I’m about to start a beta release of my newest project. It is a transcription application for Windows called Super Transcribe.
I’ve been working on this for a few months now on and off in my spare time. The website supertranscribe.com is up and I’ll have the beta release on the site real soon now.
Looking at the RS232 Bit Rate Converter website, I thought it needed more documentation so potential customers can find out more about the product before committing to buy one.
So I now have an FAQ and I added more details to the user manual, more than doubling it’s length. The user manual is now available in PDF format and also HTML for reading online.
I was also considering setting up a blog on the Serial Gadget website but I found a neater solution. By using a PHP RSS reader, I can automatically find any articles I write on Silicon Sparrow blog (such as this one) which are relevant to the Serial Gadget website and summarize them on a “News” page on serialgadget.com. That’s one less blog I need to manage.
Having a News page is also good for customers as they can see that the site is still being updated and is not one of the many zombie dead abandoned sites which abound on the global internet.
Boards boards boards!
I’ve been working on a few things to improve the RS232 Bit Rate Converter. Here’s my new revision 3 circuit board.
There are some extra capacitors to smooth out a little noise I was getting in the serial data stream and I have also outsourced the machining of the end panels.
The changes are to eliminate some pain for me since I am still hand-assembling these things. I’d love to get the volume up so I could outsource the whole manufacturing process but for a niche product like this, who knows if the volume will ever become that great.
I got a new batch of boards pressed with the additional capacitors included in the layout. I have been patching them onto the revision 2 board but it is a fiddly operation, much nicer to have it baked into the design.
I have also found a more efficient power regulator which can accept an input of up to 15V. This is in response to a very common user request for the device to run off 12V. It seems a lot of people have been using them in the automotive sphere.
Now my biggest problem is lead time on parts, I still have two weeks to wait for some chips I ordered a month ago and my stock is running low.
I’m official. I just received my business name registration in the post. Silicon Sparrow is now a registered business in New South Wales, ABN number 83-841-478-358. Now all I need is some more products and more customers…
By the way, do you like my new little bird logo at the top there, it was designed by my wife Bea who is pretty good at that kind of thing.
To test some equipment which was controlled by the printer port on my PC, I wrote a simple test app. This is allows you to control the state of the data bits and control bits and also see the state of the status bits. It’s not very pretty and only does SPP port functions because that is all I needed for the job at hand. I wrote it in Python because I was looking for an excuse to learn wxPython.
Adam's Parallel Port Monitor
Now I am putting it on this blog so anyone else who finds it useful can have it.
To run this, you will need Python obviously, you will also need wxPython and also a DLL called inpout32.dll to allow port access under Windows.
Oh, and it only works in Windows. Sorry.
Hello and welcome to my new corporate identity. This site is the centre of my current venture to establish myself as an independent designer of electronic and software products. At the moment, I only have one product, the Serial Bit Rate Converter which is fairly niche but I am working on more stuff. I’ll post here from time to time as things progress.
