Subject: [E3-hacking] E2 PBL response

From: "Peter Washington" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 15 Mar 2005 08:55:35 -0000

Hello folks,

My name is Peter Washington, (alias Pugwash), and I've been helping Ralph Corderoy for some time now providing electronics expertise
to back up his prowess on the software side.  I started life as an electronic engineer speciallising in Micro's and then moved over
the fence to software.

I'm a bit of a newcomer, (complete virgin actually), to newsgroups and mailing list, so please bear with me.

I've been following everything on this list avidly, and I'd like to congratulate Matt on the stirling work he's done in getting the
E2 to talk to us and add my own congratulations to Ralph on his superb analysis of the E2 PBL.

I actually own 2 E2's and an E3, one E2 is my main house phone and is registered with Amstrad, the other is in bits in my back
bedroom on a "Breadboard", (a lump of wood big enough to hold the parts of the case that I need and the motherboard on some plastic
pillars), hooked up to a PC running Linux.

I should be receiving a batch of 5 MAX3232's today and I will be making up a voltage level shifter as soon as possible on some
veroboard.  I'm going to need to provide a second jack plug so that I can plug in to the E2 OR the E3 as I wish.

If Ralph and Matt would like to supply me with a combined, modified exp.exe shortly, I will try the same tests on the E2 then the
E3.

I completely agree with Matt on 2 important matters :-

1.	Trust the Maxim datasheets over any other source.
	(I think the Hardware Recyling circuit has used 0.1mF to 0.1 micro Farads, lack of the Greek mu)
2.	Putting Vcc into the Gnd Pin of any chip will definitely damage it IF any other pin is connected to a voltage around about Vcc.
The "Magic Blue Smoke" gets boiled off and it stops working ;-(

I think that with the particular mix of people we now seem to have looking at this problem we should have it licked pretty quickly.

On another subject entirely, (which should probably be handled further in some other forum), Ralph and I have been talking about
home made Digital Storage Oscilloscopes recently, if either Matt or David would like to join forces with us maybe we could have a
bash at actually making something.

Cheers Peter

---

From: David Given <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 15 Mar 2005 10:34:00 +0000

On Tue, 2005-03-15 at 08:55 +0000, Peter Washington wrote:
[...]
> I'm a bit of a newcomer, (complete virgin actually), to newsgroups and mailing list, so please bear with me.

That's okay; I'll help you with the mailing lists if you'll help me with
the hardware...

[...]
> The "Magic Blue Smoke" gets boiled off and it stops working ;-(

There's actually good, if rather embarassing, news. The reason why I was
getting a voltage drop of zero across Gnd and Vcc was not, as I thought,
because the MAX232 was short-circuiting the power supply --- it was
because it wasn't connected to the power supply! I hadn't noticed that
the breadboard I was using had a break in the power rails halfway
across, and of course I'd plugged the power supply in on the left and
the circuit in on the right... I think the only useful thing I can say
at this point is "D'oh!".

So after plugging everything in the right place, I powered it all up
again and it seems to be much better behaved. All the voltages seem to
be correct, so the charge pump is pumping and it generally seems to be
doing its thing.

Still doesn't work, though; but seeing as when I connect TX and RX
together on the jack, I get garbage instead of seeing my input echoed
back, I suspect there's a wiring problem somewhere. I'll try to scrounge
up a scope and have a look this evening.

[Incidentally, I've discovered that the HAM radio set use pretty exactly
this kind of interface --- you can buy readymade cables for under twenty
quid. Pricy, but unlike the stuff I build it should work... it might be
worth looking at TI calculator cables, too.)

-- 
+- David Given --McQ-+ "Feminism encourages women to leave their
|  [email-masked]    | husbands, kill their children, practice withcraft,
| ([email-masked]) | destroy capitalism and become lesbians." --- Rev.
+- www.cowlark.com --+ Pat Robertson

---

From: Ralph Corderoy <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 15 Mar 2005 11:05:48 +0000

Hi David and Peter,

David Given wrote:
> > I'm a bit of a newcomer, (complete virgin actually), to newsgroups
> > and mailing list, so please bear with me.
> 
> That's okay; I'll help you with the mailing lists if you'll help me
> with the hardware...

I think what David forgot to point out here was your lines are too long.
I've re-formatted the above but your original lines were going up to 132
characters.  Convention is 72 characters max allowing for a few prefixes
of `> ' to be added without exceeding 80, which is all that fits on
these punch cards.

I know it's possible to alter Microsoft Outlook to do this but don't
know how.  Someone know of a good link to `configure MS OL for public
use'?

Cheers,

Ralph.

---

From: David Given <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 15 Mar 2005 11:12:06 +0000

On Tue, 2005-03-15 at 11:05 +0000, Ralph Corderoy wrote:
[...]
> know how.  Someone know of a good link to `configure MS OL for public

*trying to resist urge to suggest reconfiguring Outlook to use
Thunderbird instead*...

Tools->Options->Send->Mail Sending Format->Plain Text
Settings->Automatically wrap text at...

That's for Outlook Express; I don't know about Outlook itself.

-- 
+- David Given --McQ-+ "Why should we put ourselves out of our way to
|  [email-masked]    | serve posterity? For what has posterity ever done
| ([email-masked]) | for us?" --- Sir Boyle Roche
+- www.cowlark.com --+

---

From: Matt Evans <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 15 Mar 2005 11:32:56 +0000

Hi Peter,

Welcome to the list!

Let me instantly diverge off-topic:

On 15 Mar 2005, at 08:55, Peter Washington wrote:

> I think that with the particular mix of people we now seem to have 
> looking at this problem we should have it licked pretty quickly.
>
> On another subject entirely, (which should probably be handled further 
> in some other forum), Ralph and I have been talking about
> home made Digital Storage Oscilloscopes recently, if either Matt or 
> David would like to join forces with us maybe we could have a

Me me me!  :-)  I was looking at buying one recently... even ebay 
wasn't cheap :/  I would be interested in this.  I'm also probably more 
interested in building a logic analyser, and it's something I was 
planning to try out on my Xilinx FPGA board.  These devices in 
particular should be pretty good to trace to a certain depth since the 
larger ones have a pretty reasonable amount of RAM (or spare FFs).

One of the things I was thinking of doing with the E2.... was to use it 
as the front-end to a FPGA-based logic analyser backend.  Screen size = 
pretty good.. and of course with a logic analyser the screen's mostly 
just a GUI so bus speed (16bit) shouldn't be too much of a bottleneck.

But yes I'm interested in your plans for a DSO (they may share a lot of 
common ground too).. anyone got a wiki to scribble ideas on?

[Maybe I should say my background is in CompEng, so my studies were in 
hardware/VLSI.. nothing remotely analogue though (don't say 'FET' :P ) 
so you guys sort that angle.. ;)  I have some experience with using 
FPGAs though (ideal for complex ASIC-needing homebrew projects), if 
that's useful.]

Cheers,

Matt

---

From: Jonathan McDowell <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 15 Mar 2005 11:39:54 +0000

> common ground too).. anyone got a wiki to scribble ideas on?

http://wiki.earth.li/ is generally available for UK tech stuff - the
DebianUK lot use it a fair bit, as do a few LUGs. It has a Free software
slant, but I can't see anyone complaining about interesting hardware
projects.

(I don't run it, but I know the person who does.)

J.

-- 
noodles is one of the north coast's rising dj stars
This .sig brought to you by the letter J and the number 16
Product of the Republic of HuggieTag

---

From: Ralph Corderoy <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 15 Mar 2005 12:11:13 +0000

Hi David,

> *trying to resist urge to suggest reconfiguring Outlook to use

He does use Firefox so http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/
might be an option.

Anyway, that's probably enough OT stuff.

Cheers,

Ralph.

---

From: Ralph Corderoy <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 15 Mar 2005 18:12:42 +0000

Hi,

> Farads, lack of the Greek mu)

I've suggested to HRI they add a clarification since over software
people may use it someday.

Cheers,

Ralph.