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
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...
[...]
- 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)
- 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 ;-(
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.)
Hi David and Peter,
David Given wrote:
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...
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.
On Tue, 2005-03-15 at 11:05 +0000, Ralph Corderoy wrote: [...]
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'?
*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.
Hi David,
*trying to resist urge to suggest reconfiguring Outlook to use Thunderbird instead*...
He does use Firefox so http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/ might be an option.
Anyway, that's probably enough OT stuff.
Cheers,
Ralph.
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 bash at actually making something.
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
On Tue, Mar 15, 2005 at 11:32:56AM +0000, Matt Evans wrote:
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?
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.
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David Given -
Jonathan McDowell -
Matt Evans -
Peter Washington -
Ralph Corderoy