This is a bit of a retrospective on things I’ve learned since I built my first nixie clock back in 2007. Its been suffering from what looked like cathode poisoning for a while, so I discontinued its use and decided to upgrade it.

First let’s look at the specs. It’s built using point-to-point wiring on two stacked boards. The top board consists of 6 Russian IN-14 nixie tubes. These are driven by 6 Russian KM155ID1 equivalents to the 74141 nixie decoder/driver, driven in turn by 3 74HC595 latching shift registers. The top board also includes six LEDs that provide blue uplighting of the nixie tubes.

The lower board contains a 5V linear regulator (a 7805), a high voltage power supply built around an NE555, a Picaxe 18X MCU, a DS1307 real time clock, some switches and a MOSFET to drive the LEDs with a PWM signal.

This is the Syduino - my take on a breadboard friendly barebones Arduino clone. It was the last PCB I designed while we were still living in Sydney, so the name seemed apt. It was manufactured on 0.8mm FR4 material as part of a larger board hosting multiple designs. By using thinner PCB material it was possible to score the board with a knife and snap it, separating the Syduino from the other designs.

This is a wideband oscillator for testing resonant LC circuits that is probably good to 5MHz. It’s actually nothing more than the front end for this PIC based inductance and capacitance meter circuit. (I have built an LC meter along these lines and it has proved to be an extremely handy piece of kit.)

This is an infrared remote control extender I built. There are a couple of minor differences but in general it follows this design.

Here’s a little amplifer to be incorporated into the AM superhet radio I’m building:

It’s based on the TDA2822M stereo amplifier chip. In my case the chip is actually a clone marked CD2822 pulled from a very cheap radio. (The irony of destroying a radio to make a radio is not lost on me).

This post documents my build of the 8 transistor AM superhetrodyne receiver featured in Ronald Quan’s excellent book Build Your Own Transistor Radios. In reality, my version is a 4 transistor radio since I’ve used an audio amplifier chip in place of the 4 transistor amplifer used in the original design. The main reason for the change was that I did not have the audio transformers required for the original design on hand.

Here’s my take on a GPIO cable for the Raspberry Pi that can be used with solderless breadboards:

The cable uses a 26-way IDC header socket (available here in Australia from Jaycar, PS0987). I recycled the wire from a 40-pin hard drive cable I had in the junk box (with the 14 excess wires peeled off). You could just as easily use 26-way cable (such as Jaycar WM4504).

It seems every time I have a new laser cutting project in mind, Ponoko is running a special. This time it was a generous 30% off making costs as part of Cyber Monday.

I’m making lampshades for my daughter’s doll’s house. The lower rooms, in particular, are very dark and badly in need of some illumination.

Like last time, I’ve specified my design in Processing . This was really quick to do and should produce 5 neat little lampshades that will each contain a star LED module. Wires running to the lampshades will be concealed in brass “conduit” with little brackets to keep the conduit in place. Everything will be affixed to the doll’s house with self-tapping screws.

There was some space left over so I added a little Christmas star, which will contain a colour-changing LED, for fun.

Update 21 November 2012: My Ponoko order arrived yesterday. It is proof that the technique works - all lines were cut perfectly, the engraving looks great, and the text is raster engraved beautifully. See below for the ocular proof.

I really like Ponoko’s laser-cutting service. It’s a breeze to use and the customer support is excellent. With it, I can now create custom enclosures for my electronics projects, bringing a new level of professionalism to their finish.

The only bit I find hard is capturing my designs in the vector graphics tool Inkscape. This is clearly an immensely powerful program with a plethora of features. Mastering such programs seems to involve setting oneself up for success, becoming intimately familiar with what each tool does, picking up lots of tricks, and memorising all the shortcut keys. It’s a significant time investment and a steep learning curve; and because I only design enclosures every now and then, it takes a while to reacquaint myself with all these things.

A lot of my designs involve repeating elements - equally spaced mounting holes, for instance. This repetition led me to ask whether I could specify my designs programmatically. I’m comfortable with programming, and certainly more adept at it than I am at using a vector graphics tool!

Specifying a design in code seemed to bring with it a number of advantages:

• Point perfect positioning. Ability to specify precise coordinates and no risk of “bumping” shapes out of their intended place.

• Built in workflow. Possible to set a flag and change from “design” mode, with guidelines and annotations shown and thick lines for printing, to “production” mode, with only the details to be cut/engraved shown and thin lines for the laser cutter.

• Versioning. Standard source control tools, like Git and SVN can be used.

• Public transport friendly! It’s quite feasible to type on a bus or train; much harder to use a mouse to create precise graphics.

This visualisation explores the growth of research data collections in ANDS Research Data Australia (RDA) over time. We were interested in who contributed collection records in what disciplines when.

The visualisation gives us insights into questions such as:

• Who got the ball rolling?

• When were there bursts of activity?

• How did RDA grow over time?

• What did the discipline coverage look like at any point in time?

What you’re seeing are collections grouped by contributing research institution and then by top-level Field of Research (FOR) code.

• Each cluster represents an institution.

• Each colour represents an FOR code.

• Each dot represents a collection

This visualisation was produced by Luc Small and Jared Berghold as part of the 2012 eResearch Australasia conference Developers Lounge Challenge.

It makes extensive use of the source code visualisation tool Gource as discussed further below. Gource is great for viewing the contribution of actors (usually developers) to (source code) repositories over time. RDA is effectively a repository, and the contributing institutions are actors, so Gource is a perfect tool for visualising its growth over time.

The data was sourced from the Australian National Data Service (ANDS) and used under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Australia License.

We also acknowledge the work of J Lang, whose song “The Garden of Forking” is used here and has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) License.