barnoid

BBC B running 2048 I’ve recently been experimenting at the Hackspace with UPURS and UPURSFS. These unfriendly strings of letters amount to a cable that links the BBC’s User port to my laptop via a USB to serial converter, two ROMs that go in the Beeb and some Perl code that runs on my laptop. The upshot of which is that I can access parts of the filesystem of my laptop as if they were floppies on the BBC.

I recently bought a string of 50 individually addressable RGB LEDs from Embedded Adventures and so had to decide what to do with them. I decided it would be festive if they could reflect Twitter’s current feeling about Christmas. So I started Googling sentiment analysis and quickly discovered that Stanford University’s Natural Language Processing Group has released the source and data for their sentiment analyser. When fed a sentence it outputs one of “Very negative”, “Negative”, “Neutral”, “Positive” or “Very positive”.

Almost exactly a year ago I got married, just before Halloween. It seems to be fairly typical these days to have a photobooth at the reception so that guests can take photos of themselves for you. We decided ours should have a Halloween theme. What Happens Guests enter a cubbyhole and sit on the chairs at one end. The space is lit by a lamp and there’s a camera on a tripod pointing at them.

TwitBeeb Photo by John Honniball TwitBeeb is a BBC B microcomputer (vintage 1981) from which you can Tweet. The Beeb itself was my main computer until 1994, I taught myself to program on it. A few years ago I pulled a rather scuffed up BBC out of a skip at Sussex University and took it home. Inside it had an add-on ROM board with several programs in ROM chips including a serial terminal emulator called Termulator.

Bus Pirate and SCP1000 I decided to learn how to use my Bus Pirate (v3) by getting it to talk to an SCP1000 chip that I’ve had for a while but not got round to using. The SCP1000 is a very accurate barometric pressure sensor with an SPI interface, mine is on a handy breakout board and came from Sparkfun. The datasheet has the details. For the first step I found it pretty much vital to label each of the connectors on the end of the Bus Pirate cable as tracking down which is which was taking too long.