Early medieval reenactment

As you might rememeber some of my New Year resolutions were not connected with PCs or electronics. One of the things that I wanted to focus on is historical reenactment. Although my early medieval kit is not yet finished I would like to show you couple of old pictures of the textil-part of the whole thing.

The basic set consists of trousers based on the Thorsberg and Damendorf bog finds. Although they are not medieval at all - dated to around IV century - a find from Skjodelhamn resembles this pattern and allows me to claim that this is accurate. The set consists also from two tunics - silk undertunic and a thicker green, wool tunic (unfinished as for now). On the head I have a felt cap and a hood based on the hood found in Skjodelhamn. The hood is made from two layers of wool, one thin for the shell and a thick fluffy layer inside. The belt bag is also made from felt with red felt appliqués and silver silk embroidery. The belt is not period.

For colder weather I have an cloak (half a circle with wooden buttons) or a kaftan made from felt. The kaftan has small glass buttons (hand made) for closing. Good thing about this piece of garment is the fact that this is almost completely waterproof.

This is not everything that I have now for this period. Surely I will post more pictures soon (although I do not know how soon). I have to finish the tunic and belt to have something new. In the mean time I have received period shoes and I'm waiting for some pieces of military equipment.

The photos were made by M. Niedlich

Mysterious hardware, part 2.

Okay, so I had some spare time to tinker with the Analog I/O card. Unfortunatelly I do not have much info now:

• On the DB50 connector on the bracket are signals from/to all the MUXes, this means 32 analog ports. Most probably analog inputs. The rest of the signals on the bracket connector is unknown.
• The card is electrically okay. It did not crash the computer I have inserted it in.
• the adressing uses only 10 bit, from which 7 MSB are to be configured by jumpers. This should help me to talk/listen to ports of the card.

Now this project is going a bit on hold. I have to obtain a motherboard with ISA connector and as powerful as possible (for the sake of convinience). I have locates several like that, so this is matter of time only. The problem is that I do not have any PC that 1) has OS on it, 2) is able to fit the card inside. And also - I would not like to test a '97 card on a '90 PC. It is hard without complicating it like that ;).

Setup for optoelectronic characterization of nanostructures

So I managed finally to put together the setup for optoelectronic characterization of nanostructures, consisting of a wide-field fluorescent microscope that we have at work in the institute and my set of devices, namely the precise ammeter and electrode holders together with two power supplies (one for powering the ammeter, second one for polarizing the sample. Sorry for the low quality of photos, but I have only ma cellphone camera here at the moment.

Electrode holders are placed on a metallic plate (in order to fix them to the microscope using small neodymium magnets). The electrodes are made of sewing needles (cheap, easy to get and with a  sharp tip).

Here is the operator view of the whole setup. On the right there is also an PC that is collecting the data from the CCD camera in the microscope and from the picoammeter, using an National Instruments USB DAQ. On the right, next to the microscope, is the PSU used for polarizing the sample. It is capable of outputting up to 200 W or 40 V, whatever is lower at the current moment.

And here is the side view of the setup with the bug PSU powering the ammeter on the right, the ammeter and USB DAQ behind it. The computer controlling the whole thing is not shown here.

So stay tuned for some preliminary results (as soon as I obtain anything that is worth showing).