Image compression is a massive topic and to be honest, a bit of a buzzword title. Images can be compressed in multiple ways. One of the simplest being reducing the bit depth of the image. Reducing the bit depth is a pretty poor method of compression though and generally produces weird banding results as could […]
What do you get when you combine an FPGA with some SDRAM and an OV7670 camera, transferring uncompressed frames through UART? Really poor performance, reliability and a pretty useless end product… Though just because it sucks that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth doing! I’ve had my first exam and I’ve wanted to crack on with […]
A couple of weeks back, I posted about designing a pair of smart glasses. Now that university has finished for the year (results tomorrow!), I’ve had a lot more time to work on my glasses – though I started employment on Monday so I’m not completely free. I have however been developing both an app […]
Capacitive touch is “rad”. By utilizing one of the simplest physical characteristics of an object – charge storage, one is able to measure the presence of a grounded object including touch and pressure. There are a couple of capacitive touch libraries that I’ve seen around but many require dedicated hardware, for example the TSC peripheral […]
Today, my Swarmbot PCBs arrived! I’ve put one of the robots together to get a feel for where everything would go and what it would look like so its not too pretty but it seems to be functional and I’ve got the robot working autonomously in obstacle avoidance mode using the front IR sensor. Build […]
Servos are great. They generally work really well and contain all the control and drive circuitry for reasonably precise error free position keeping. Servos are interfaced through PPM with the standard generally being deemed as a pulse between 1ms – 2ms and a period of 20ms. I’ve written code before for the STM32F0 discovery boards to allow servos to […]
Term is over! I’m free for another Easter so hopefully I can get a couple of blog posts done though I’m taking a trip to visit Chernobyl so my levels of irradiation might end up screwing up everything electronic… (lol.) Assembler The assembler I’ve been using previously had been written quite a while ago and […]
So as I’ve said many times before, C++ is not my strongest language! I’m putting that disclaimer out there before I start this post because I’m sure the whole world of skilled programmers will bear down and dismantle all of my efforts… Anyway, disclaimers aside, while Qt is great for quick GUIs, its license can […]
One software project I’ve wanted to do for quite a while is to code a logic simulator. Well I’ve finally got round to doing so and made reasonable success within under half a days worth of coding! With 444 lines of C++ and 17 lines of Matlab code, I’ve managed to design a simulator which can […]
You heard correct! I’ve written my HMCU as a virtual machine in C. I’m not actually a fan of the only virtual machine language I can think of off the top of my head – Java though I think thats more at fault to the syntax and way of programming, all that overloading, inheritance and […]
