. Oberon was developed by Niklaus Wirth who has developed many languages, Pascal and Modular being probably the best known. Chris met and spent some time with Niklaus and had the rare opportunity to see the original development system, still in working order, that Niklaus used to develop his original code. Chris also took plenty of photos during his trip that he shared with us. Chris showed us the video of Niklaus Wirth's presentation. Niklaus seemed very much at ease with English and gave much insight into how he and his colleague developed the languages they are so famous for. A fascinating sideline was to see the very unusual venue at the very top of the huge VisDome, Main Building (Hauptgebäude, HG) ETH Zurich, Switzerland. Some links to Oberon sites are:
Oberon Day www.oberonday2011.ethz.ch
ARM www.arm.com
Astrobe www.astrobe.com
Embedded Artists www.embeddedartists.com
MISRA www.misra.org.uk
NXP Semiconductors ics.nxp.com/microcontrollers
Oberon-7 www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/Articles/Oberon.html
FRIDAY JUNE 10 - ***VISIT*** to Flinders University for a Mobile Phone-to-Phone Towerless Network presentation by Dr Paul Gardner-Stephen who is in charge of this project.
The method Dr Gardner-Stephen and his team has developed makes use of the WiFi hardware that is included in most of the new mobile phones combined with software that his team has developed. It provides a phone-to-phone alternative to the GSM system that all mobile phones normally use that totally depend on phone towers and a working telephone network to be operational. Some particularly interesting features of this system are that the phones use their normal telephone numbers for making or receiving calls and every phone that is switched on and is either in standby or in conversation can relay other phone calls to extend the network well beyond what would be possible just between two phones by themselves.
This project has generated a lot of interest in the wake of recent disasters such as Australia's bushfires and floods and the earthquakes in Haiti, New Zealand, and Japan when the power and normal telecommunications were all wiped out. This method of communicating will still operate in those circumstances enabling emergency services to talk to and more quickly rescue many disaster victims that would otherwise perish. The ABC TV's "New Inventors" program featured this communications' system in a recent program.
Other links for the project are: http://servalproject.org and http://github.com/servalproject
and The Hungry Beast video is available at: http://hungrybeast.abc.net.au/stories/kill-net
FRIDAY MAY 13, 2011 - (1) Software for the PIC32 USB Development and the Maximite Kits and (2) In the light of April's NBN presentation what does it mean for such things as where will your ONT be installed, what route will the street to house fibre cable take, and what equipment will need to be replaced or can some of it be reused? If you have a separate ADSL Modem connected via an ethernet cable to a router or router/wireless unit then you should be able to simply ditch the Modem and then just reconnect the ethernet cable to your new ONT from the WAN port on your existing router or router/wireless unit. But if you have a combined ADSL Modem/router/wireless unit then it may be more complex. With no WAN port on your router/wireless unit you could simply connect your ONT to one of the ethernet ports on your router (although the ethernet cable has to be "twisted" because you are connecting client to client). Tests show some equipment works this way and some does not. How do you test for this? What do you do about firewalls, filtering, etc.? With the NBN project due for completion in 5 years then you will need to give the NBN's effect on you some thought very soon. Places like Willunga are being installed now with Prospect and Modbury about to begin. Do these areas include you? Also see NBN report further down this web page under "Past Event Reports".
FRIDAY APRIL 8, 2011 - JOHN LINDSAY, GENERAL MANAGER REGULATORY & CORPORATE AFFAIRS INTERNODE & AGILE, presented us with a very detailed and comprehensive whirlwind tour of Australia's National Broadband Network, the NBN, that is presently being installed throughout Australia and in which Internode is a very active and integral part. John revealed to us how Internode's network, together with its world-wide partners, reach way beyond Adelaide where Internode is headquartered and extend throughout Australia, Asia, North America, the Middle East, and Europe.
As far as Australia's future local Internet access is concerned, and as John described and illustrated with some excellent photos, it will be mostly implemented with the Fibre To The Premises (FTTP) option using a Passive Optical Network (PON) where single-mode fibres from (usually) the local telephone exchange are extended to passive optical hubs. Each fibre's 1.2 Gigabit data stream is then split into 16 fibres for serving up to 16 customers' premises. The fibres will be terminated at the home or business end on Optical Network Terminals (ONT) to provide at least one ethernet and one phone connector at data rates of up to 100 Megabits/second. To prevent eavesdropping among the 16 who share the last passive optical fibre section encryption will be used on the downstream data feed.
The ever growing amount of home and business equipment that will be able to use the NBN include the things we are very familiar with such as PCs, laptops, smart phones, wired LAN and WiFi networks, etc. John showed us some less familiar items that will make use of the NBN's high data rates such as Femto Cells that are short range IP wireless phones, and Slingbox, a TV relay device, that can capture free-to-air or cable TV and relay it anywhere in the world (for the very homesick maybe?).
John was inundated with questions that he easily handled, although neither he (or anyone else) can be sure what customers will pay for an NBN connection just yet. As for "Who needs the high speeds of the NBN?", John said that video in its various forms is expected to be the main reason, even though the main use of the Internet is presently HTTP as the daily data usage graphs showed us. John emphasised that the NBN will completely replace existing copper cables with no other choice to the end user once the NBN goes down their street. Copper cables are rapidly reaching the end of their life and the choice has to be made to upgrade to an all-fibre network for phone and Internet access or continue repairing and extending the existing copper network. The government has chosen to go with an all-fibre NBN.
John said, apart from his busy schedule, he still likes experimenting with new hardware and writing code so he is particularly pleased with his recently successful solar panel controller design.
We are very grateful to John who, in spite of his heavy workload, was prepared to give us this very timely presentation on the NBN. We hope that you, John, enjoyed the evening as much as we did.
Here are some useful links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Broadband_Network
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_optical_network
FRIDAY 11 MARCH 2011 - AN ELECTRONICS' GOODS MARKET SURVEY - On Friday March 11 we looked at some of the huge range of electronics' goods presently out there in the market place such as notepads, notebooks, laptops, desktops, iPads, iPods, LCD monitors, games consoles such as Wii and XBox, TVs as monitors, fixed phones, cordless phones, home phone networks, mobile phones, Skype phones, LCD TVs, plasma TVs, HDTVs, 3D TVs, projection TVs, portable TVs, USB TV dongles, settop boxes, PVRs with DVD recording, PVRs with hard drives, PVRs with DVD and/or hard drives, PVRs with networking, DVD and/or Blueray players, portable DVD players, photo frames, external USB or eSATA hard drives, external USB burners, USB memory sticks, SD memory cards, networking wired and/or wireless, ADSL and ADSL+ MODEMS, mobile broadband dongles, cameras still and/or video, GPSs, Bluetooth peripherals such as headsets, portable MP3 music players, voice recorders, DAB radios, corded and cordless mice and keyboards, USB video cams, inkjet and laser printers, networked printers, scanners, ink cartridges, all-in-one printers, LED torches, laser pointers, plug packs, NiMH battery chargers, to name just a few.
Many good and bad experiences were discussed. It was a good opportunity to assess what choices we should make for our future purchases.
FRIDAY 11 FEBRUARY 2011 - Annual General Meeting - The February AGM elected our committee and set out the meeting agenda and other activities for 2011. Several vacancies were filled.
A number of potential meeting subjects were discussed.
A project to design a sound warning system for electric cars. The Chairman of the Electric Vehicle Association of SA (EVASA) who spoke to us last year says that a lot of countries are now legislating to make it compulsory to fit electric vehicles with some sound generator to warn people that an otherwise nearly silent electric vehicle is near. Probably a good starting point would be something that sounds similar to a normal car probably determined by vehicle speed. Just turning up the radio may not qualify. This need has become urgent and could be a way to give the SAMG a somewhat higher profile.
Another item also involves electric cars. It is possible we might get a look at and a talk on one of the top of the range electric vehicles this year - more later.
Video, and HD video in particular, has become an almost essential companion for travel and holidays these days. The problem arises when you find out that the video format for HD video is *.m2ts that is not easily handled. We should have a much closer look at the available alternatives for viewing, editing, converting and storing the various video formats.
With the rapid growth of "apps" on many portable e-devices these days there is an opportunity to do some software development ourselves. If you have a great idea then what is involved in implementing it? With this in mind we should do more on computer languages such as C, C++, Python among others.
FRIDAY 3 DECEMBER 2010 - ARM PROCESSORS - The Development Manager of CFB Software, Chris Burrows, presented a talk and demo of some ARM processor history, theory of operation, software, and showed us some development systems at the December meeting held at the WEA's Cottage "B" room at 223 Angas St Adelaide. Chris compared ARM processors with other microprocessors and it could be seen they lie somewhere between top of the range but power hungry Intel and AMD chips, and the lower end simpler Microchip and Atmel chips. ARM processors now completely dominate the mobile phone and similar portable device market (at about 98%). The ARM is a 32 bit RISC, or Reduced Instruction Set Computer. The RISC idea was originally developed for Acorn Computers. ARM devices combine high speed with low power compared to complex instruction set, or CISC, CPUs such as the X86 (Pentium, etc) found in nearly all laptops and desktops. You can see more at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_processor Most of Chris's development work has been with the ARM700 series. The ARM class of chip has never been featured at SAMG meeting before and yet there are so many out there, you probably have lots at home now. Chris has just had an article featuring ARM processors printed in the December issue of the EU-based Elektor magazine and he very generously provided a free copy to all those present.
Friday 12 November 2010 - AUSTRALIAN ELECTRIC VEHICLE ASSOCIATION - The Chairman of the AEVASA, Edward Booth, fresh from the Electric Vehicle Conference held in Adelaide on the weekend of November 5 & 6 provided a presentation on electric vehicles at our December meeting at "Cottage B", WEA, 223 Angas St Adelaide. We have had several electric vehicle presentations over recent years and it won't be long before we are all driving one, so it was not surprising that we had a bigger than usual audience including quite a few visitors. Edward described and showed pictures/videos of his and other AEVA members designs, builds and on-road demos of petrol-electric conversions that they have achieved. This gave us considerable insight into how it is done. Edward's presentation drew a lot of questions from the audience indicating a high level of interest from members. One area Edward admits is lacking in the electric vehicle fraterity is expertise in eletronics that some of our members might be able to assist in. We are indeed indebted to Edward for this presentation particularly as he made such a long round trip from Goolwa to do it.
FRIDAY 8 October, 2010 - A closer look at MULTI-BOOTING. There are many advantages from being able to choose from different Operating Systems at bootup on a single computer such as being able to run software only available on one of the O/Ss, or for trouble-shooting to separate hardware from software faults, or for recovery from some mishap where one O/S is unbootable, or to avoid malware attacks to one of the O/Ss, or take advantage of cheaper or even free software on one of the O/Ss. It can be done from "live" CD or DVD discs without any disturbance to the internal hard drive, or it can be done by repartitioning the internal drive and installing alternative O/Ss on the hard drive, or it can be done from an external devices such as USB hard drives or eSATA hard drives, or it can even be done from Flash USB sticks. Apart from the "live" CD or DVD bootup that are extremely safe there are safety issues with the other methods that you should be aware of. They range from very dangerous to completely "bullet-proof" methods that were covered in this presentation. The presentation included some discussion on boot menus focussing on the Grub (Grand Unified Boot) menu.
FRIDAY 10 SEPTEMBER 2010 - Adam Webb has been working on the Web Server Enhanced in a Box version B, or "WEB-B", since last November and presented its progress at the September meeting. The original Web Server In A Box is an outstanding design, yet Adam has significantly extended the design with many more hardware interfaces and controls. The most attractive features of this PIC chip based server are low power and low cost, but many will also be attracted by the wide range of digital and analogue I/O ports that allow remote control and remote monitoring over the net which are not normally available on traditional web servers. There is one feature that is not available on this server so far and that is CGI (Common Gateway Interface) that allows interactivity with the client end. CGI requires some ability to run a language on the server that can accept data from the client end, process it, and respond with some HTML back to the client's browser. This is possible if PIC executable code can be developed to run such a CGI capable language, possibly a subset of C, Perl, Python, Basic, or other. This could be an SAMG project. A more detailed list of the many characteristics of this web server are HERE. Adam intends to make this project available as kits in the near future to those interested.
FRIDAY 13 AUGUST 2010 - Lecture/demo of Linux and some of its Applications by Hayden the President of the Adelaide LSGA Linux users' group who meet regularly in Sturt St, Adelaide. With the rapid growth in computer platforms beyond PCs and laptops into such things as mobile phones, navigation systems, ebooks, control systems, etc. Linux and Apple operating systems have been growing at the expense of Windows. Then, if you access the Internet these days there is about a 90% chance that you are talking to a Linux server at the other end. If you talk to any Google anything or use any Nokia mobile phone the chance of it being Linux is 100%. We chose the following topics for Hayden to cover in his talk from a long list. (Hopefully, others will be presented on some future occasion.)
* Very brief history Unix/Linux.
* The software stack (Linux is modularised not monolithic).
* Applications
* GUI (several)
* Shell (several)
* Kernel (including Drivers) you can pick and choose components
* Additional Drivers
* Hardware
* Live CD's and Flash Sticks
FRIDAY 9 JULY 2010 - DEMO of a range of Educational Electronic Kits. Our July guest speaker, Nigel, has been working for some time on a range of immaginative, low cost electronics education kits based on readily available, cheap, electronics parts combined with recycled household items such as milk cartons and plastic bottle tops to make a range of different model vehicles and a clever demo water pumping system as shown on his web site. Nigel described to us the processes of getting these ideas from concept to realisation while at the same time including as many basic physics and electronics disign principles as possible. As well as demonstrating the kits shown on his web site, Nigel went on to demonstrate many more kits not shown on his web site so far using ultra-sonics, infra-red and ULF (40KHz) radio remote controls such as the fruit juice bottle paddle wheelers and the beautifully designed vaccuum molded plastic radio controlled model speed boat. Another example was the versatile 2 transistor "long tail pair" that Nigel uses to simulate op amp design and illustrate most of the things op amps are typically used for. Then adding to his extensive collection, Nigel showed us his "peanut paste jar and Alfoil" electroscope that can be used either stand-alone simply as a detector or together with a voltmeter to give reasonable voltage measurements, and lastly there was a Hall Device-based magnetic field measuring instrument that is rarely attempted these days because they are generally regarded as too difficult. There was certainly lots of food for thought in that lot and Nigel attracted a lot of good comments and further ideas from the audience. Many thanks Nigel for a very entertaining and stimulating presentation.
These ideas and kits are candidates for sessions similar to the PICAXE Workshops we have done in the past at the Hindmarsh Science Centre. We may be recruited to combine with him and his kits at a future PICAXE Workshop or help out at separate workshops dedicated to just his kits. We are looking at the possibility of holding more PICAXE classes at Hindmarsh in late August or early September.
FRIDAY 11 JUNE 2010 at the WEA "Cottage B" 223 Angas St Adelaide starting at 7:00pm - FLIGHT GEAR (Version 2). A while ago now we had a look at Flight Gear version 1 and I think we all agreed it had promise, but at that stage, was not too good. Well, we saw the latest version 2 at the June meeting in 2 compilations, one compiled for Windows and one for Linux. It does seem to work a lot better, but because it is intended to be a close simulation of real aircraft it is incredibly difficult to control from a mouse. Nevertheless a lot of the faults we noticed last time have been fixed and the scenery is very impressive. Scenery now covers the entire earth's surface and includes all airports. (The only scenery not included is featureless ocean.) Aircraft choices are virtually anything that can fly and even includes vehicles that can't fly at all that just run around on the ground!
We also looked at some DESIGN ASPECTS OF FUSES. The selection of fuses is not quite as simple as you might expect and nor is the background physics. We had a look at the physics (not included here), but you can look here for the explanation of the tables and graphs and here for the tables and graphs themselves.
FRIDAY 14 MAY 2010 - VISIT to the NEW HINDMARSH STUDIOS of RADIO 5MBS at 4a River St Hindmarsh. We were invited by John Ingham to visit the new Hindmarsh studios of Radio 5MBS (99.9MHz) for our May meeting. You will remember that we previously visited 5MBS at their former Hutt St Adelaide premises and marveled at how they had somehow managed to shoehorn their entire operation into such a small space. Well, they have a lot more space now and were very happy to invite us to see it. John showed us their extensive CD library, several of their recording studios and the tech gear that provides internet feeds, their mandatory program recording and archiving equipment, the PCs that store pre-recorded programs on hard drives for mostly night-time use, and the microwave link gear to South Tce Adelaide where the transmitters are located. John described a problem with radio interference caused to the present analog TV channel 4 by 5MBS's 99.9 MHz frequency allocation. (How ironic - John used to work for chan 4 years ago and now works for a station that interferes with it!) In the near future 5MBS will convert from an antenna pattern that favours the eastern suburbs to one that is omnidirectional when analog TV chan 4 vacates its present channel allocation to its digital one. The station is run entirely by volunteers and is funded by public subscriptions. Many questions were raised relating to training volunteers in the complex operation of digital editing software, obtaining material from various program sources, operating mixer consoles, and preparing and producing radio broadcast programs. The group wish to thank John for this opportunity to see the new 5MBS studios. More details of the station can be seen on http://www.5mbs.com/
FRIDAY 9 APRIL 2010 – CROSSWORD PUZZLES, SODUKO, ETC. John Stevens has been writing software to generate word and number puzzles for over 18 years and is known world-wide for his puzzles that feature daily in much of the world's printed media. John's first version ran under DOS and was known as The Daily Crossword. That led to Windows and MacIntosh versions called Crossword Express. The latest Java offering is a collection of all the puzzles he has developed so far called Magnum Opus that John concentrated on for most of his presentation. The leading puzzle in Magnum Opus is the crossword puzzle with its huge range of puzzle layouts, various language dictionaries, and other options that you can choose from. The other puzzles such as the familiar Sudoku and those with less familiar (mostly Japanese) names are well worth a closer look. You can download Magnum Opus free to try for yourself at http://crauswords.com/ John is an engineer with an extensive background in telecommunications' network design, construction and operation.
For those with an interest in Sudoku you might like to look at this site where the author has written a Sudoku solver in C (with source code) that runs under Linux and solves Sudoku problems at 7,100 puzzles per second on a 2.4GHz PC using an Athlon 64 4000 CPU! - a middle range machine.
FRIDAY MARCH 12, - RISING SUN PICTURES. This was a landmark meeting with Ian Cope, Communications Manager, Rising Sun Pictures with a degree in Design (Visual Communication) from the University of Technology Sydney presenting and describing the Computer Generated Imagery (CGI) and Special Effects (sfx) production methods used by his company for such films as the “Lord Of The Rings” trilogy, the “Harry Potter” franchise [“The Goblet of Fire”, “The Order of the Phoenix” and “The Half-Blood Prince”], "X-Men Origins: Wolverine and Watchmen", "Australia", "Prince Caspian", "28 Weeks Later," "Blood Diamond", "Superman Returns", “Terminator Salvation”, and "Batman Begins". Presently RSP are working on more of the highly successful Harry Potter series “The Deathly Hallows” Part 1 and Part 2, and Peter Weir's “The Way Back”. Rising Sun's filmography has now grown to exceed sixty feature films. You can see more, including a demo reel, at http://www.rsp.com.au/news.htm Ian's presentation generated a lot of interest and intense questioning from an enthusiastic but somewhat depleted audience. (The audience was smaller than usual due to the Arts Festival, car racing and other concurrent events. We might have to review having meetings in future that coincide with those other events in March.)
FRIDAY FEBRUARY 12 - Annual General Meeting. The only changes were to fill a committee and the auditor vacancies. The program for 2010 has got off to a good start with Rising Sun Pictures in March and a visit to radio station 5MBS 99.9MHz FM at their brand new very spacious studios at Hindmarsh and a talk by an Adelaide Hills software developer who produces the software that is used by most daily newspapers world-wide to produce crossword and Soduko puzzles.
Also at the January meeting was a prototype of a web server that Adam Webb has assembled. This unit is along the lines of one featured recently in a local electronics magazine. Its main components are a PIC chip, an Ethernet controller, a MAC chip, and an SD Flash memory card. It holds many web pages (only limited by the capacity of the SD card), can read analog voltages and read/write to digital I/O ports. It only consumes 1 Watt so it could be left permanently on-line at very low cost. A lot of interest was generated by Adam's demo.
JANUARY 2010 - NO JANUARY MEETING as usual.
FRIDAY DECEMBER 4 - SHORT TALKS/DEMOS - We had an aggregate of some shorter items that occupied about 15 to 30 minutes each. (We hope that the advertised DAB+ talk might be arranged for 2010 when the invited speaker is not so flat out.) Instead, the items discussed were fixing radio/TV interference from all new switch-mode power supplies, a clever height measuring device that combines a few simple measurements with a spreadsheet, intro to a local software developer's Crossword, Sudoku, etc generator/solver (with hopefully a full talk by the developer in 2010), and what the CSIRO WiFi patent is (see further down).
FRIDAY NOVEMBER 13 - VIDEO PROCESSING - Howard Harvey discussed and demonstrated the use of video editing and processing to produce very professional results from several digital video sources and formats using Corel's Ulead video editing software. A lot of you were trying to copy down some of the details in the semi-darkness, so Howard has sent on the Power Point slides to make sure that you get the details correctly. Slides in Power Point and in pdf. Obviously there is a lot of interest in video processing so look forward to more soon.
FRIDAY OCTOBER 9 - Meeting was presented by Thomas Sprinkmeier and discussed Arduino micro kits. A pdf of the talk can be downloaded here (including useful links an contact email address). It was a very interesting talk about a very impressive microcontroler development system, thanks Thomas for a great talk especially at such short notice. More info; playground, bits available from littlebird. Another interesting site by Jonathan Oxer is here, well worth a look.
FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 11 - We discussed a number of items that have emerged recently. The first item was a look at the fascinating new operating system, Kolibri available as a live CD iso download. It looks roughly like most operating systems with all the usual features, but at just under 3 MB (can you believe it!) it is by far the smallest O/S ever and it runs more than 50 times faster than any other O/S, especially Windows. It is only early days yet, but it could be a good candidate for embedded systems and phones where size, speed, battery consumption and performance with minimal hardware is vital. It is entirely written in assembler and comes from a Russian team. We also had a quick look at some of the huge number of features of Linux's ffmpeg for video processing. We had a brief look at cyber attacks and privacy invasions linked to all those free email services, we had a look at Lagrangian Points (see Wikipedia) that appear in scifi and are now actually applied in space, we had a quick intro to digital broadcasting (DAB+ and DRM), and we had a Science Week report. There were a number of items left over for other meetings.
FRIDAY AUGUST 14 - REMOTE CONTROLLED MODELS - Adam Webb showed/demoed some components and fully operational remote controlled model racing cars and multi degrees of freedom arms. This was further to Cliff Hignett's presentation in July - see "IDEAS FOR KIDS WORKSHOPS" report below. It was an opportunity to discuss ideas, see some working models. Vehicles and robots that Adam demoed were:- Microbric Viper http://www.microbric.com.au/
- Real Robots two robots
(both of the above as shown by Cliff)
- Lynxmotion hexapod (6 legged walker)
- Lego Mindstorms.
FRIDAY JULY 10 - THERE WERE TWO PRESENTATIONS -
(1) IDEAS FOR KIDS WORKSHOPS - Disillusioned by the direction modern education is taking and disappointed by the lack of exposure and appeal that there is for electronics to kids these days, Cliff Hignett presented some concepts to expand on the idea of the PICAXE kits that we have presented several times to the kids at the Hindmarsh Science Centre. Cliff thinks there is a good opportunity to improve on model car racing by introducing electronic intelligence to replace the real-time human interactive component by making the cars fully self-controlled and auto-responsive to their environment including other cars. Such behaviour is seen "virtually" in many computer games, but so far not seen in the "real world" even though there are a number of venues set up these days for fast model car racing with a variety of tracks and conditions. The challenge for us would be to provide the kids with suggestions, parts, assemblies, development software, etc to achieve this. Apart from being exciting to participate in as well as to watch, it would provide plenty of incentive to learn about the hardware and/or software design techniques that are taking place now and will become so much more important in future. To further develop Cliff's ideas, Adam Webb will bring some components and fully operational models for demo and discussion to the August meeting of the SAMG. What ideas do you have?
(2) JED PRODUCT PRESENTATION - Ed Schoell is CEO of JED Microprocessors Pty Ltd, Boronia, Melbourne VIC. He graduated from the SAIT (now Uni SA) Adelaide in 1968. Ed explained that after working in the electronics' industry here and overseas for a few years he realized that there was an untapped market for microprocessor-based systems featuring low power, user-programmability and with plenty of I/O options, so he decided to set up JED. By previously working for National Semiconductor and therefore being very familiar with their microprocessor products, Ed's early systems were based on the PACE INS8900 16-bit series. To reduce users' development time and effort, the systems were mainly programmed in variants of BASIC that proved very popular then and is still very popular today. Ed tried some Intel based systems, but because of Intel's short production life times for their support chip such as the "Super-IO" they were eventually abandoned. More recent JED products are now AVR microprocessor based. Ease of testing, debugging, transferring the code to EPROMs and more recently to Flash, have been very attractive features. For data logging applications F-RAM (ferro-electric RAM) is now used on many products to buffer the data before transferring it to the far greater capacity of Flash while accommodating Flash's "block writing" requirement. Data projector controllers have emerged as one of the most successful of JED products. These are wall-mounted in class-rooms to avoid using remote controls that get lost, stolen, trodden on, etc. JED's controls select what to view/hear from a variety of video/audio sources. Some other of JED's large product range are the PC/104, STD, Tiny Tiger and AVR based computers, displays in b/w & colour, RS485 comms, and analog/digital I/O "for scientists and engineers who build things". JED products now sell world-wide in a rare Australian success story.
FRIDAY JUNE 12 - NEW COMPUTER HARDWARE STANDARDS. Adam Webb described and demonstrated a dazzling array of new computer hardware standards that included a quad-core Intel CPU fitted to a large, top-of-the-range motherboard with plenty of 16X PCI-e slots and running SATA hard drives configured in a raid array all housed in a large, well-ventilated, multi-fan cooled tower case overflowing with high-capacity power supplies. The nVidia video card covered several PCI-e slots, weighed a ton, and was connected to a wide-screen fast response LCD screen. This is the kind of system needed to run modern computer games or similar high demand computing tasks. The audience was very impressed by the game Far Cry 2, a war game set in Africa, running on this hardware. It showed incredible detail and super-fast rendering that provided a degree of realism not seen and not even possible before this. You would do well to consider at least some of this hardware, if not for gaming, then for very high performance machines capable of connecting to a wide range of peripheral hardware and capable of highly intensive processing such as needed for video editing and processing, virtualization, and servers for busy networks.
FRIDAY MAY 8 - TURING MACHINES. David Tilbrooke gave a presentation on Turing Machines. Alan Turing was a leading British researcher who worked on deciphering Germany's Enigma machines' "uncrackable" coded messages during World War 2. He led a team that developed machines using electromechanical logic (mostly relays) to do the deciphering. After the war he continued his research into the development of early computers such as ACE that introduced programs stored in memory rather than using wired logic. In some of his early papers and presentations he introduced the idea of machines (now known as "Turing Machines" in memory of him) that, in spite of their simplicity and impractibility, can simulate any computer algorithm. While Alan Turing never saw a Turing Machine, modern computers can fairly readily simulate them. Check here and here for more.Here are a few useful book references and web site locations supplied by David for those who may be interested:
References:
"Engines of Logic", Martin Davis, W.W. Norton & Co New York, 2000.
"Computability and Unsolvability", Martin Davis, Dover Publications Inc., 1982.
"The Undecidable", Ed. Martin Davis, Dover Publications Inc., 2004.
Web Sites:
www.turing.org.uk/turing/scrapbook/machine.html
www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_Logic
www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/HistTopics/Beginnings_of_set_theory.html
www.turing.org.uk/turing/scrapbook/tmjava.html
(This latter site has an active Turing Machine simulation.)
(There was NO APRIL MEETING because Easter fell on the 2nd Friday of April)
FRIDAY MARCH 13 - VIRTUALIZATION. Our Chairman, Andrew, presented and demoed Virtualization at our March meeting. This is a method of running one or more different operating systems from just one boot-up and operating them completely separately or, if desired, with various degrees of interaction with one another supervised by the virtual control software and/or hardware. Keeping overall control in this virtual environment is very attractive for testing, checking that updates actually work, the operation of servers, etc. wherever there is some risk of things going wrong or you are running an O/S and want a feature on another O/S without a full shutdown and reboot. Andrew uses virtualization to completely isolate and protect his company records from the Internet while other O/Ss on the same machine.are Internet connected. Virtualization puts some additional load on the processor, so the CPU needs to be fairly quick, and it uses a fair bit more memory than non-virtualized systems. Andrew used VMware running on an Apple laptop with Windows XP running virtually in one demo to be followed by another demo of a desktop PC running Xen as the control for a virtualized server system. With both virtual systems running and connected by a wireless link the situation got very complex and yet continued to operate happily. To get a glipse of the sort of things to expect from virtualization see the recently demoed Nokia N800 mobile phone (see video) installed with VMware that boots and then offers quick swaps between Windows CE and Google Android operating systems depending on what features you want?
FRIDAY FEBRUARY 13 - ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING. The election of officers for 2009 resulted in just one change to the committee - Adam replaces David.
The program for 2009 will add some items to the list left over from last year. Turing Machines, Aircraft Positioning System (ADSB) from last year and now add Python, Bluetooth, new hardware standards (PCI-e, SATA, HDMI), GPS, MIDI, CD & DVD format standards.
Other events that we hope to include are auctions that we have not held for some years of electronic equipment, show-and-tell nights where a number of you can briefly describe and/or demo items that would not fill a meeting by themselves. There is also Bluetooth hardware that is now down to $10 per dongle. See Bluetooth Special Interest Group for explanation of Bluetooth.
Rick demoed an LCD display from Aztronics that connects to his laptop using his interface cabling plus software he wrote in C for both Windows and Linux.
We viewed Peters set of flv videos showing electric cars being assembled and road tested in Sydney. The engines in standard model road cars were being replaced with electric motors just ahead of the gearbox together with lots of special high energy/weight ratio batteries (lithium-iron-polymer - note: it is "iron" and not "ion"), vacuum pumps (for the brakes), heaters/demisters, etc. Even those not very interested in electric cars got very interested in the vidoes. See here for one of the video series. Make sure you check out the others.
Lastly, if you have trouble viewing videos such as those electric car videos then try the Western Australian "live" Puppy Linux that is less than 100 MB download. Being a "live" version, it boots and runs without any disturbance to your hard drive and the real bonus is that it comes with all multi-media software installed and per-configured to display all video and photo formats in common use (ie. video works straight off without the need for a net connection, or downloads, or installation, or configuration - it just works!).
DECEMBER 5 - Virtualization was to be demoed, but will now be held during 2009. (Virtualization is where 2 or more operating systems can run on the same machine simultaneously.) Instead, the December meeting we had a preliminary look at Virtualization and Turing machines that will both be covered in the new year. We also had a look at those maths problems (above) and we had enough time for a Xmas drink in one of the nearby cafes in Hutt St.
NOVEMBER 14 - Peter Rosenthal, Convenor of the SA PIC Users Group, gave a talk and demo of Vapour Phase Soldering that is now used extensively throughout the electronics industry to assemble printed circuit boards. Peter explained that the process was developed primarily for surface mounted (SMD) components. The method solves the problem of providing a uniform temperature sufficient to melt the solder on all soldered connections while simultaneously keeping the temperature as low as possible for as little time as possible to minimize the risk of damage to a boards components. Very expensive and amazingly heavy liquids based on fluorides are used that are heated to their boiling point (phase change). The boards are immersed in the vapour above the liquid for just long enough for the solder to melt and then removed. Most components are usually held in place by a solder paste masked onto the printed circuit during preparation for soldering. Both leaded or lead-free solder can be used in the process, but with different fluoridated liquids because of the different solder melting points (210 C and 240 C). Peter used his video microscope that he developed for SMD work to show us what was happening. Peter also clearly showed us that the home constructor is able to construct electronic equipment using essentially commercial SMD methods.
This web site now has MIRRORS at http://samg.yi.org and http://samg.supremeit.com
