I am making some progress toward a manufacturable design of my RS232 baud rate converter. I now have the prototype working.

As you can see from the photo, I had to add a couple of wires to the PCB but only a couple and I am very pleased about that!

I am going to revise the board design before sending it for manufacture - apart from the couple of patches I also forgot to bring out the chip programming lines and the reset line. These are not needed for normal operation but will be needed to initially program the chip. To this end I am putting a new 10-way header on the board for programming and debugging.

Another issue I had when bringing the thing from prototype to a production stage was the firmware. I realized there really should be some way for end users to update the firmware either to patch bugs or add new features when customers inevitably request them. I do not want to be physically mailing these things back and forth for modification once they are sold. To that end, I have written a boot loader and firmware update utility.

I’m now ready to get the board manufactured. I want to do a small run of 20 or so to start off with. I used BatchPCB for my prototype but they are not cost-effective for more than one or two boards. After comparing a few different places, I have also come to the conclusion that local Australian PCB manufacturers are 3 to 4 times the price of an offshore fab. So I am going to try a Chinese manufacturer.

I enjoy designing little electronic devices in my spare time. I like working with circuit boards and digital chips, I’ve posted a few of my projects here on my blog in the past.

And some people have been reading those blog entries and have been asking me to make stuff for them. I’ve given in to a few people here and there and built some. I think this indicates a clear although small demand for these devices.

So I’ve decided to have a go at manufacturing some things for sale. I’ve reviewed my designs and I think these two are obvious candidates:

1. RS232 Speed Converter
2. MIDI Clock Source

I’m going to start with the RS232 Speed Converter since that design requires the least amount of work to get it to production. I’ll post my progress here on this blog. Let’s see if I can sell something. Wish me luck!

Just a quick note that this site now supports Gravatars. So if you make a comment here and are registered over at www.gravatar.com, your picture will appear next to your comment like magic!

As you can see, I have removed all the Google ads from this blog.

This blog gets around 1000 page views per day and I’ve been running the ads for about a year and a half now. In all that time Google have not paid me anything. Not a cent! So they are gone.

Hey, Multicomp runs pretty good under Ubuntu using WINE!

I’ve been using the excellent Wordpress blogging software for a year and a half now and it has been good - except for the comment spam. By the end of 2007 I was getting more than 100 comment spams every day and I was mighty tired of manually deleting them.

Then I found SpamBam by Gareth Hayes. I’ve been running it for two months now and in that time I have received no spam. None. Not a single one.

If that isn’t the best anti-spam plugin ever, I’ll eat my hard drive.

If anyone has tried to email me yesterday or today (19/20-Nov-2007), it might be an idea to re-send your email ‘coz I’ve fallen victim to Thunderbird bug #323875

In summary, don’t ever use T-bird’s “Undo Delete Message” function! Under certain circumstances it can destroy a lot of your messages.

After moving house, I have also had to move my site to a new hosting service. I was previously hosting it from home but now I am on Web City.

Apologies to everyone who has been trying to view this site, it has been down for almost 6 days. I’ve been rather busy packing and moving. Also I thought it more important to get my friend’s and family web sites up first.

Hey, how about that. I finally found an opportunity to do some Slashdot-style hyperlinks!

I really like this picture of me that Kai drew (sorry about the bad scan). I love the messy hair and the facial hair and the slightly insane expression. He’s really captured me well I think.

And look. He’s also drawn a chibi-version of me at the top of the page. How cool is that! Hmm maybe I’ve been showing the kid too much Anime.

PS. Kai says this picture is about the time I went upstairs to his bedroom and brought one of his toys down for him. So there’s a picture of me downstairs and a little picture of me upstairs in Kai’s bedroom. The hoops down the left are the stairs!

Here’s another unusual use for a phone camera. It’s a simple test to see if your TV remote control is working.

Since digital cameras are sensitive to infra-red light, you can simply point your remote at the camera and you will see the flashing of the infra-red beam on the phone’s screen, digital technology making the invisible visible!