Electronics & Production

When using PySide, a QTabWidget is handy. But the size of the QTabWidget is dictated by the largest item, even if it’s not visible. Let’s assume self.tw is our tab widget. Then add this function: from PySide.QtCore import * from PySide.QtGui import * class…

I recently got an Atmel AtMega163-based smartcard for some side channel experiments, along with a SASEBO-W board. I owe a debt of thanks to Cryptography Research Inc. & Sakura for setting all that up! Anyway I also got a normal smartcard reader, and wanted to…

Revision Control is the most critical part of any project involving files. Otherwise you end up with tons of directories, and naming schemes like "report_final2_june.docx" along with 20 other copies. This is best described in this 20-min clip. Sorry it's a…

Here is an ongoing project: it’s a high-speed ADC combined with some nice input preprocessing (amplifier). It’s all controlled by a FPGA on the Avnet LX9 Microboard, so it just plugs into that. Here is a simple python app (still being improved) to control it:…

I was recently working on a project which needed more gates than I had in my trusty current FPGA Board (Spartan3-200 on DLP-FPGA-HS). I quickly found the Avnet Spartan 6 LX9 board (AES-S6MB-LX9-G), which I could buy for $90 and have here in a few days. It…

I’ve added a page on Turbo Coding, a subject I’m researching for a class at Dal. This includes a large presentation, links to reference material, and lots of MATLAB code based on CML. It’s still being updated but maybe you’ll find it useful/interesting as…

I recently got an LPCXpresso board, which you can cut and make into a debugger. I wanted to use the 0.1" header (J4) and not the specified JTAG (2x10 0.5") header. Here is how I cut my board such it can be plugged back together: the female header is just half…

I recently got my 34401A bench meter out of storage, and wanted it working with my computer, something I hadn’t done for several years. I forgot to get my ‘official’ Agilent connection cable, but figured I could use my standard cables no problem. This took a…

In my effort to build the calibration software for my simple Digital Compass, I’ve been working on doing tests with it. Here is a screen-shot of the output (using MATLAB to interface to the serial port), it shows a plot of X & Y magnetic field readings…

I needed to use my AT90USBKEY at higher than 3.3V for ADC input purposes. It’s not documented in the manual, but the schematic shows they anticipated this. You can easily convert the AT90USBKEY to run on 5V with a few changes. The changes needed are: Remove…