1202 ALARM

(Touch monitor under test using Linux Mint) I've posted a short set of photos of the LCD monitor conversion so far. http://www.flickr.com/photos/glennwalsh/sets/72157628590966293/ The monitor is one of a pair purchased on eBay for £15 (s0 say £8 per monitor) and the touch panel cost £14 again from an eBay store in the far east. Total cost is under £30 and a lot of fun in the research and modification. The monitor is not VGA, but the picture is remarkably sharp and with big icons (such as Linpus or Tiny Core at 400 x 300 or something) this would be ideal as an in-vehicle dash control panel. I've just ordered some panels (just the panels for now) for under £5 a panel. Now the electronics are the more expensive part, but I'm about to start looking at reading these resistive panels directly from a micro controller using A/D conversion. More on that in the New Year.

I thought this was pretty clever when I spotted it a while back passing a farm on the coast. They've put a row of solar water panels on an outbuilding roof. Nice south-facing roof too and low enough to make installation and maintenance a breeze. The only wonder is how the water is being piped from the outbuilding to the main house (if it even is). There's a fair loss in heat over even short distances which is why it is always recommended that solar panels are placed as close to the hot water tank as possible. Still a great installation.

These are 1-inch green LED 7-segment displays I picked up on eBay. I got 8 in total for a few dollars. I wanted to use up some off-cuts of stripboard so I ended up sticking 2 pieces together using epoxy glue and a strip of scrap ABS plastic which is on the back. The DIL socket will hold a MAX7219 integrated circuit when the display is finished. The MAX7219 is an intelligent driver which can handle binary-coded decimal as well as bit-addressed data. I'm going to play about with this and add it to the ever-growing box of 'modules' for the car computer project (if ever...) as it would make a great rev counter or speedometer, or both.

Internals of the 6.2" LCD monitor. Just 4 connections needed, 2 for power and 2 for the composite video signal. Power connection is marked (strangely) 7v, but the power board supplied 9v and it seems to work on anything between 6 and 12v. Internals of the 7" LCD monitor. The lower circuit board handles power and has a stereo audio amplifier.

I've been looking at a quick, cheap way to make a dry store area for scrap timber, old pallets and logs. I needed somewhere out of the rain, but where there will be a breeze to encourage drying and the best space was at the gable end of the house where we have our coal bunker. I bought this tarpaulin for about £4 from CPC and rigged it to the side of the house using 10 cup hooks (5 at the top and 5 at the bottom). The first attempt went a bit wrong because I hadn't put enough of a rake on the tarpaulin so the rain just pooled at the bottom. This adjustement seems to be working, but I think I'll drop the bottom end a few inches to make sure any rain runs off.

Coming along nicely (almost segueing into) my last post, here's the same idea, 20 years later. http://www.raspberrypi.org A tiny credit card-sized single-board computer aimed at teaching kids (and anyone else) about old-school computing, growing-your-own code and building your own kit. What really attracts me to this one is the provision of an analogue video output, which I could hook up to one of the old 6" LCD screens I've been messing with for about 2 years. I'm thinking of a 20MHz PIC like a 16F690 to collect raw engine data down at the ECU and to send it via a long USB cable to the cabin where a Raspberry Pi running TinyCore and my own Gambas program would decode this into graphs and charts. Rather than a touch display, I'd like to revisit the old Renault Laguna stalk controls , but via another PIC (maybe a 16F628) and USB so the control buttons have some degree of 'intelligence' for the computer to interpret. Getting closer, but oh so slowl...

Zilog Z80. Ahhhhh.... (!)