Woodworking for the Software Engineer...

So.. I've been a bit busy recently, and the fun technical progress with arduinos, maples, serial FRAMs, and floppy autoloaders has been somewhat on hold.. plus there was that whole christmas thing ;p

What have I been up to ?

Then you put it back together..

It's done.. =)

I've completed reassembly of the CopyPro CP2000, with a new mainboard, consisting of a chunk of MDF, with an Arduino, Motor Board, Stripboard & breadboard, and Kryoflux attached to it..

All in the same space of the original..

First, you take it apart...

Well.. my little project to read in my entire Amiga Floppy archive took another step forward, when an Ebay search found a 'CopyPro 2000'.. leading to the purchase of a bunch of related bits & bobs..

So now I'm waiting on a motor controller, some connectors, stripboard, I've been slightly busy attempting to read datasheets..

What is a CopyPro 2000? why is it useful? Read on..

Arduinos Floppy Drives, and Maples..

Time for some serious geekery documenting =)

This tale starts with my other half getting intrigued by an arduino.. and picking up an Uno, with a whole exploratory box full of parts, and little projects to build. Then shortly after that, getting an arduino nano, and an ethernet module, with the aim of solving our garage door opening problems..

This led to me to start looking at arduinos & MIDI, and lcd's, and thus I ended up with an arduino Mega. Then I got a little sidetracked, and started looking at how to read floppy disks, and things just kinda spiralled from there..

Busy busy busy

Well.. life presses on.. and somehow I find it's almost a month since I posted here last..

I mean.. just how? it's not like I visited another planet, or entered a tech free lifestyle growing corn & making bread.. is it?

Well, here's some of what I've been up to..

Compressing Postcodes..

The UK has postcodes, which are of a similar purpose to zip codes in the US. You put a postcode, and a house number on an envelope, and in theory that's pretty much all that's needed to get the letter to the destination.

I've never really put much thought into how they were constructed, until I met a stack of data that was indexed using postcodes as the lookup, very handy, but it was causing the data size to exceed a limit which meant I couldn't embed the data into a blog post ;-)

I went hunting, and found a document explaining the structure here. I ran a quick scan over my data, discovering I had 121 postcode areas present in my list, some 129 sub bits of them, and some 4000 or so last bits =) Eg, PO1 3AX, PO being what I'd call an area, 1 being the sub bit, and 3AX being the last bit.

I started playing around a bit and here's what I ended up with...

on Hosting, and other such things..

I remember walking along the seafront, back in the mid 1990's, trying to explain these things called 'mp3s' to a few non technical friends. Attempting to explain that here's a way to fit an 'acceptable' quality version of an audio track into something that would fit on a couple of floppy disks. How important it was that the size was small enough to be transferable within an 'acceptable' timeframe, and that most people really didn't care for CD-quality (most of them still using cassette tape for Cars, Walkman's etc).

I remember saying this will really change things, that I wasn't sure how the music industry would cope with their content becoming available in the same way software was, with all the positives and negatives that brought with it.

Well.. here we are.. almost 20 years later, and there has been Winamp, Napster, Peer2Peer, Lawsuits, iTunes, YouTube... we're currently in a time where we are able to share information with millions of people, just by making a blog post, like this one.. so I figured I'd try hosting some of my music, and was a little surprised by the process.