EV Control and Instrumentation

In my spare time, I’ve been working on an embedded system to provide instrumentation and accessory control (indication lamps, turn signal flashers, head lamp relay control, etc.) for use in hobbyist electric vehicles (EVs). Most of my work so far has been focused on implementation of system logic in a simulation environment (desktop Linux).

I’ve written a few tools that simulate some of the hardware that will be present in the target system. I have pulse generators for system timing and a speedometer sensor, a LCD simulator (simple serial 4×20), and a GTK+ GUI to simulate the relay output state and collect contact input from the user. This system is implemented as C code in anticipation of maintaining a build tree that will cross-compile to a ARMv7 MCU.

In case you were wondering, the vehicle silhouette displayed in the GUI shown above is original artwork I created; it was inspired by a Mazda Miata. It is rendered as batch of hard-coded Cairo API calls.

Click here to go to the EVAC project page on GitHub. 

Lilypond Scores

I’m no composer, and not much of a musician, but sometimes it’s nice to visualize music, or save an idea expressed as notes. The program Lilypond is available in Linux and allows users to enter musical score in a text file, and produce nice looking PDF files and accompanying MIDI. For a friend, I created a simple test file to demonstrate the input format. The Lilypond web site has a much more comprehensive set of documentation.

Here is a link to the Lilypond source file I created, based on my memory of the original tune.

Download earthangel_test.txt

I ran Lilypond from a terminal in order to generate a PDF and MIDI file from the source file like so:

lilypond earthangel_test.txt

Using the software MIDI synthesizer timidity, I created a sound file from the resulting MIDI file like so:

timidity -Ov earthangel_test.midi

Here is a link to the sound file in Ogg/Vorbis format, rendered using timidity.

Download earthangel_test.ogg (119K)

And finally, here is a link to the score rendered as a PDF (with a screenshot included below).

Download earthangel_test.pdf

Turbonium Color Theme for GNU Emacs

Here is the color theme I created to use with GNU Emacs (Emacs > vi, btw). It’s based on the Blue Mood theme, which is part of the emacs-color-theme package included with Debian. I decided to name it ‘Turbonium’, because I have to hold in a snicker every time I hear that word. I use Emacs for editing C source code mostly, so this color theme is tailored to that end. Here’s a screen shot to demonstrate how it looks with the White Rabbit font by Matthew Welch:

download turbonium.el.tar.gz

Sometimes More Is More

I don’t need nor want to own this unit (or even have the money to afford one), but wow. I like to think I typically appreciate a minimalist aesthetic to gadgets, but if anything so busy has ever looked as sexy to me as this, I’ve all but forgotten about it now.

Not a superconducting quantum interference controller, oscillation overthruster, or flux capacitor, the AATON Cantar X2 turns out to be a digital multitrack audio recorder. Really it could have been a bathroom scale and I would still have had to sit and stare at the photos on the manufacturer’s site. Wow.

HTC EVO Skin for Android Emulator

I’ve put together an HTC EVO skin for the Android emulator (the emulator is part of the Android SDK). The four buttons below the screen are working, but I didn’t include definitions for the volume control buttons in the layout. I’ve packed the files in to a .tar.gz archive. If you’re using windows, I believe 7Zip can unpack the archive for you. Let me know if you find this useful! Oh and yes, that is a screenshot of the emulator displaying this page displaying the emulator displaying this page displaying the emulator displaying this page displaying the emulator displaying the home screen.

Download WVGA800-EVO.tar.gz