Author Archive for Darren Yates

Linuxs distros and RDBMS Labs test for ITNews

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After some long hours, I’ve just completed my first labs test story for Australian business tech news website itnews, looking at Linux distros and relational database management systems (RDBMSs) – MySQL and MariaDB, in particular.
All the major Linux server distros feature at least one DBMS, but working out which is the best combination would obviously take some serious time testing (hint: it does!), so I’ve taken the three most popular distros – CentOS 7.0, Debian 7.6.0 and Ubuntu Server… Read more

Enigma Cipher Machine story up at apcmag

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The Arduino Uno microcontroller is a pretty impressive little number – so impressive, in fact, you can turn it into a fully-working Enigma Cipher Machine.
I know I’ve been banging on about this project a little lately, but I was pretty damn chuffed when it started working (it’s one of the most complicated pieces of code I’ve had the pleasure of putting together!).
Now, the full story has now gone up on the APC magazine website.
What’s cool about it… Read more

Software for the Arduino Enigma Cipher Machine

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In the current August 2014 issue of APC Magazine, I’ve written about a functional-replica of an Enigma Cipher Machine that I’ve designed and built using an Arduino Uno microcontroller board.
But if you’re looking for the software, it’s on the APC magazine website but at http://apcmag.com/magstuff in the August 2014 section.
Hopefully, it will be transferred to the regular Arduino page (http://apcmag.com/arduino.htm) page shortly.
Sorry for the confusion.
The Arduino Enigma displays everything on a 16×2-LCD module shield and accepts… Read more

Turn an Arduino Uno into a digital audio recorder

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One of the great things about Atmel’s ATMEGA328P microcontroller that powers the Arduino Uno boards is the sheer versatility of the chip. It might only clock in at 16MHz and process data in 8-bit chunks, but it has so many practical real-world interface options that helps it punch well above its weight.
My favourite part of the chip is the ADC or ‘analog to digital converter’. By rights, it’s only a 10-bit ADC and only has a rated sample rate… Read more

How to calculate log2 without the real function

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In computer science, being able to count in binary is pretty much a prerequisite. So too is being able to quickly work out the decimal range of a binary number by just knowing its length in bits. For example, an 8-bit number has 256 levels; a 10-bit number 1024; a 16-bit number 65536.
But working back the other way – this is, finding the number of bits based on the number of levels – is a bit harder. Calculators have a… Read more