This is part 3 of a 4-part series. See also part 1, part 2 and part 4. I’ve finished all the wiring. It looks a mess but I’m confident that it will work. Of course it won’t do anything until I write the software. There are four circuit boards here: The PIC Board – Contains [...]

This is part 2 of a 4-part series. See also part 1, part 3 and part 4. I made it down to Jaycar today and bought all the bits I was short of. These guys aren’t all that cheap but time is short and I really need to get the parts today. They also had [...]

This is part 1 of a 4-part series. See also part 2, part 3 and part 4. So I asked my Dad what he wanted for Christmas, and he said a Talking Metronome. He’s learning to play the piano you see and is dissatisfied with regular tick-tock metronomes. So I had a look around. Talking [...]

Just for something different, here is a bit of PHP which will cause a random background image to be loaded every time you refresh your page. The image is chosen randomly from a directory making it easy to add or remove new images without needing to update the HTML. This code should go in place [...]

I just bought myself a new SMD rework station, it’s a fine tool but I want to share with you a few choice excerpts from the extremely poorly translated manual. I think the Chinese manufacturers put no effort at all into the English translation these days: “Intelligent system that could alarm, Fault detection automatically” “Green [...]

The Serial Bit Rate Converter runs an ARM7 CPU which is complete overkill for the simple job of relaying serial data. I’ve often thought I should redesign it to run a cheaper and less powerful CPU like a PIC or AVR. I originally designed it with an ARM7 simply because I like them and enjoy [...]

Finally I have all the parts and I spent last night assembling ten boxes to fill my first order. It looks not half bad. Next I need to set up a web page and finalize pricing so anyone can buy one. So what is a Volume Box I hear you ask? Well, the Volume Box [...]

The Volume Box board is assembled and tested, the last few firmware bugs are squished and the only thing missing now is the machined end panel for the plastic case and it is ready to sell! Here are the lessons I have learned: 1. PICs can be a mighty pain in the bum to debug, [...]

I’ve finally taken delivery of my first batch of printed circuit boards for the Volume Box. They look real nice. As usual I got them from Gold Phoenix of Shanghai – The quality of the boards is pretty good and their prices are good for very small runs. My chips and other parts have already [...]

This is a bug fix release based on some user feedback I got. There are a whole bunch of little fixes including some problems with audio sync when playing videos and an issue with the seek bar if your media file was longer than 40 minutes. There is no public bug-tracker for this software (yet) [...]