After a long bout of "Who can make the best chiminea" between a friend and myself, I finally came up wth the washing machine drum idea. I soon found an old broken machine and went to work removing the drum. 

I was unable to get all of the elements off so the first trial burn had to commence with the machines aluminum drive pulley still attached to the drum. During this burn I noted that the aluminum melted with the heat of the chiminea, and so, the washing machine foundry was born.

Below are some pictures of the results:

As part of my Masters we are doing a Mixed Signal Processing module where we are using the C8051F120 microcontroller to process basic mixed signal functions. In the labs we have been given the C8051F120DK development kit from Silicon Labs which includes the Silicon Labs IDE. Developing with this on Linux was a real pain since I had to run the IDE through a Windows XP VirtualBox install, and that wouldn't do!

I've just started an MSc in Digital Systems Enginnering at the University of Portsmouth...

It's a 3 year part-time program with the 3rd years being dedicated to my Masters thesis.

Woop woop, exciting times! 

Just some photos of my TQ6410 embedded ARM board, touchscreen LCD and custom alu case. 

This is the same board that was used in my Final year BEng project, more infomation can be found here.

System specification

Processor:
Samsung S3C6410 feat. ARM 11 core, up to 667MHz

Memory:
128MB Mobile DDR SDRAM, 266MHz

 
256MB NAND Flash

 
2MB NOR Flash

Operating system:
Linux custom built system based on uClibc and Busybox