Recent Posts

• August 15, 2009

  TINI from Mac OS X: javax.comm

  I knew it wouldn’t be long before the next wrinkle presented itself. There was some frustration of the “This should work now” variety, but eventually things worked out.I’ve adopted the Mac as my new development environment of choice (w...

• August 13, 2009

  TINI from Mac OS X

  Still experimenting with the “master” portion of Ifos (the device itself being a Modbus slave), looking to replace/simplify the current communication path: PC → USB-to-Serial (RS232) cable → my RS232-to-RS485 converter &rar...

• May 01, 2009

  Circle Packing Revisited

  When I originally set out to determine how many optical fibers would be supported by each Ifos lens, I discovered the answer was related to the ongoing research problem of Circle Packing.Luckily, I found an online calculator to compute the theoret...

• October 14, 2008

  Non-Responsive Flash Memory

  The M25P10-A serial flash memory I use in the Ifos project seemed non-responsive when installed in the actual device—at least, my test program was consistently failing. Something was wonky, though, because not even debugging output was reach...

• October 12, 2008

  Ifos Hardware Check

  Here's a short video of Ifos running a hardware check. The LEDs are intensely bright, so it probably would have been better not to shoot them straight-on, but the basic operation is still obvious.</embed>Here’s the code used to generat...