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

All of the circuits here have been drawn (or re-drawn) by me using CAD or schematics software and there may be a minor error here or there. Some of schematics here are quite old and I haven't looked at them in over a decade.

Circuits I Built: projects to experiment and test out components.

• 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. Nothing fancy. Simple is good.
• 8-channel Audio Spectrum Analyzer - My crowning achievement for 2008 :-) This completed prokect features the Interstate Electronics ASA16 16-channel Audio Spectrum Analyzer chip (picked it up on eBay and built the rest of the circuitry to get it to work). The 8x8 LED Matrix is multiplexed (only one audio channel is displayed at any given moment). Multiplexing of the 8 channels is performed via a 360 hz. clock signal to a CMOS 4024 counter and two CMOS 4051 mux/demux units. Actual audio signal graphing is done with an LM3916. Entire circuit runs off of a 9V battery source. Only the first 8 of the ASA16's channels are displayed as they seem to be the most interesting to look at. Here's a simplified block diagram and a photo of the working display.

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

• Low-power (3 volts) timer circuit with selectable preset frequencies (schematic came mainly from an Intersil databook)
• 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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