John Burton's Blog

I’ve not posted much in the last few days because I’ve not done much on any projects, being away from home over the weekend and also updating my CV and putting a little more effort into trying to find a new job over the last few days. I won’t be posting much for the next few days either as I have *two* weddings to go to in the next three days.

So here are my current projects -

• Continue to work on the TV display. This is mostly software at the moment, writing a reasonable library for displaying graphics and text in other applications. Also I’d like to output RGB signals too so I can get colour but this will require a PIC with more RAM. I could do character cell based colour perhaps in a similar way to an old ZX-Spectrum display. Hmm, idle thought –  I wonder if a PIC is powerful enough to emulate a z80 at the speed of a spectrum… Almost certainly not if it has to display video too.
• Computer USB / IR Remote project. I’d like to build this properly and put it in a box so I can just plug it into USB port and be able to control the PC. Ideally I’d like to be able to configure the buttons from the PC (What they send…). I would like to consider using a PIC24FJ64GB106 in TQFP package which I believe I could solder onto a PCB I could make. Strangle the farnell link doesn’t show it does USB but the microchip datasheet indicates that it does
• Learn Direct3D11. I did quite a lot with d3d9 / c++ in the past but I’d like to make a proper project with d3d11 now. I would really like to use C# as a learning excercise too but for this first project i think I’ll stick to c++.

My first project will be the d3d11 one

I was quite pleased with myself getting all of this to work, and have implemented text display too. (Although it’s horribly inefficient as I have to reverse the bits of the font from left to right as I draw them – I need to convert the font really).

But then I put up some blocks around the text and it’s clear that I’ve not got my timing quite right. Every 16 pixels there is a slight gap of less than one pixel. And by coincidence I write out the display 16 bits as a time as it’s a 16 bit CPU. Clearly I miscalculated the timing somewhere. It looks like just ONE cpu instruction, or perhaps two. Anyway, it’s nice to have spotted it here so I can fix it

A lot of what is written here is old and out of date now… Plans changed.
I’ll write up some of the projects I’ve worked on over the next few days but for now here are two of the things I want to make :-

• A proper remote control receiver for my PC. I’ve made a small prototype one but I’d like to make one in a proper case and which fixes a few issues with the software on the one I made. In addition I’d like the keypresses it sends to be configurable using some kind of PC application.
• I’d like to make a clock / thermometer  for my living room. I’ve seem some nice OLED displays I’d like to use for a display. I’d like it to have a nice alarm clock, and thermometer display. But also to record the temperature in a EEPROM so that I can draw graphs and get statistics about how hot my room is at different times of day. In addition (mostly as it will be sitting in my living room. I’d like it to have a USB interface to so I can occasionally connect it to my PC to upload the temperature data (I’ve actually made most of this except with a 2 line LCD instead of OLED as a prototype)
• Network connected IR sender. I can never remember which channel SKY HD is on for example so rather than just pressing 170 or whatever on my remote control I have to go through pages of slow menus. I would like to have an IR sender which can change channels for me which has a web page interface and is connected to ethernet. That way I can use my android phone as a web browser and just “click” on the channel I want. I’m not sure how difficult ethernet / tcp/up is but I’ve seen some i2c chips which seem to handle quite a lot of it so it’s an area for more research.