/now - What am I up to?

I copied off Matty and also made a now page. Completed projects should in theory be in the blog. :)

Current Projects

Amaranth and Glasgow Interface Explorer - I've been learning Amaranth and building a GPIB applet for the Glasgow Interface Explorer. It's fun!
VP406 LaserDisc Repair - Very active ongoing project to fix an old LaserDisc player. More info on the nottinghack wiki.
Nottingham Hackspace - I'm currently a trustee at Nottingham Hackspace. There's quite a lot of stuff behind the scenes, always things to improve. This in itself has become a project.
Work - I recently (update: over 3 years ago…) moved from an academic position working on deep learning research (where I felt a bit stuck), into an research computing infrastructure at the University of Dundee. It's been quite a big change, but much easier for me to adapt than I thought it would be. Our "mission" is to improve the state of trusted research environments (TREs), providing a secure research computing environment for working on sensitive genomics data.

Sometimes a project is too difficult or I get temporarily fed up of it. This is a pile of those.

(2022-present) SBD Dowty video card driver - Another PDP-11 card, like above, except the SBD is able to generate graphics. The SBD includes (iirc) a z80 CPU and a fair amount of RAM. It can parse fairly sophisticated drawing commands as well as display bitmap 16 colour graphics. I'm working on a driver for 2.11BSD so it can be used as a frame buffer.
(2021-present) Vidicon tube webcam - An electronics project! I haven't managed to get a signal from this, but I did wind and test a deflection yoke on a small Russian CRT. My plan is to use an STM32 to capture the video signal and digitise it so an old Russian Vidicon tube can be used as a webcam. I have described my coil winding process on GitHub.
(2018-present) RL02 drive repair - I know, another PDP-11 project… but the RL02 drives are really cool! The linked blog post went into (probably too much) detail about how they work. It was an attempt to improve my understanding of the drives so I had a better chance of repairing them.

HP 1630D Repair - While trying to repair my RL02 drives, I needed to dig a bit deeper to understand what the drive thought it was doing. Unfortunately the screen wouldn't turn on when I went to use it, so another thing to fix.
Home Decorating - Urgh. I really hate decorating.