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Arduino

Finally! A vaguely recent addition to this page!

Here's an article I wrote on building a simple Arduino microcontroller project - a min/max thermometer with an LCD display. It's nothing new or very exciting unless you like wires, breadboard and suchlike.


This man is eyeing up your SGI hardware

Fiddling about with 9 year olds

(This was written when yes the SGI was 9 years old. It's now 12 and I got rid of it - so this text is archived as was simply to maintain a weak & rather tasteless joke)

I was recently given a Silicon Graphics Indy R5000, a nine year old Unix workstation which runs IRIX and originally cost $10k without it's 20" monitor. Primarily I wanted the screen, but I had to tinker with the venerable old machine that came with it.

IRIX isn't massively bizarre, but it took a fair amount of webtrawling to get what I needed to ressurect the beast into something vaguely useful. I stress the vaguely part of that. It does look pretty though, and has a cool camera. It's history and a monitor stand!

So here are the resources that I found useful:

IRIX pre 6.5 is too crap to bother with. Network installing 6.5 via Linux works just fine.

I had a broken indycam. It's more broken now, because I butchered it to have a look at what the heck goes on in a prehistoric web cam. Quite a lot, it seems. take a look at the IndyCam dissection if you're really bored. IndyCams are not easy to open, so I don't suggest trying this with a working unit :)


You dirty old man!

Cheapskate Linux

I've thrown together some notes on getting RedHat Linux 7.3 up on the super-cheap-and-cheerful PC Chips M841LR all in one micro-ATX motherboard. Most of it should be useful to any board with the SiS740 chipset. Exciting, no?

Here we go...


Small furry tree dwelling animals can't be wrong

The Soup Dragon! No, I have no idea why he's here either.
Red Squirrel totally rocks! It does a rather good impression of an ARM 2/3 era Acorn machine, which means myself and the monkeys can have fun evenings in playing the now-retro arcade games of our school years instead of getting all dewy eyed about them and complaining about it just not being the same since 3dfx made graphics vaguely convincing (note, not that Acorns ever got particularly decent 3dfx, just all the vaguely decent 2d games stopped bloody working). Polygons per second? Bump mapping? Transparencies? Pish. We want sprites and bouncy tracker mods! Zool! Yay! Cannon Fodder! Lotus Turbo Challenge! Gods!

You'll need a ~500Mhz Windows box and a decent graphics card to get Red Squirrel running at a vaguely useable speed... and it won't go that discoloured yellow colour every Arc on the planet seems to have gone. Later versions will also emulate later ARM600/700 boxes which takes all the fun out of it.

Oh, and I never liked Elite, it was too complicated. Sorry.


Just a trim, thanks.

Compaq iPAQ tinkerings

In 2001, between grooming the otters I wrote up a hack to get the Compaq iPAQ (StrongARM variants) to use the web over the host machine's net connection via the USB cradle.

This probably doesn't apply to PocketPC 2002, only previous versions.

Here it is, you lucky people.



xargle@eh.org
Last modified on: Sat Jan 30 09:55:25 2010
mnftiu