THE BATTLE STATION
My home study (aka The Battle Station) is where I have a MINT Linux based triple head PC with three 24″ BENQ monitors & two mice, a regular optical plus a trackball for PCB work. This is were the majority of my software development takes place. Tools include:
- Qt Creator for C++ cross platform & mobile development.
- Eclipse configured for Tomcat Java Servlet development.
- MPLAB & Visual Studio Code for embedded development.
- Quartus, iceStudio & USB-Blaster for FPGA development.
- KiCAD for circuit schematic capture & PCB design.
- A WIN10 virtual machine for all things Windows.
- Arduino EDI for a bit of fun!
The name? A friend of mine coined it because the wall of monitors reminded him of some kind of mission control, I like the name as its where most of my coding battles & conquests happen.
THE ELECTRONICS BENCH
Most of the work I do in this space is digital electronics either for hobby or to support my paid work. I hold a Ham Radio licence so there is an element of analogue work including up at R.F.
The bench has been built over a period of time to suit my needs and my love of retro hardware. The kit includes 3 ‘scopes (two analogue and one digital). A 3GHz spectrum analyser that I bought at a price I still can’t believe, and there are various meters, counters, power supplies plus an array of device programmers.
Oh, and I have what I call “the ‘ol boys’. To be clear, I love Marconi hardware, and I’m proud to own a 2019A signal generator, a 2305 modulation meter and xxx 200Mhz counter. They only come out when I do the Ham Radio stuff. I’ve re-capped them and they make me smile every time I switch them on.
This space, and the studio, are in a large summer house at the end of my garden, it is a great place to work.
How big is the summer house? Internally, it is about 14 by 28 feet, so I make that about 390 square feet.
THE WORKSHOP (GARAGE)
My garage has become an odd mix of a metalworking and woodworking shop. You will find a micro milling machine sitting next to a chop saw (although that has a multi-material blade). There is a really old metal lathe and next to that a table saw with a 12″ blade, but to be honest, that is a bit too big for the work I do.
I have a compressed air line running around the space which includes a retractable hose so I can do work out on the drive or in the garden with air tools.
This space is a bit cluttered currently, mostly because there is a 1970’s pinball machine crated up waiting to be restored as well as an upright piano waiting to go down to the studio.
THE AUDIO/VIDEO STUDIO
Sharing the summer house with ‘The Bench’, the studio is made up of two rooms. The control room is equipped with a Linux based DAW that I use for A/V recording and editing. The DAW has two Delta 1010 sound cards & Behringer control surfaces (with cool motorised faders) these are all hooked to the fantastic Ardour Open Source software. There is an acoustically damped sound room (booth) with microphones and for the 80’s feel, its home to my Yamaha DX7 synth.
I have a 19″ rack in the control room for patching & retro effects units. This rack also holds my local NAS storage hardware which I backup up to Crashplan from Code42.
The DAW also has most of my development tools so I can create code from there too!