Installing meep under Windows

I have decided to start some FDTD calculations or at least to learn how to calculate this. In order to omit all the problems with developing my own algorithms I have decided to search for a (preferably python) library doing FDTD stuff and found meep. The only problem with that is that it needs Linux and so I decided to use Cygwin instead. I was using this tutorial with some minor differences.

VMEBus crate - why not.

Recently I have acquired an VME CPU-Card and thought about testing it somehow. As after powering it up the card seemed to be alive I have decided to give it a shot and try to put together an VME crate.

For that I have used an old Eurorack that I have got from some phone central (or some similar telecommunications equipment). After checking that the size of the crate is standard I bought an backplane from e-bay for... 1 Euro (plus 12 for shipping, but that's not the case). Unfortunately only this backplanes are so cheap, regular VME equipment is pricey as hell.

So i have started from taking apart the old backplane:

And putting the new one:

Sorry for the mess. You can see that here the backplane is already in position, and connected to a power supply (it takes 5 V and +/- 12 V). The PSU is also taken from the same equipment that the crate is.

This (above) is the CPU card (on the left) with the display controller removed, and the display controller itself (on the right). The CPU Card is an Pentium 120 MHz with 64 MB RAM equipped with Universe Tundra VMEBus controller. Fortunately there are plenty of drivers for this PCItoVME bridge. The cards equipment covers a wide range of peripherals - starting from two serial and one parallel port, going through VGA, Ethernet and finishing with SCSI-II. The card has two PCI-compatible slots, one of which is occupied by the display controller. It also has an PC/104, ISA compatible socket. The SCSI, together with the FDD connector are on the P2 connector of the VMEBus, so I will have to make a special connector going from the P2 on the backside of the backplane  to the SCSI harddrive. As far as I have tested the CPU-card is fully functional so after I get some free time I will try to connect an SCSI HDD to this setup and install some Linux maybe. After that I plan to go back to few years ago when I was studying and try to re-learn VHDL in order to make some VME cards for this setup

Linux Box, some serial buisness.

Yesterday I managed to get sme spare time to get a new computer up and running. This one is planned to be a Linux Box with various uses (for now it has one). The computer itself looks rather harmfull and compact: 

Inside there is a industrial motherboard in PICMG 1.3 standard with an backplane for 6 PCI-X cards. On the card - double Xeon 2,8 GHz and 1GB of ECC DDRAM. Sounds like enough for most of the things that I could be capable of imagining to do on such machine. Also I crammed an SCSI controller that will be mostly used to interface to 50pin disks that I use for the Amiga (as far as I know Linux is capable of mounting FFS and/or OFS file systems). As for software I went with Ubuntu Linux - probably out of laziness (as I had it on some Live CD). I've downloaded the newest distribution of the Ubuntu Server and just installed it on this machine. As the ethernet connection is not running on this machine (dunno' why, have to check it) I haven't installed anything more.

So, let's try to interface with the Amiga. I have connected both computers with a Nullmodem (a standard one, not some of the fancy 'ADF-transfer kits', that people are selling (price of a nullmodem x 10) and in fact these ARE normal nullmodems). So I chose some example file on my DH0, and typed in on the screen to see its content. After that I started the Linux Box and made it to start listening to the serial port (ttyS0):

cat /dev/ttyS0

This wat you will see it on the display, but yoy can redirect it to a file by using the >> {your file}. Then, on Amiga, I have sent the file over a serial:

type {your file} to ser:







As you can see - it works. It works accidentally as I have not done anything to set the serial port parameters, both computers are working in the default settings. I have to install setserial on the Linux Box to be able to configure the serial port, and in order to do that I have to have an internet connection on it up and running, so I guess it's the closest thing that I will be doing.