My name is Andy Baxter. I live in the North West of England. This is my webspace for writing up personal projects. I also write an occasional blog on this site.
I work part time for a small electronics company, doing bits of research, linux sysadmin stuff, and some microcontroller programming. When I am not working, I like to go cycling, make and listen to music, cook, engage in computer geekery and electronics, read a bit, and take photos.
The site is pretty much under construction at the moment. It is powered by dokuwiki - a lightweight wiki program with neat syntax and some nice features. I hope you find something here you like.
You can contact me at this email address: andy on the server highfellow dot org. (replace 'on the server' with '@' and 'dot' with '.' to make the right address).
I've now finished installing the stair lights. I'm really pleased with how they look, and they're working nicely. I've put up a page about them here
I've now soldered up the main PCB for the stair lights I'm making, and set them up on the stairs using blu-tack. The only things left to do are to put the switch on the far end, check for bad joints again, and install them properly using cable clips.
They look really homely coming down the stairs at night.
I have just been moving my site over to a new hosting provider, called webfaction.com, mainly because I wanted better python support. So far I'm really impressed with them - the service is quick and helpful, and the way they have laid out their custom written control panel is really neat and well thought out. It's only taken me a couple of hours to move everything over, partly because I now have proper ssh/sftp access to the site, which makes things a lot easier.
Now I'm just waiting for the nameservers to update, which should be done in about 20 minutes.
I've spent the last few days working on a web based script to generate random google searches from words picked from the dictionary. You can control the amount to which the words are biased towards normal word frequencies, which I'm quite proud of (it's a nice algorithm). I'll be releasing the code some time soonish. The link to the current version is here.
Since last week, I've been making a set of LED stair lights for the house. It's a piece of 2 core mains flex with 8 LEDs spliced into it, and a control box to dim the circuit and also turn it on and off under the control of a couple of switches. The tricky bit was working out how to have a switch at both ends with only 2 wires (the LEDs are wired in parallel.) I've now built the circuit on breadboard, and done the LEDs, and it's looking really nice. Should get it finished and installed over the next day or two.