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…
Disposing of defective appliances is common practice and repairing them is often uneconomical. However, there are often still very useful components in such devices. I took a closer look at a Thermomix and found a nice motor control unit. Thermomix The Thermomix is a food processor from the German Vorwerk Group based in Wuppertal close…
In the last blog-post I discussed developing retro-apps for Windows that can be run under OS/2 using the WLO toolset from Microsoft. But what about native coding under OS/2 directly? Since 2003 I’m coding software for lot of different target-systems, like microcontrollers (started with Atmel Studio 4 and the Atmel AT90S2313), personal computers (Borland Delphi…
Retrocomputing with real hardware is a very nice way to understand how modern computers have learned to run and talk. I developed some GUI for OS/2 Warp 3.0 and Windows 3.11 to control some of my microcontroller-projects. Windows 3.x and the Win16-API To develop a GUI for a modern computer, you can make use of…
Ethernet on Microcontrollers is available without problems: using FreeRTOS or the Arduino-libs is always a good start. But for FPGAs? I was shocked how expensive Ethernet is for FPGAs – but I found a good solution… In 1997 I bought my first NE2000-compatible ISA-Ethernet-Card for my Windows 95 computer. Why? Well, not that my 13-year-old…
Without the possibility to adjust the volume of individual frequency bands within an audio signal, modern audio would not sound the same. Today I’d like to show how I’ve implemented a EQ within my FPGA audio-mixer. In this blog-post I won’t describe the general idea of an EQ, because there are more capable persons available…
