It should be trivially easy to do, given a short BASIC program and five minutes on ebay.
Just search ebay for an Amstrad CPC6128 or a Sinclair Spectrum +3 or an Amstrad PCW. There are still plenty of them around. (I have a Spectrum +3 with a working 3 inch Amstrad floppy drive as it happens, the floppy drive is quite handy for restoring the firmware on the Spectrum ethernet card I'm developing if I blow some non-functional code onto the flash ROM and can't reprogram it any more over ethernet). It would be best to get a CPC6128 - if you get a Spectrum +3 or a PCW you may have to write some low-level software to read CPC formatted discs.
The CPC, if I remember right, has an RS232 port. Write a short BASIC program to send your data to a PC via RS232.
Incidentally, the most common fault on the 3 inch Amstrad drives is a broken belt - you can buy new ones from rwap software: http://www.rwapsoftware.co.uk/ - while this firm caters for the Spectrum, since the later models were built by Amstrad with the 3in drive, they carry parts for 3in drives.
The other good news is most floppies seem to hold up well - while the 3in discs don't seem to do as well as 5.25 in discs (I have only one faulty disc in many 20+ year old ones for my BBC micro, but rather more faulty 3in discs - all pre-recorded game discs) - so I suspect your discs will all read fine.
Actually, I'd agree that making your own PCBs is time consuming and can be a pain, but on the other hand, I can lay out small PCB such as a breakout board or a reasonably straightforwad circuit in the morning in gEDA PCB - and by the afternoon, I have the thing assembled and in use. You're going to be waiting a lot longer for a PCB fab to turn around a design.
But there are a lot of PCB fabricators who do one offs these days - lots of competition on price and features! My most recent design is a 4 layer board and I sent that off (especially since I wanted multiple copies).
*Nothing* beats practical experience. Others have mentioned the Art of Electronics (which I have, and recommend as well). But practical experience is what really is the fun bits and what cemented it for me. I started from your position, and what I did was this:
1. Solderless breadboard, and an assortment of transistors, resistors, capacitors, inductors, 555 timers, op-amps etc. Do some simple circuits with them - make logic gates with BJTs and resistors, then do the same with mosfets (construct some CMOS gates out of discrete transistors for instance). Experiment with power supplies - buck converters to step DC voltages down, boost converters to step voltages up. Make sure you have several of each, because you'll probably let the magic smoke out of some of them.
2. Decide on a simple practical project. I chose to make a solar power system for my garden - an 80 watt pv panel sourced from ebay. The first project was to turn on lights at night from the battery that had been charged by the panel in the day. This consisted of a voltage comparator to detect when the solar panel voltage had fallen below a certain level. The output is connected to a power transistor that turns on the lights.
3. More complex stuff. Get a heap of 74 series or 4000 series logic ICs and make something with it. This will teach you how the real world has a nasty habit of creeping into your digital designs: glitches, why we need decoupling capacitors, synchronizing clocks, that kind of thing. I built an RS232 nixie tube display. It had no microcontroller - the UART was entirely implemented in 4000 series logic. I built it on tri-pad proto board. This required me to learn how to build several things: a simple switch mode power supply to boost 12v to 170vdc for the tubes, as well as the UART.
4. It is your fate to home brew a computer. My next project was a Z80 based single board computer on 160x100mm (Eurocard). It has a CTC, PIO, real time clock, paged memory, 512k of flash memory and 32k of RAM, and an expansion connector. The flash was initially programmed by a similar circuit to the nixie tube UART, but with a simple address generator circuit added. Once the initial program was written, the Z80 system could write its own flash.
I'm now up to the stage where I'm doing more challenging designs, such as an ethernet card for an 8 bit system, implemented almost entirely surface mount components, the glue logic being in a programmable logic chip called a CPLD (the little brother of the FPGA). There are even more real world considerations that mess with digital design here: how to avoid ground bounce, PCB layout considerations to make the board work at all, and also a good bit of real fun programming: writing a driver for it in assembly language:-)
There's a great deal you can do as an electronics hobbyist: for example, you can make your own PCBs for fine pitch surface mount components if you have access to a laser printer: I've made my own PCBs for chips with 0.4mm pin pitch (that's 0.2mm traces and 0.2mm spacing) using nothing but gEDA PCB (which is GPL'd PCB layout software), a laser printer, a clothes iron, copper clad board and etchant. Sparkfun Electronics have some great tutorials on hand soldering surface mount components, by the way. As you progress, you'll want to be able to do this because there are a lot of interesting ICs that are only available in some sort of surface mount package.
I would not have chosen the ENC29J60 for this project, rather the Wiznet W5100 (or perhaps the W5300). The W5100 provides a built in TCP/IP offload engine (although you aren't forced to use it, it allows access at the MAC level) as well as the choice of SPI or a parallel bus (so if you need performance you can use the parallel bus rather than SPI). It also has a pretty decent amount of buffer memory (and you don't have to use up space in your microcontroller's flash memory for a TCP/IP stack).
If you're developing software, yes, you don't need a scope.
But if you're developing hardware (i.e. not taking someone else's pre-made modules, but making your own PCBs, designing your own circuits etc.) an oscilloscope is an essential piece of hardware.
Atmel's AVR micro is very easy to program. I used an old printer lead, cut the end off, and four 1K resistors to make my AVR programmer - essentially free. It would be very easy to make an AVR programmer using a USB chip such as the FTDI FT245R.
Current solar voltaic tech _will not_ save you money, it will likely be considerably more expensive than just paying for the power.
However, if you want to do some solar stuff for a hobby (which I have done) and cost isn't the primary concern, then don't even tie to the grid; if you have to ask the questions you ask, you aren't even remotely qualified to homebrew a grid-tied inverter!
For a hobby project, consider 12 volt stuff - perhaps use solar to run your computer (you will need to build a computer PSU that runs off 12v and provides the right voltages for your motherboard - this can be a good, informative learning electronics project). If you have a garden, you could use a 12v solar power system to run things like garden lighting and your pond pump. Or perhaps you can run a couple of appliances, isolated from the mains electricity, off a non-grid tied inverter.
However, there are some things to note about solar. A panel only makes rated power in *full* sunshine, with the sun exactly perpendicular to the panel. If the panel is fixed, and optimised for the mid day sun, you won't even make half rated power more than two hours either side of mid day. A thin layer of cirrus cloud will cut power output to about 1/2 to 1/3rd of rated power. Even just normal summer haze will have a significant impact. On a bright overcast day, where faint shadows are still cast, you probably won't even make 15% of rated power.
If this isn't strictly a hobby project for the fun of it...
If your motive is to be green, note that if you have a typical commuting distance, you can probably save more money by cycling to work just once a week instead of driving that day.
If your motive is to save money, then you'd do MUCH better with a solar hot water heater - they are so effective that people make significant savings even as far north as I live.
The data bus for parallel ATA is 16 bits wide. Block addresses are 48 bits wide (you'll see lots of references to 48 bit LBA if you poke through stuff that deals with ATA).
That's not correct: even NOR flash (what you use for ROM, rather than mass storage) has been rated at 10,000 erase/write cycles for years - per sector (rather than the whole device). The typical flash mass storage is up to 100K erase/writes.
Swap is the main concern here - the solution is to give the machine enough RAM that you can turn swap off.
Well, the IDE bus isn't mechanically oriented anyway - we don't actually use cylinders, heads and sectors (and haven't for years), we use block addressing and the drive electronics has figured out how to move the mechanics. Block addressing isn't all that far off from addressing an individual byte in memory anyway - except you're addressing a whole block rather than a single byte (and for mass storage, whether it's mechanical or flash, you're going to want to do it that way so you don't have an absurdly wide address bus). Parallel ATA uses a 16 bit wide data bus.
EPROMs are more robust than you may think - I have some 25+ year old ones with their original program in my BBC Micro, which work just fine. They are typically in cerdip packages which are much more durable than plastic (the plastic used for chips can sometimes absorb moisture). I've had more problems with ancient RAM chips than EPROMs.
So long as the window was covered and they've not been zapped by static, there's a good chance that they will read perfectly.
The only cross platformness it needs is browser cross platformness. 95% of desktops run Windows on x86. Since I suspect Flash doesn't get updated as often as Windows or Firefox (and I suspect many users don't even update those) this is going to be quite an effective way of making a botnet.
The original article already has Russian trackbacks on it.
I run speaker connections through unshielded Cat5e cabling, to the patch panel, back out again to the remote speakers, which involved four RJ-45 connections (one at the amp, two at the patch panel, one at the remote speaker set). It goes through at least 50 feet of UTP. I quite honestly can't tell the difference between the speakers connected directly and via the Cat5. I use two pairs per speaker.
Perhaps if you live in an electrically noisy place with lots of motors you'd get noise, but you wouldn't notice it for the sound of all the motors.
This doesn't mean we shouldn't develop technologies that will be useful and cost effective. It's perfectly alright for a particular technology only to be a partial solution.
Indeed, this is the case right now. There is no one single type of power plant - instead, electricity comes from diverse sources today, nuclear, coal, oil, natural gas, hydroelectric, wind. None of those power generating methods are silver bullets either, but they are all in successful operation.
For the areas where solar thermal is more useful, the beautiful symmetry is the months of highest power demand due to air conditioning, are also the months where plants like this would be most productive.
I don't work for corporate IT where I do work so I don't make the policy, but they have a policy on 'no media files in your home directory'. It's entirely reasonable - if you want to bring in non-business related media files, bring it in on your own MP3 player, not at the expense of the business.
It's hardly an onerous policy. When there's 2000 staff who might put 30 gigs of media files in their home directory, it soon adds up to a lot of money supporting the storage of personal, non business related files. Consumer storage might be cheap, but mirrored, RAIDed, battery and generator backed, and backed up in the fireproof tape vault storage is most certainly *not* cheap. Nor is the bandwidth going to numerous remote sites if everyone's streaming media files off their home directory.
It's only $6 of storage space if the storage space is made up of second hand ATA drives purchased on eBay.
Most corporate storage is on a RAID array, on 15krpm SAS or SCSI drives, with associated DLT or LTO backup tapes, a dual redundant UPS and backup generators. In many cases, these 30 gigs will be mirrored at a remote site, on another RAID array full of 15krpm SAS drives. The reliability demanded for a business critical resource makes it several orders of magnitude more expensive than 30 gigs of consumer hard disc in a home PC.
1. Schadenfraude: the immense hubris of the builders and operators of the Titanic were key factors in the loss of the ship. Stories where supreme arrogance is dealt a blow by nature are always fascinating to people. 2. A grand supposedly unsinkable ship sinking on her first voyage. 3. This accident prompted a sea change (pun intended) in maritime safety practices.
From an accident investigation standpoint, it is also the classic demonstrator of the accident chain. Many maritime and aviation accidents consist of a long chain of direct events that occur over a considerable period of time, and if any of the links been broken, the accident wouldn't have occurred.
I find it interesting that after so many years, and so much evidence, that the company still strenuously denies any wrongdoing. It's not like they can be sued this long after the fact; indeed it's like a vestigial remaining piece of the very arrogance that doomed the Titanic in the first place.
And of course they and game developers slam Intel's product... but 99.9% of PCs are never used to play games.
Nvidia's statement sounds like famous last words, too. I think their laurels are getting pressed too flat from resting on them. Just as Intel's CPUs eventually caught up and overtook the Alpha, the same might happen with their graphics chipsets.
The thing is, nvidia's statement feels spookily like "famous last words".
I'm sure DEC engineers poo-pooed Intel back in the early 90s when the DEC Alpha blew away anything Intel made by a factor of four. But a few short years later, Chipzilla had drawn level. Now Alpha processors aren't even made and DEC is long deceased.
Nvidia ought not to rest on its laurels like DEC did, or Intel will crush them.
Slashdot Mirror
It should be trivially easy to do, given a short BASIC program and five minutes on ebay.
Just search ebay for an Amstrad CPC6128 or a Sinclair Spectrum +3 or an Amstrad PCW. There are still plenty of them around. (I have a Spectrum +3 with a working 3 inch Amstrad floppy drive as it happens, the floppy drive is quite handy for restoring the firmware on the Spectrum ethernet card I'm developing if I blow some non-functional code onto the flash ROM and can't reprogram it any more over ethernet). It would be best to get a CPC6128 - if you get a Spectrum +3 or a PCW you may have to write some low-level software to read CPC formatted discs.
The CPC, if I remember right, has an RS232 port. Write a short BASIC program to send your data to a PC via RS232.
Incidentally, the most common fault on the 3 inch Amstrad drives is a broken belt - you can buy new ones from rwap software: http://www.rwapsoftware.co.uk/ - while this firm caters for the Spectrum, since the later models were built by Amstrad with the 3in drive, they carry parts for 3in drives.
The other good news is most floppies seem to hold up well - while the 3in discs don't seem to do as well as 5.25 in discs (I have only one faulty disc in many 20+ year old ones for my BBC micro, but rather more faulty 3in discs - all pre-recorded game discs) - so I suspect your discs will all read fine.
Actually, I'd agree that making your own PCBs is time consuming and can be a pain, but on the other hand, I can lay out small PCB such as a breakout board or a reasonably straightforwad circuit in the morning in gEDA PCB - and by the afternoon, I have the thing assembled and in use. You're going to be waiting a lot longer for a PCB fab to turn around a design.
But there are a lot of PCB fabricators who do one offs these days - lots of competition on price and features! My most recent design is a 4 layer board and I sent that off (especially since I wanted multiple copies).
*Nothing* beats practical experience. Others have mentioned the Art of Electronics (which I have, and recommend as well). But practical experience is what really is the fun bits and what cemented it for me. I started from your position, and what I did was this:
:-)
1. Solderless breadboard, and an assortment of transistors, resistors, capacitors, inductors, 555 timers, op-amps etc. Do some simple circuits with them - make logic gates with BJTs and resistors, then do the same with mosfets (construct some CMOS gates out of discrete transistors for instance). Experiment with power supplies - buck converters to step DC voltages down, boost converters to step voltages up. Make sure you have several of each, because you'll probably let the magic smoke out of some of them.
2. Decide on a simple practical project. I chose to make a solar power system for my garden - an 80 watt pv panel sourced from ebay. The first project was to turn on lights at night from the battery that had been charged by the panel in the day. This consisted of a voltage comparator to detect when the solar panel voltage had fallen below a certain level. The output is connected to a power transistor that turns on the lights.
3. More complex stuff. Get a heap of 74 series or 4000 series logic ICs and make something with it. This will teach you how the real world has a nasty habit of creeping into your digital designs: glitches, why we need decoupling capacitors, synchronizing clocks, that kind of thing. I built an RS232 nixie tube display. It had no microcontroller - the UART was entirely implemented in 4000 series logic. I built it on tri-pad proto board. This required me to learn how to build several things: a simple switch mode power supply to boost 12v to 170vdc for the tubes, as well as the UART.
4. It is your fate to home brew a computer. My next project was a Z80 based single board computer on 160x100mm (Eurocard). It has a CTC, PIO, real time clock, paged memory, 512k of flash memory and 32k of RAM, and an expansion connector. The flash was initially programmed by a similar circuit to the nixie tube UART, but with a simple address generator circuit added. Once the initial program was written, the Z80 system could write its own flash.
I'm now up to the stage where I'm doing more challenging designs, such as an ethernet card for an 8 bit system, implemented almost entirely surface mount components, the glue logic being in a programmable logic chip called a CPLD (the little brother of the FPGA). There are even more real world considerations that mess with digital design here: how to avoid ground bounce, PCB layout considerations to make the board work at all, and also a good bit of real fun programming: writing a driver for it in assembly language
There's a great deal you can do as an electronics hobbyist: for example, you can make your own PCBs for fine pitch surface mount components if you have access to a laser printer: I've made my own PCBs for chips with 0.4mm pin pitch (that's 0.2mm traces and 0.2mm spacing) using nothing but gEDA PCB (which is GPL'd PCB layout software), a laser printer, a clothes iron, copper clad board and etchant. Sparkfun Electronics have some great tutorials on hand soldering surface mount components, by the way. As you progress, you'll want to be able to do this because there are a lot of interesting ICs that are only available in some sort of surface mount package.
I would not have chosen the ENC29J60 for this project, rather the Wiznet W5100 (or perhaps the W5300). The W5100 provides a built in TCP/IP offload engine (although you aren't forced to use it, it allows access at the MAC level) as well as the choice of SPI or a parallel bus (so if you need performance you can use the parallel bus rather than SPI). It also has a pretty decent amount of buffer memory (and you don't have to use up space in your microcontroller's flash memory for a TCP/IP stack).
http://www.wiznet.co.kr/pro_iin_W5100.htm
If you're developing software, yes, you don't need a scope.
But if you're developing hardware (i.e. not taking someone else's pre-made modules, but making your own PCBs, designing your own circuits etc.) an oscilloscope is an essential piece of hardware.
Atmel's AVR micro is very easy to program. I used an old printer lead, cut the end off, and four 1K resistors to make my AVR programmer - essentially free. It would be very easy to make an AVR programmer using a USB chip such as the FTDI FT245R.
Current solar voltaic tech _will not_ save you money, it will likely be considerably more expensive than just paying for the power.
However, if you want to do some solar stuff for a hobby (which I have done) and cost isn't the primary concern, then don't even tie to the grid; if you have to ask the questions you ask, you aren't even remotely qualified to homebrew a grid-tied inverter!
For a hobby project, consider 12 volt stuff - perhaps use solar to run your computer (you will need to build a computer PSU that runs off 12v and provides the right voltages for your motherboard - this can be a good, informative learning electronics project). If you have a garden, you could use a 12v solar power system to run things like garden lighting and your pond pump. Or perhaps you can run a couple of appliances, isolated from the mains electricity, off a non-grid tied inverter.
However, there are some things to note about solar. A panel only makes rated power in *full* sunshine, with the sun exactly perpendicular to the panel. If the panel is fixed, and optimised for the mid day sun, you won't even make half rated power more than two hours either side of mid day. A thin layer of cirrus cloud will cut power output to about 1/2 to 1/3rd of rated power. Even just normal summer haze will have a significant impact. On a bright overcast day, where faint shadows are still cast, you probably won't even make 15% of rated power.
If this isn't strictly a hobby project for the fun of it...
If your motive is to be green, note that if you have a typical commuting distance, you can probably save more money by cycling to work just once a week instead of driving that day.
If your motive is to save money, then you'd do MUCH better with a solar hot water heater - they are so effective that people make significant savings even as far north as I live.
Modern thermonuclear weapons are fusion, not fission bombs. (They do have a fission 'detonator' though).
The data bus for parallel ATA is 16 bits wide. Block addresses are 48 bits wide (you'll see lots of references to 48 bit LBA if you poke through stuff that deals with ATA).
That's not correct: even NOR flash (what you use for ROM, rather than mass storage) has been rated at 10,000 erase/write cycles for years - per sector (rather than the whole device). The typical flash mass storage is up to 100K erase/writes.
Swap is the main concern here - the solution is to give the machine enough RAM that you can turn swap off.
Well, the IDE bus isn't mechanically oriented anyway - we don't actually use cylinders, heads and sectors (and haven't for years), we use block addressing and the drive electronics has figured out how to move the mechanics. Block addressing isn't all that far off from addressing an individual byte in memory anyway - except you're addressing a whole block rather than a single byte (and for mass storage, whether it's mechanical or flash, you're going to want to do it that way so you don't have an absurdly wide address bus). Parallel ATA uses a 16 bit wide data bus.
Hundred mile an hour tape is actually the aluminium repair tape (which is significantly different to duck/duct tape).
On a point of pedantry, it's the DMCA, not the DCMA. Although I suppose Digitial Copyright Millennium Act does have a kind of ring to it.
EPROMs are more robust than you may think - I have some 25+ year old ones with their original program in my BBC Micro, which work just fine. They are typically in cerdip packages which are much more durable than plastic (the plastic used for chips can sometimes absorb moisture). I've had more problems with ancient RAM chips than EPROMs.
So long as the window was covered and they've not been zapped by static, there's a good chance that they will read perfectly.
Actually, that's how I do have it wired - each speaker terminal uses a pair.
I think at typical audio frequencies though you're just not going to notice the difference.
Since I don't get any noise via UTP, I doubt STP would be worthwhile.
Actually, 10Gbit ethernet abandons both CSMA/CD and half duplex operation. CSMA/CD is not supported at all by the standard.
The only cross platformness it needs is browser cross platformness. 95% of desktops run Windows on x86. Since I suspect Flash doesn't get updated as often as Windows or Firefox (and I suspect many users don't even update those) this is going to be quite an effective way of making a botnet.
The original article already has Russian trackbacks on it.
That's bravo-sierra, I'm afraid.
I run speaker connections through unshielded Cat5e cabling, to the patch panel, back out again to the remote speakers, which involved four RJ-45 connections (one at the amp, two at the patch panel, one at the remote speaker set). It goes through at least 50 feet of UTP. I quite honestly can't tell the difference between the speakers connected directly and via the Cat5. I use two pairs per speaker.
Perhaps if you live in an electrically noisy place with lots of motors you'd get noise, but you wouldn't notice it for the sound of all the motors.
There is NO silver bullet. At all.
This doesn't mean we shouldn't develop technologies that will be useful and cost effective. It's perfectly alright for a particular technology only to be a partial solution.
Indeed, this is the case right now. There is no one single type of power plant - instead, electricity comes from diverse sources today, nuclear, coal, oil, natural gas, hydroelectric, wind. None of those power generating methods are silver bullets either, but they are all in successful operation.
For the areas where solar thermal is more useful, the beautiful symmetry is the months of highest power demand due to air conditioning, are also the months where plants like this would be most productive.
I don't work for corporate IT where I do work so I don't make the policy, but they have a policy on 'no media files in your home directory'. It's entirely reasonable - if you want to bring in non-business related media files, bring it in on your own MP3 player, not at the expense of the business.
It's hardly an onerous policy. When there's 2000 staff who might put 30 gigs of media files in their home directory, it soon adds up to a lot of money supporting the storage of personal, non business related files. Consumer storage might be cheap, but mirrored, RAIDed, battery and generator backed, and backed up in the fireproof tape vault storage is most certainly *not* cheap. Nor is the bandwidth going to numerous remote sites if everyone's streaming media files off their home directory.
It's only $6 of storage space if the storage space is made up of second hand ATA drives purchased on eBay.
Most corporate storage is on a RAID array, on 15krpm SAS or SCSI drives, with associated DLT or LTO backup tapes, a dual redundant UPS and backup generators. In many cases, these 30 gigs will be mirrored at a remote site, on another RAID array full of 15krpm SAS drives. The reliability demanded for a business critical resource makes it several orders of magnitude more expensive than 30 gigs of consumer hard disc in a home PC.
There are several reasons why:
1. Schadenfraude: the immense hubris of the builders and operators of the Titanic were key factors in the loss of the ship. Stories where supreme arrogance is dealt a blow by nature are always fascinating to people.
2. A grand supposedly unsinkable ship sinking on her first voyage.
3. This accident prompted a sea change (pun intended) in maritime safety practices.
From an accident investigation standpoint, it is also the classic demonstrator of the accident chain. Many maritime and aviation accidents consist of a long chain of direct events that occur over a considerable period of time, and if any of the links been broken, the accident wouldn't have occurred.
I find it interesting that after so many years, and so much evidence, that the company still strenuously denies any wrongdoing. It's not like they can be sued this long after the fact; indeed it's like a vestigial remaining piece of the very arrogance that doomed the Titanic in the first place.
And of course they and game developers slam Intel's product... but 99.9% of PCs are never used to play games.
Nvidia's statement sounds like famous last words, too. I think their laurels are getting pressed too flat from resting on them. Just as Intel's CPUs eventually caught up and overtook the Alpha, the same might happen with their graphics chipsets.
The thing is, nvidia's statement feels spookily like "famous last words".
I'm sure DEC engineers poo-pooed Intel back in the early 90s when the DEC Alpha blew away anything Intel made by a factor of four. But a few short years later, Chipzilla had drawn level. Now Alpha processors aren't even made and DEC is long deceased.
Nvidia ought not to rest on its laurels like DEC did, or Intel will crush them.