During my time as a scientific researcher at the University of Kassel, I worked on a couple of very different types of laboratory test-devices to check if a theoretical idea is working or not. Most of the time we designed not a very fancy and good looking device, but a functional PCB with the main-components…
A kind of diary of reverse engineering the Behringer X32 to finally process audio with my own audio algorithms within the original audio DSPs… My original plan was to publish a new blog-entry every week. But my current projects got much bigger than I’ve initially planned. So for the sake of the projects, I will…
Linux, being a highly versatile and flexible operating system, can be configured to run on a wide variety of hardware – including Behringers X32… If you are using a fullsize X32 console like me, you might have realized the huge amount of different connectors at its back. While working on my own Audio-Over-IP-protocol I used…
Don’t loose your PV-power to the Grid. Here’s a cheap DIY-solution to keep the PV-energy in your home! General idea In Germany it was common to earn more than 40ct per kWh if you had a PV-power plant on top of your roof in 2009. Since than everything changed: the feed-in tariff dropped to less…
With the KLF200, Velux offers an ethernet-based device to control shutters and other wireless components. But their implementation is a disaster for DIY-homes. With an ESP8266 I fixed this mess… Attic = sweating Its June and here in Germany and the sun is very powerful now. Together with my wife and four kids I’m living…
In this final episode I’ll show how I implemented data-exchange with my card using IRQ and the development of some ShellExtensions and ControlPanel-applets for Windows98. Fixing the SRAM Last time I had some problems with my second SRAM producing noise. It turned out, that I missed two additional lines in the documentation: besides the chip-select…
It’s may and the pool-season has started! So we’ll have a look on how we find the best time to jump into water using an ESP8266, MQTT and NodeRED… General idea As I’m living in the center of Germany in the middle/northern of Europe, the temperatures at night can fall below 10°C – even during…
In part 2 of this series I will show my progress on developing a DIY PCI Card using Alteras FLEX10K FPGAs. Last time I reverse-engineered an old Altera development-board I’ve found on eBay. Unfortunately there was absolutely no documentation about this card so I had to track all traces on the PCB by myself. Of…
Motorcontrollers are everywhere, cheap and reliable, but building a field-oriented control (FOC) from scratch to understand the details is a nice challenge. So I accepted the challenge and implemented a full-featured FOC within an FPGA. If you want a ready-to-go controller for a motor-application, you can take a dedicated microcontroller like the TI C2000 with…
Spare parts for Viessmann-controls are quite expensive. As the control of our oil-heater has broken down, I searched for a replacement but in the end I developed a full replacement with MQTT and connection to NodeRED. Basics of heating-control In the 70s the boiler double thermostat was state of the art in german houses. So…
