Saturday 3 August 2013

Slow news month(s)

So, not much visible progress has been made over the last couple of months...

The laser cut case from the last video fit pretty well, as you can see them here:

I would like to tighten up the holes a little so that the board doesn't rattle around when the PCB doesn't have feet attached, but it's still a pretty good second effort. Sadly, it looks like I won't be making any more cases for a while - fizzpop moved to their own building, so no longer has access to the laser cutter I used before. There are plans to buy one in the near future, but that'll be a few months off. And besides, I seem to be too busy doing other things to actually make it along anyway!

I've been (silently) working on the FDC emulation (which I decided to do on the Atmega side) - a first version works, but it's a bit buggy. It manages to load a few demos, but it's nowhere near stable enough to release publically.

I've also been trying to get the DVI transmitter chip to work. It looks like I forgot a couple of connections to the chip, although often fixing them up I still can't get the chip to actually transmit any data. It's hard to tell where the problem lies, sadly, so it might still be some time before I get DVI output working...

So today, I decided to investigate how many shades I can coax my 2-bit DACs to produce... I'll give you a clue, it's more than 4! :) There are about 30, although quite a lot of them are difficult to discern, but it looks like there are enough shades to produce the equivalent of a 4-bit DAC. I took some pictures so I can analyse them better:

The other big news is that I've got a new job, starting in 2 weeks. I guess that might mean I get even more busy though...