Chris's Stuff

Modular Test System Part 1

Chris Elwood — Wed, 09 Sep 2020 00:00:00 -0500

This is the first post about a modular test equipment / data acquisition system I'm working on. I had the opportunity to work with PXI based equipment on several projects back when I was in school. I really liked these systems because they made it easy to plug in a card …

Project Log

Chris Elwood — Fri, 22 Feb 2019 00:00:00 -0600

I recently put together descriptions of all my in-progress projects, which can be found here. This page can also be accessed from the "Projects" button in the navigation bar above.

I tend to have multiple projects going and switch between them depending on what I'm interested at any given time …

STM32 / FPGA Board

Chris Elwood — Sun, 10 Feb 2019 00:00:00 -0600

I put together a development board of sorts last month to test out a few different things. It consists of a STM32F4 microcontroller with its external memory interface connected to a Xilinx Spartan-6 FPGA. The FPGA has a basic VGA output as well as SDRAM to use as a frame …

LED Matrix Clock

Chris Elwood — Tue, 18 Dec 2018 00:00:00 -0600

It's been a while since I've updated this site. There was too much going on with school at the time and I just didn't end up getting time to write projects up. I graduated a while ago now and have more free time, so I'm going to make an effort …

Halloween Costume

Chris Elwood — Sun, 16 Nov 2014 00:00:00 -0600

It's been a couple weeks since halloween, but this is worth writing up anyway. Last year I had been thinking about doing some sort of costume using LEDs. The prices on flexible RGB LED strips have gotten really cheap, so it seemed like a good time to try to build …

Yaesu VX-6R Receive Fix

Chris Elwood — Sat, 03 May 2014 00:00:00 -0500

Some time in the last year my VX-6R radio started having problems receiving. On narrowband FM mode it had trouble picking anything up at all. The local weather radio station, which came in loud and clear on another radio, could barely be heard. I did some searching around and found …

Skein Hash Breaking

Chris Elwood — Sun, 21 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0500

So I think it is finally time to start updating this blog. On April 1st xkcd posted a comic titled "Externalities", which partly involved a competition to find a value that matches the most bits in a given Skein 1024 hash. I decided to write a program to automate the …

Welcome

Chris Elwood — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0600

I created this site to document some of my projects. I hope you find them interesting.

This site itself is actually one of those projects... it is powered by some basic blog/CMS software that I wrote in PHP. I am planning to add comments and a few other features …