DIY Star Realms Counters
If you have ever played Star Realms before you may have noticed the interesting card counting system. In most cases, this system works well. However, after a beer or two results start to vary. I made some counter tokens for my set which worked surprisingly well. Counters only require average human maths. If you have access […]Read More »Vector Spherical Harmonic Python Tools for FEKO
I recently found myself in a situation where I needed to simulate many antenna configurations while storing all of their far-field patterns. The far-field patterns themselves are described on a spherical grid using, in my case, 26×101 points. That is more than 2000 data points per frequency. If you are simulating 60 frequency points, this […]Read More »FEKO Parameter Sweep Lua Script
Part of my work at the Cavendish Laboratory involves optimisation of the SKA Low aperture array antenna. As a result, a substantial amount of FEKO gets used. During my efforts, I created a script that allows for parameter sweeps over a parameterised FEKO model over an arbitrary number of input dimensions. Using a Lua scripting […]Read More »Measuring and Simulating our Cheap Dielectric Probes
As a follow up to my previous post, I built some simple SMA dielectric probes using PCB edge mount connectors. The probe interface surface is rather rough and the short was made using some soldered copper tape. This is definitely not the ideal set of probes. Nevertheless, I was curious how the probe would compare […]Read More »GUI Text Box in Terminal
Having a GUI in the terminal would be ”interesting”. Here is some code to display a box with a title and content. Its far from a GUI, but its a start. This idea might just be used in my autonomous buoy project for displaying telemetry data. from colorama import Fore, Back, Style def gen_text_box(title, size_x, […]Read More »Dielectric Permittivity using a Coaxial Probe
Adding dielectric materials to electromagnetic simulations can be a pain if the correct dielectric properties are not known. To solve this I decided to build a poor-mans dielectric probe. The probe consists of a coaxial interface that is placed flush with a material under test. From a single reflection measurement of your material and a […]Read More »Python in Eclipse
A short brief walk-through on setting up a python environment in Eclipse with the necessary libraries. Note that all installers need to be of the same architecture namely 32bit or 64bit. This walktrhough will focus on the 64bit case. 1. Install the latest java runtime environment 2. Install the latest python distribution 3. Install the […]Read More »My 3D Printer
I decided it would be a good idea for our lab, and for me, to have a 3D printer at our hands. After some consideration, I ordered a kit from a local supplier DIY Electronics whom I would gladly recommend. The kit, a relatively new design, is named a Prusa i3. Up to now, after […]Read More »SCADA for Windtunnel Project
This project was done by myself for a company called TFDesign, the software is in phase 1 at the moment and is capable of reading data from a Siemens PLC, processing the data with some thermodynamic libraries and finally plotting the data on a psychometric and pressure-enthalpy graph. The software has extra functionality such as […]Read More »Heat Exchange Calculator
This is a project I did for a company called TFDesign. The software is used to calculate certain parameters of a Heat Exchanger given certain specifications. The calculation runs over a given amount of heat exchanger rows to help the user determine the optimum design. The project was written in java to enable its use over multiple platforms. […]Read More »