Philip Kreis

This was my senior design project for my microcomputer design class.  I finished it back in May 2008.  It wasn’t perfect, but i got it working. I wrote a bios and OS for it in assembly so it could modify and load files and programs.  I used the LED as programmable status indicators.

• Motorola 68000 16Bit CPU
• 4Mhz Clock
• Phillips SCC68681 DUART
• Serial Connection at 19200 Baud
• Xilinx XC95108 CPLD
• 12 Green LED Indicators
• 2x 32kx8 SRAM
• 2x 32kx8 Rom
• MAX 690 Supervisor Chip
• Serial Driver
• 5V Power Supply

I was tired of getting plain RSS feeds from deviantART, so I made the first ever deviantART Google gadget that displays thumbnails instead of RSS feeds. It integrates onto your iGoogle homepage or personal website and shows the most popular pieces of art for the day. I was surprised no one had done this yet since its fairly simple to do.

I had the oppertunity to take the Microprocessors class here at LeTourneau and went through the process of designing the schematic for a microcomputer. I designed the circuits connecting each of the chips, data-buses, ports, and power sources.  The harder part was making the PCB schematic because i had to model the dimensions of every port and chip that would be on the bord, then route the circuit paths around all of it.  I’ll be doing this more extensively including writing software for a new microcomputer I’ll design in Microcomputer Design class.

I wrote a python program to output the computer name that is accessing a system’s samba shares. It also can give the names of all the files locked by samba. I integrated this into a SuperKaramba system monitor to see what shares people access. Here is the simple version of my parse string. The main parse I’m using is long and mostly unreadable.

I found this in the NewYork Times. Paula Scher’s Diagram of a Blog. It works for forums too.

I really like the User Agent Switcher use it quite often. It allows Firefox to fake what type of browser it actually is, and what operating system I’m using. For example, some yahoo features only work with IE unless you just pretend you have IE with the User Agent Switcher. The page isn’t blocked for incompatibility anymore and it displays fine in Firefox anyway.

The Locale Switcher will fake what country you are from. Some websites restrict where users can view their sites from and this is handy to get around that.

I’m using the coolcode plugin to highlight my syntax, unfortunately the documentation is in Chinese but it works great! For example:

Use coolcode like this, just remove the extra spaces in the tags:

[ coolcode lang="java" ]
System.out.println(“hi”);
[ / coolcode]

Just take out the spacing next to the brackets in your wordpress post to highlight your code. I found this thanks to codex.wordpress.org.

A simple python script I wrote to interact with web servers. It’s a hopefully easy to follow example of how to use the telnetlib in python.

Read the rest of this entry »

When I modeled the ECC walker, it looked like the carriage might spin around from the force of the cannons firing. So I added a back leg that hopefully will add some stability making this walker seem a little more realistic.

I have several thousand photos on my computer and I often back them up and copy them to other computers. Then copy them back after I modified the collection. So much for synchronization! This program will help people find any duplicate images even after they are resized or changed slightly. They can search by metadata which includes camera type, shutter speed, and many more options or they can search by visual similarity by supplying an image. Then, it will allow users to do basic file operations such as move or delete the duplicates after the search. Maybe this will help clean up some of the digital camera clutter and save space.

This was originally a project for software systems, but now it doesn’t really fit in the scope of the class because it would not be logical to make it a web app.  My Software Systems team will probably develop some of the backend and I want to continue to develop this on my own. In the future, I might expand it to music and other file types. I’m looking forward to using the new Qt features so I can make it a windows compatible application as well.