More Morse--- Breadboard

Mounted with a log potentiometer for volume control, circuit board for associated hardware, 45 Ohm 1/5 watt speaker (in custom case, made from perf aluminum and a
Container Store Seamless Tin. Still needs battery pack / power supply in the open space.

Soviet Morse Key

We got this pretty soviet military morse key from ebay. Plans include: opto isolation, debouncing, USB-ification as computer input device...
Using the TI MSP430

Test Equipment

The AD56645 14 Bit A/D converter takes 105 mega samples a second, which implies a Nyquist limit of 52.5 MHz.
In actual sampling operation the 2 LSBs are ignored. The output of the A/D converter is can be saved to a comma delineated Excel file 16,384 samples at a time, stored in 16 bit range.

The oscilloscope is a Tektronix 2230 100 MHz job with a nifty digital storage feature that will take 1K or 4K of samples (from Ebay). Its sampling rate is 20 mega samples a second.

Since the scopes visual mode is faster than the software ADC version, and the ADCs sampling rate is faster than the scopes sampling rate, the pair of them are useful in conjunction.

Don't blow up your computer!

This is a 1 to 1 RF isolation transformer with 40 turns of bifilar wire.

Oooh. Pretty.

Clicky for movie action.

This is the soviet made EM80 cats eye indicator tube.

Test Lighting some Display Tubes

Mandelbrot Fractal Flash

You can see the Fractal using this flash movie.

One of the first pieces of code I programmed when learning how to program using Microsoft Foundation Classes was the Mandelbrot fractal. I directly colored pixels, using distance for points still inside the fractal space, and using "generation" to color pixels outside the fractal space. My father helped choose the color scheme. I then coded the program to reshape where we were looking in the complex number field with a pair of mouse clicks, and added a keyboard "zoom out" control. Running time can be long for large images, but that helps them turn out beautifully. The complex math was programmed into a pure C++ object, with as little mixing with MFC as possible.