Over the last few months I’ve been working on building a pico balloon payload for the university society I’ve been president of, TinkerSoc. This has been my first foray into designing PCBs and writing code for (just) the ATMega328PU, so it’s taken a little while! For communications, I decided LoRa (the 433MHz version, and not to be confused with LoRaWAN - this is raw LoRa) would be the best choice - it’s in the licence free ISM band, modules are relatively cheap and it has great range.

I got a SCSI2SD v5 board the other day for a Macintosh Quadra 700 as the original hard drive had finally died. Unfortunately this machine (at the moment) has basically no I/O - the floppy drive is not functioning properly and I do have a SCSI CD drive, but not SCSI1. So… I needed a way to install Mac OS 8 without using the floppy or CD drive. I decided to use the SD card as both the HDD and the installation media.

TAPAS is the Timepix Analysis Platform at School and is a web platform I’ve been developing over the last couple of years for analysing radiation data from CERN’s Timepix detectors. I originally developed it for my Extended Project Qualification but now have extended it massively. TAPAS is now used by many schools and organisations around the country - and is ready for over 300 schools and their students to analyse scientific data.

Since getting access to the UK Grid, I’ve been starting to write some of my own software to run on it. Initially, I have been working on a simple analysis system, using lucid-utils for actual analysis, to run through a folder of XYC frames and output a CSV file that is similar to that of what TAPAS (https://starserver.thelangton.org.uk/tapas) produces - but designed for a much larger scale. The system uses Ganga to easily submit jobs to the GridPP DIRAC instance, requiring you to only enter a ZIP path and a couple of other options.