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Showing posts with the label school

School At Home IT Solutions

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I work in education and recently have been in contact with a number of schools in Northern Ireland, Scotland and a couple in England to find out what barriers students are encountering in continuing their learning from home. While a small number of families are reporting problems with their broadband connections, by far the biggest barrier is actual IT hardware. Often this is in families with three or more children where there are not enough computers to go around, especially if mum, dad or both are also working from home. An announcement was made by the Department of Education in England last week that IT hardware would be available for loan to students and some schools in NI have already lent laptops to students, but there are nowhere near enough to go around. Now obviously in our house we are spoilt, but only because we up-cycle 'obsolete' IT equipment and run everything on Linux, but that hasn't stopped me looking at possible solutions for others. It occurred to m...

Genie Microcontroller Homework

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My son came home at the end of term with his technology electronics project, which unfortunately didn't work. I'm not sure what sort of a mark or grade he got for this, his end-of-term report hasn't appeared just yet. Anyway, I thought it would be fun to have a go at fixing it for him. The project is based on a Genie C08 microcontroller which is a PIC 12F683 8-pin running custom firmware, essentially a serial bootloader. The Genie software is a free download which was handy, but I didn't have a Genie programming cable and didn't fancy spending £15 buying one when I thought I could probably bodge a programmer using parts I already have. The first issue was getting the Genie Programming software running on Linux. I had a version of the Wine Windows abstraction layer (Wine Is Not an Emulator) on my workshop computer downloaded from the Linux Mint repository, but this turned out to be wildly out of date, so I uninstalled it and and downloaded the latest version...