Phil's Blog

Control Systems
Interfacing with the Real World....Hello World!

Posts


Covering Electronic hardware software pratical application and theory. Thanks for stopping by feel free to comment on anything. Phil


Hardware

There are many ways of controlling a system and there are many companies that would like to sell you their system and their software package. This blog will focus on open source hardware and software, and projects that are a good value preferably free. The above image is a typical set up for my projects. I prefer a PC over an embedded solution? I use a pc because it gives me the flexability to do a lot of diferent projects along with printing, copying and storing data. It allows me to do more projects in less time and keep better documentation.

Debian

My interface with software, hardware, monitor, keyboard, and other peripheral devices, is my computer. It is a simple dual core processor running the Debian operating system. I choose debian because it is free and I am cheap, also Debian is for programmers and hackers. It is stable and flexable and it is the best operating system that I know of.

Python 2.7

If at all possible Python 2.7 will be the software running the control algorithms, and GUI. Python27 is cross platform, user-friendly, well suported and stable. If you havent tried Python do it! After that you will be anoyed any time you have to use other programming languages. For real time computing I will be using assembly or C.

RaspberryPi

This site was made with a RaspberryPi and the Raspbian OS. The site uses ruby gems, jekyll, html and is hosted by github. On your raspberryPi you will have to get the latest ruby package and install it on your pi, Then follow the Jekyll tutorial linked at the bottom of this page.

sudo apt-get install ruby1.9.1-full mkdir your USERNAME.github.com folder in your home directory and not your root directory. I did it in root and had key issues. <br> <br>


check out my raspberrypi project log at the raspberry pi forums.

To-Do

This site is still under construction, as I try and figure out how I want it set up.

All of the code for this site is at my github repository
Complete usage and documentation available at: Jekyll Bootstrap