Problem Solving – Geronimo/370

Retro Z80 computer (12) – C compiler

Posted on2022-12-082022-12-10

After having coded in ASM assembler and in Z80 assembler (see this post), now I also have found a C compiler. As far as I can tell, it adheres to K&R (Kernighan & Ritchie) rather well. I found it here. Like assembler, this was a trip down memory lane for… Read the rest

Fixing old Nixie Clock (3)

Posted on2022-04-282022-04-28

Capacitor replaced The replacement of the power supply capacitor with a new one cleaned up the pulses nicely. The clock is running properly again for about two days now.… Read the rest

Fixing old Nixie Clock (2)

Posted on2022-04-232022-04-233 Comments

Remember that old Nixie Clock? For a while it ran properly, but now it skips time again at random intervals. So I got that big capacitor out that I suspected right away, because it has been in there for over 40 years. And unlike me, these things do not age… Read the rest

Fixing old Nixie Clock (1)

Posted on2022-04-102022-11-22

Father’s clock My father built a Nixie clock in ‘ye olden days‘, over forty years ago… It was a relatively simple design compared to what we build nowadays. Design and simplified workings The clock derives it’s clock-pulses from the mains power, 50 Hz here in the Netherlands Dividing it by… Read the rest

Experimenting transistor amplifiers (1)

Posted on2022-02-132022-02-181 Comment

Today I thought I’d play around and build a simple amplifier, just for fun. I started out searching for circuit diagrams for “one transistor amplifier BC337“, just because I have a couple of those BC337’s laying around. I found a schematic that you can see to the right: It is… Read the rest

Silencing my signal generator (2)

Posted on2021-04-182021-04-18

A while ago I lowered the voltage of the fan in my to silence my signal generator. It was better, but over time I still found it rather noisy. So today I came up with a simple solution to silence it some more. Floorboard insulation I took a small piece… Read the rest

Waterfall vs. agile…

Posted on2019-10-202019-10-21

Since a couple of months I’m working in an organization where we use agile. It’s an euhm… ‘interesting’ experience… Then I found this pictorial, ‘nuf said:… Read the rest

Totem – Robotic arm

Posted on2018-08-04

Totem – Robotic arm The guys at Totem sent me a sample of their robotic arm to review (link points to the mechanical version without the electronics). The version I received contains several Totem Bus modules to drive the arm. It is described on their web page as an “easy… Read the rest

TotemDuino connected to MacBook!

Posted on2017-12-14

TotemDuino connected to MacBook! After some mailing back and forth with the Totem team, they found a solution. Oddly enough, it’s a solution I tried, but it did not work the first time. It appears one has to install the Prolific USB-to-Serial drivers. Installation log Here’s what I did now:… Read the rest

Real robots don’t drive straight

Posted on2017-11-15

Real robots don’t drive straight This is the title of a publication by Fred G. Martin of the Computer Science department of the University of Massachusetts in Lowell. Basically, what he is trying to tell us is that sometimes we tend to cut corners and hide the interesting stuff from… Read the rest

Robotics on the work floor

Posted on2017-10-08

Robotics on the work floor I came across a nice video about the influence of robots on the work floor of warehouses.… Read the rest

8 bit computer, output module, problem solved

Posted on2017-09-24

8 bit computer, output module, problem solved Remember that annoying problem I spoke of? I solved it! It appears I had soldered two connections together by accident. Almost invisible, but still two outputs were connected, resulting in double displays on the two leftmost 7-segment displays. Fortunately I was able to… Read the rest

8 bit computer, output module, annoying problem

Posted on2017-09-17

8 bit computer, output module, annoying problem As you can see in the picture on the right, the output displays two little ‘-‘ signs – and sometimes even more segments – in a dim, lightly flickering way, to the left of the actual output digits. Funny thing is this seems… Read the rest