Just a quick note, if you want to use usbtmc (tmc is a protocol to control measurement devices remotely), the version in the linux kernel doesn’t really seem to work. There’s one from Agilent which works fine, the installation procedure is described here. However it doesn’t compile on newer kernels unless you do these changes: http://paste.kde.org/625736/ After that, it works just fine: # cat /dev/usbtmc0 Minor Number Manufacturer Product Serial […]
I’m happy to announce the release of the first stable version of kdev-python, version 1.4! As this is the first stable release, this post is supposed to be an overview about what kdev-python actually does. KDevelop with kdev-python 1.4 First of all, kdev-python is a plugin for KDevelop. Its purpose is to make development of python applications more convenient. The main focus of the program is static analysis of source […]
For university, I needed a camera tracker which could track motion of some particles under a microscope, and give me the coordinates of a particle for each frame. Blender has a very nice camera tracker which is ridiculously easy to use (and very fast), but it cannot export its results in a gnuplot-compatible format. But, it has a nice Python API, so you can just do it yourself! This is […]
i2c is a protocol to communicate with microchips. It is widely used if the required data rate is not that high (up to few thousand bytes per second or similar). Reading data from some client (which could be some sort of sensor, or an Analog-Digital-Converter for example) with the Raspberry Pi is usually as easy as just reading from a device file (/dev/i2c-0 for example), specifying the device address beforehand, […]
In my recent electronics projects, I encountered two cases where a chip supporting the SPI protocol behaved in a weird or inconsistent way when communicating with the computer controlling it. I had an ADS 8320 Analog-Digital-converter (which should measure some voltage 100k times per second in 16bit resolution), which reported data like this when given a monotoneously rising, then falling voltage: Weird data received from an AD converter via SPI […]
I’m planning to build another radio telescope (I’ll write more about that once it’s a bit more advanved), and for that, I need to solder a lot of SMD stuff — mostly because many of the parts I need are only available in SMD. This has a few advantages — especially it’s cheaper and smaller — but it can also be very difficult to do with a soldering iron, for […]
I’m happy to announce the immediate availability of the second beta version of kdev-python, the python language plugin for KDevelop! You can download the sources from kde.org; those can be compiled against KDevelop 4.4 (which is the current stable version). Changes over the first beta release include: Two crash bugs fixed Fix a bug in parse priority things (it did sometimes cause documents not to be reparsed after a dependency […]
In an effort to improve the overall quality of KDevelop’s user interface, Aleix and I polished the settings dialog of KDevelop. Since the Kate guys challenged us by showcasing their “awesome” gimp skills, I feel like I have to do that too: Comparison between the old and the new configuration dialog in KDevelop There wasn’t really any changes to functionality, it’s just supposed to look better and be more understandable. […]
This is the third day of the KDevelop / kate sprint in Vienna, and it’s really fun and productive so far! There’s several new things related to kdev-python which I’d like to write something about. Beta release First of all, there’s a first official beta release of the python plugin, which is to be used with the (new) 4.4 (resp. 1.4) stable versions of kdevelop / kdevplatform! You can download […]
I’ve done some observations and experiments with an 1.2m parabolic dish radio telescope which I built from cheap components, at a frequency of about 10GHz (3cm wavelength). Among other things, radiation from the sun and the moon was successfully detected. Since I’m not too eager to typeset equations and graphs in HTML, here’s a nice PDF describing the project. Have fun reading, and feel free to leave comments 🙂