Electronics on Michael Doornbos

Brain, what’s the thing we’re gonna learn in December? FPGAs Pinky. FPGAs.

Mon, 30 Nov 2020 09:34:59 +0000

From the “always be learning department, December’s new tech to learn is FPGAs!

I’ll be continuing my quests to become intermediate with Commodore Assembly and writing some simple tools in Rust.

Oh, and that Maximite there needs some attention. How do people have time for TV?

Coming along nicely

Thu, 01 Oct 2020 16:09:34 +0000

CPU clock module build

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 16:08:50 +0000

My weeknight project this week is building an 8 bit computer on a breadboard. Part one, a fully adjustable CPU clock with step through is working already.

I'll never complain about 40 columns again

Thu, 24 Sep 2020 11:54:50 +0000

I’ve been eyeing an Altair remake. I don’t know why, I just love being close to the metal on machines. I’m a little too young to remember the Altair and I don’t recall ever seeing one in person.

I do however understand how it works and am fascinated by what it must have felt like to run programs you came up with and saved on paper tape on it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8InWiihlIQw

My Uncle ran his business on a Commodore VIC-20 for many years and I still have the Commodore 64 that I used until I graduated High School in 1993. I don’t recall when it went from being my Dad’s computer to mine, but I don’t think he minded me stealing it terribly much.

Upgraded my workstation

Tue, 22 Sep 2020 18:21:28 +0000

For no particular reason, I’ve been learning 6502 processor assembly language. My workstation is that soothing 80s beige.

Finally have a more permanent place for the X-Carve CNC. Time to make custom airplane parts :-)

Sun, 07 Jun 2020 08:23:11 +0000

Detecting spins in small aircraft

Sun, 12 Mar 2017 19:08:56 +0000

Here are three spins. The first I intentionally recovered poorly. The other two were more “textbook” recoveries.

This is just the graph of the slip/skid sensors.

Interesting that there is a clear pattern and threshold.

The goal here is to detect and give enough warning to a pilot to avoid and intervene on an impending unintentional spin entry.

Archived Comments

Paul T Breed (2017-03-13 00:31:45):

The traditional training spin is not what kills people… Next time you want to do spins go up and set up a fake landing pattern at altitude… Then get slow and do the base to final turn with some skid…. cross the controls and keep pulling back til it departs controlled flight… be high and be prepared as it will snap to inverted so fast you won’t know what happened….

Detecting and predicting loss of control in flight

Tue, 16 Aug 2016 21:11:00 +0000

I’m currently working on detecting loss of control (LOC) on an overshoot of base to final. Using data models in X-Plane which depending on the aircraft model is known to be pretty accurate (there’s a certified commercial version suitable for flight training). Not practical to do this in an actual airplane for obvious reasons like crashing and fireballs.

Anyway, here’s a screenshot of data gathering. I’m collecting about 50 data points 10 times per second. I’m feeding this into a learning algorithm to teach it to predict the actions which may lead to an accelerated stall and/or spin.

Intel Galileo Time! Woot!

Tue, 18 Feb 2014 20:44:03 +0000

It's glass time

Mon, 17 Feb 2014 16:26:37 +0000

I’ve got Google Glass for the next couple weeks. What should I be doing with it?

This is great: Sparkfun on Demystifying Serial Communication

Tue, 18 Sep 2012 08:58:05 +0000

I love it when someone takes the time to teach a broad audience something that most people who work on computer systems should now but probably don’t understand very well. Thanks SparkFun! [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJZOTtwpAjA&w;=560&h;=315]

It's a Curious Raspberry Monday Mars Pi

Mon, 06 Aug 2012 08:10:04 +0000

Not only did Curiousity land safely last night and is already sending images

but I have 5 Raspberry Pi’s on my desk at work right now.

Happy Monday!

The new Beagleboard: BeagleBone vs Arduino size comparison

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 17:35:14 +0000

Just took my new BeagleBone out of the box. It’s even smaller than I was thinking. Would fit nicely into a 1U cubesat…

Archived Comments

Roland (2011-12-10 21:22:00):

Can’t wait to receive my BeagleBone. It’s sad all those cool new dev boards are so limited in their availability (BeagleBone, PandaBoard, …)

Minty Boost

Wed, 30 Dec 2009 15:47:29 +0000

Archived Comments

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Infrared Sensor Data for Hal

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 15:01:31 +0000

I’m using an infrared range sensor for the real life Hal. The Sharp GP2Y0A02YK0F - Infrared Proximity Sensor Long Range -

[caption id=“attachment_498” align=“alignnone” width=“300” caption=“Hal 1.0”][/caption]

While testing his motions, I was noticing some pretty erratic behavior, so I decided to collect some data on the sensor values on a fixed object, while Hal was not moving.

This is a graph of about a minute of Hal moving the sensor from 45 to 135 degress in front of him and then taking a reading when the motion of the sensor stops. It’s at a wall, at a slight angle so the graph lines aren’t on top of each other at about 45 centimeters away.