Current Activity in the fox's lab...

I am currently exploring the potential of the Parallax BASIC Stamp line of products. Very neat stuff. I bought a Parallax StampWorks kit in the spring of 2006 to experiment, and it was good. I'm just now getting around to work on it seriously again. It came with a BS2 module, which is great for learning this system, but I've also recently found that as soon as you try to apply what you've learned and write a sophisticted program you quickly crash into EEPROM size and speed limitations, so a BS2p24 module is on its way :-)

I've recently been geeking out on BASIC Stamp accessories and have been playing with driving some VFD displays and bifilar stepper motors with a BASIC Stamp. Yes, I thrill easily.

Circuit Schematics and Electronics Geek-Out

NEWLY ADDED in 2007!! A page dedicated to my 8031-based computer project.

All of the circuits here have been drawn or re-drawn by myself using CAD software and there may be a minor error here or there.

Some Simple Circuits: These are circuits I built to experiment and test out components I bought and theories I had about how to use them.

• The Gruenenwald Flashing Bar-LED circuit - A completely useless but neat little circuit to make a 10-segment bar LED flash like KITT's hood from Knight Rider.
• The Second Gruenenwald Flashing Bar-LED circuit - Similar to the first, but this one turns all the LED's on in sequence, then turns them all off in sequence. Switch S1 controls direction.
• Simple but interesting voltage switching circuit - This circuit uses an Intersil IH5041 dual SPST analog switch to select between two voltage sources. Simple but useful.
• Light-sensitive switch - This circuit uses a simple photo-transister I found at Radio Shask.
• 20-segment audio power meter / bar graph - It isn't complex, just the first time I got all of the components to work together in a grand way. I designed a circuit board for it even.
• Simple two-digit counter application using two 74143's
• Low-power (3 volts) timer circuit with selectable preset frequencies (diagram came mainly from an Intersil databook)

Other useful circuits: There aren't mine, but they might come in real handy.

• Sound-generator application using TI's old 74677 sound generator chip (diagram came from a kit I bought)
• Audio recording/playback application using an ISD1000A analog audio record/playback IC
• 8-bit Microprocessor Bus Interface (Intel 8080, 8086) - I don't remember where this came from. At one time I needed this for something, but I never did use it.

Software Projects

Filename	Description	Language
dsu.pas	Disk Statistics and Usage: A DOS utility I wrote which gathers file allocation information for a specific hard drive. It was written in the good old days of DOS, back before there were gigabytes-sized hard drives. Hence, it can't deal with values > 2 GB.	Turbo Pascal
nanites.cpp Sample parameter file	This is actually a complete artificial life simulation program I wrote and re-wrote and re-wrote. It's a fun little toy.	Turbo C++
ipx_dist.c	This is a BIG thing I made back in the early 90's: it is an IPX network-based distributed Mandelbrot generator program. It is an excellent example of distributed computing using an IPX network. If you have no idea what a Mandelbrot set is, then I pitty you, but you may find the IPX code useful.	Turbo C

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