It’s alive!

I spent a little time on my lunch break putting in the last few wires and the board has come up 🙂

The flash from my phone has drowned out the LEDs on the board, but they were blinking as they should.

Since I didn’t have another voltage regulator handy I have used the voltage drop across two diodes from a bridge rectifier (a trick I’ve used successfully before with other 3.3v parts from Microchip).

Some more pictures of the failed boards

I took a few more pictures of the failed boards and sent them to the fantastic people at circuits.io.  They have very generously offered to send me new ones at no charge 🙂  Hopefully these new boards will work out.

I also had a quick go at getting one of the boards working.  After soldering lots of wires on the bottom of the board I powered it up and let the magic smoke out of my voltage regulator, so it looks like I may have a crook connection somewhere.  It could also be because I didn’t have the right regulator available so tried another with a slightly different pinout.  I put some heat shrink over the input lead and bent it into the right position. Maybe I didn’t get it quite right.  The interesting thing is that the Mac I had it plugged in to didn’t complain about the device drawing too much current, so I don’t quite know what went wrong.  Time to head out to Jaycar and get the part I actually need I guess 😉

Toilets

Over the weekend I replaced the leaking inlet valve of our toilet. What should have been a 5 minute job took a couple of days as whoever installed it in the first place glued the nut joining the inlet pipe to the inlet valve. This meant that I had to cut the inlet valve out once I had managed to snap things off badly inside the cistern. No going back once I had snapped a couple of the plastic bits on the inside. Once I got it out I was able to replace it in a matter of minutes 🙂

SVG

I’ve been looking into making some software with my daughter.  She wants to make a game with some characters she has drawn, so I need a nice way to render them.  I want to make them using vector graphics, but iOS doesn’t really have a nice way of doing that.  What I am in the process of doing is making a little command line tool that converts SVG files into CoreGraphics calls.

The code can be found here on github
This is a sample of the output of the tool.  I have seen several other tools that convert the SVG paths to CoreGraphics calls, but nothing that will actually render the whole file including colours and fills.  It is still very rough and doesn’t handle things like gradient fills, but for a quick hack it is working pretty well.

Hopper Disassembler

I’ve been using a new disassembler a lot over the last couple of weeks called Hopper.  I’m finding it to be well worth the money.  So much so that I initially purchased it through the Apple App store, and then purchased it again directly from the developer so I could get access to the latest version more quickly.

It has many of the features of IDA Pro at a fraction of the cost!

It is alive again

I got another email from the awesome tech support guys at Drobo this morning asking about my DroboPro. I told them it had died again and they offered to replace it rather cheaply, they also suggested that both batteries might need to be replaced rather than just the CR2032 coin cell. I removed the main backup battery pack and pressed the power button and the thing booted up. I’m not shutting the thing down again until I’m sure I’ve got ALL of the data this time 😉