Blog on My Life, Open Hardware, Free Software, India ……
“Electronic Design and Fabrication with gEDA” is my first article in LINUX For You Magazine.
This is the first time I am forgetting to blog about my article. Actually it was published in last month(NOVEMBER 2009) issue. Please read it if possible.
This article mainly gives a quick introduction about gEDA. I have also given some snaps of my designs.
More example programs for Octave has been posted in my wiki page. Please vist
If you don’t know about Octave, I have been maintaining a wiki page for Octave. See the link below
http://jeffrey.co.in/wiki/doku.php/experiments_using_octave_for_b-tech_course
In a pursuit of fabricating pcb’s, I have won. I had designed pcb’s boards using PCB. But when I tried to fabricate the pcb in my home, I used to fail. the problem was with the Acrobat Reader . When I take the print out on the paper for layout transfer to the board, a size change occurs to the layout. This size change make the layout completely useless. Actually it was the wrong option selected in Acrobat Reader that made the size change.Now it is OK.
This is development board designed by me for the ATmega8 microcontroller. It is a miniature ARDUINO. You can burn your bootloader and then use with Arduino IDE or you can simply upload your hex file using DAPA programmer circuit. If anyone needs its schematic file please post an comment or I will soon upload it when I am free.
Anyway this is an open hardware project. I will try to upload the details soon. If you are in a hurry, please comment so that I can upload the details fast.
Here is the PCB layout files http://jeffrey.co.in/files/mini-AVR.pcb
These are the two snap shots of my board
PCB is one of the free softwares for designing PCB’s. But one of the major disadvantage is that, it lacks documentation. Here is a tutorial by DJ Delorie. This tutorial explains about designing a PCB using ordinary and SMD components. But still some parts are under construction. You can read the tutorial from this link
I am a B-Tech student in University of Calicut, Kerala, India. The lab syllabus of final year electronics engineering contains “Experiments Using Matlab” which are a set of three experiments to be done using Matlab. In our college we are using Matlab. Since proprietary softwares like Matlab are not recommended in universities (see this Why schools should exclusively use free software), it is goodto use free software Octave. As I am a free software enthusiast, I love using octave instead of Matlab.
If I ask the lab staff to use Octave in the college lab, they will ask me “Will all programs work in Octave?”. Actually they are not happy to accept Octave because it is not mentioned in syllabus. Is it compulsory that students should learn only what is in the syllabus? The other true fact is that, at the end of semester there will be a lab exam. The teachers coming from other college won’t be familiar with Octave. So when they see Octave, they will surely ask to install Matlab.
One of the method to bring free software in B-Tech course (not only in B-Tech, but also in other courses) is to have a syllabus review. Thereby all will start using free software. If the syllabus changes there should be reference materials for these free software tools. The first thing everyone does if he/she doesn’t know about something is that he/she will Google it. So I thought of contributing once again to free software by writing some tutorials for Octave that can be helpful for implementing free software like Octave in universities.
These all led me to write this tutorial. This tutorial is about installing Octave and also contains some examples using Octave. I have tried to write the tutorial in a simple and lucid way. Hope this tutorial can guide university to use octave in their labs instead of Matlab.
The tutorial here explains the simple example code that can be used for teaching Octave. This tutorial is specifically designed for University of Calicut in India. But I hope the syllabus will be almost same in other universities also.
The tutorial is in my Wiki page. You can visit the tutorial from the link below
Experiments using Octave for B-Tech course
Copyright © 2009, Jeffrey Antony
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