Device software is ready
I’m done with the software for my “Linear Camera” Device.
The first picture shows the device booting up with my University logo (TU-Sofia), the second one is the main menu, the third one shows the linear sensor output. Notice the three icons on top. The first one (the emoticon 
) shows that the device is calibrated or not. The second one (the lamp) shows that the “flash light” is activated and the third one shows how much battery we have left. The last image shows the results of the measurements. It’s only in Cyrillic – no latin alphabet because I wanted to free some space for the logo
I’ll have to present this as my Bachelor thesis in Friday (9th of July). I hope everything will go as planed
“Linear Camera ” – PCB and assembly
I just received my PCBs:
And this is how they look after I have soldered the elements.
It’s my first time soldering SMD components but I think I’ve made it. I now have to find a programmer and hope that everything is OK and that the device will run properly
“Linear Camera” progress
I have some progress on my USB device - now defined as a "Linear Camera". It's going to be my thesis for my Bachelor degree. I've currently developed the board and I'm waiting for it to be produced so I can assemble it.
I was able to drive a Nokia 3310 LCD, to display some text and graphics from the sensor.
Communicating with TSL202R
Last time I talked about my USB device that I’m creating. I’ve connected the TSL202R Linear Array Photodiode sensor. It has 128 photodiodes(pixels) that tells us how much light there is on each one of them. This is very useful. It can be used for example for OCR, measuring the angle of a light source etc. I’m interesting in measuring the dimensions of object. It’s actually a simple method. Take a look at this figure:
We have a source of light then an optic system and the sensor. When we put an object in front of the light we get his shadow on the sensor. By measuring the size of the shadow we can calculate the size of the object.
Here’s how the sensor looks like and a simple result of it’s output in my application:
USB HID Device
This weekend I've managed to create my first USB device. It's a simple board with the PIC18F4550 microcontroller. It gets detected from Windows as HID device and works properly. I can send data to it and read information back. Tried the ADC and it works fine. I still have to make some test on the speed of the transfer but for my needs it's more than enough. I used the Microchip USB Bootloader and modified it a bit to work with the free version of C18 compiler. And so the device is able to update/program it's firmware/memory using the PC thought USB. So no need for my programmer for now. There is a design fault in the pictures below. The big capacitor over there under the LED is too big and the device was not working properly. I have now changed it with a 100nF capacitor and everything is fine.
So here are some pics:
Asus EEE vs Intel Celeron 2Ghz
Today I had a chance to play with Asus EEE and test what it's capable of. It looks very cute and it's usefull compared to its size. I can't find "Home", "End" 
To test the CPU of Asus EEE I've downloaded the program "SuperPi" and I ran it with 1M iterations. The results was 2m 07s; I ran the same test on a machine with Intel Celeron 2Ghz and it gave the result: 2m 18s; So in this test the 900Mhz CPU of Asus EEE is faster than the 2Ghz Celeron CPU - Amazing! It also looks capable of playing 3D games (not those new one), but I haven't had any games with me to test it. However I tied some simple 3D games and applications and they all run fine.
New PC
I've bought a new PC this month. It's a Intel Core 2 Quad 6600(2,4Ghz), 2GB RAM, 500GB HDD, nVidia 8600GT 512MB DDR. I know the video card isn't very good but that's what I was able to afford. Now that I have a new PC I'll have more power for programming. I'm interested in multithread programming, that's why I bought a four core CPU. It does make a difference compared to my old pc. I can now encode video, record TV shows from my tunner and play a game at the same moment without any visible perforemance decrease. It compiles really faster and programs like Bledner3D witch can use all 4 core runs atleast 2 times faster. Unfortunatelly I have exams at university right now and I don't have enought time to test/play with my new PC.