Richards Weblog

So, many years ago, when I’d just left school my wonderfully supportive parents bought me a BBC Master for passing my exams. I loved that machine. Before then I’d only had a baby Beeb, an Electron. (with a spectrum 48k and ZX81 being previous to that).

Whilst at school I had built, with the instructions from a phiysics teacher, an interface to be able to control motors, take digital and analog input and I wrote some software to control it. All exciting stuff. These days I use Arduino, but that’s where it all got started.

The BeebM was eventually replaced by an Amstrad 1512 when I got to college and wanted to start programming in Cobol and Pascal, but the Beeb has always been my fave.

So, as I suspect many of my generation did after watching Micromen on TV the other week, I started to trawl eBay in search of my youth.

I managed to pick up a Master 128 for £30 (+12PP) which I didn’t think was at all bad. It arrived soon after and has now been sat on the dining room table for the last week, all wired up to the portable tv and tape deck.

After initially thinking it was broken as it came up with the message “This is not a language” we soon realised that the internal battery power had died. A quick bit of googling and we managed to get the old Master up and running. Remembering the good old command AUTO 10 and away we go with the obligitary

PRINT “Please enter your name” INP
INPUT NAME$
PRINT “Hello ” ; NAME$

We were off.

Next, to load some of those old games from tape that I had for the Electron. Tape desk plugged in, cassette rewound. CH. “” , hear the little microswitch go and wait for the tape deck to start. Nothing. Bugger. Still not got to the bottom of this, even after trying many different cassette cables. Will be a job for the weekend.

Next plan, to get a 3.5″ floppy disk drive connected and get that working.

It’s all good fun and keeps me and the kids amused, even if the wife does want her dining table back. She sounds similar to how my mum used to sound when she wanted to put the tea out. Happy Memories.

Now, where did I put that copy of Elite…..

admin Personal bbc, classic computing, master, youth

I can’t believe that Brawn GP won the F1 constructors championship and Jenson Button gets his first drivers title all in the first year of a team that nearly didn’t exist.

This is a fantastic time for F1 and long may it continue. Brawn and Jenson have made a new fan this season (and I presume 1000’s more).

CONGRATULATIONS to Brawn GP and Jenson Button.

admin Personal brawn, button, f1, jenson, world championship

Had a great day to day at Access Space in Sheffield with some of the people from SHACKNET. We had the first of our Project Days.

Our first project was to build a Laser Cutter using equipment and any bits that could be found around Access Space. Access Space had managed to get hold of a large plotter, a Roland DPX-3300. This would provide the basis for the Laser Cutter. The plan was to get the plotter working and then look at how we could make an attachment that would hold a laser from an old CD/DVD writer to then be able to design a pattern on a computer and then have this cut out on the plotter.

The first job was to get the plotter to actually work. Fortunately the plotter uses the standard HPGL language and Martin from Access Space had done some initial investigation and found how to take a .ps file and convert this in to HPGL which we could then send out to the parallel printer port. The PC that we connected the plotter to is running Linux Mint. Working with the tools Martin had provided we had the plotter printing within about 20 minutes, although it wasn’t printing in the correct positions. Some jiggling of the options on the HPGL conversion was going to be required.

A quick search of the internet showed that there were printer drivers available for Windows XP. I have to admit that I thought that this would be the easy option and so we set about trying to download a driver. In hindsight this was a mistake. We eventually managed to get a driver but it wasn’t even close to working. Back to using Mint.

By mid afternoon we had the printer positioning and scaling working brilliantly.

Due to there being lots of adults and children in Access Space it was not prudent to be shooting lasers around the building, so, we hooked up an LED to the pen mechanism to test out a theory on how to switch the laser on and off as the pen goes up and down. This worked a treat. We even then managed to work out how to slow down the plotter to allow for cutting.

This was as far as we got on this first project day so the plan is to meet up again in a few weeks time to complete this project. The two areas where this need work is to make the sending of the HPGL to the plotter more seemless from the PC applications by trying to add in a new printer driver. The second thing is to get the laser actually wired up as a unit that we can attach and remove from the plotter without making the plotter unuasble for anything else.

This has proved to be a very enjoyable project and will not only benefit the Shacknet members by being able to cut templates for projects but also for anyone else that uses Access Space and wants to make things. Combine this with the FabLab that will be coming to Access Space and there is the start of something really great for everyone.

admin Personal Arduino, laser cutter, plotter, shacknet