iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Nathan Dane @nmsni.co.uk · 08/10/2026

Red lights spell danger - or in this instance 'input fail', which is even worse.

Nathan Dane @nmsni.co.uk · 06/10/2026

Found this rather homebrew looking "test sig gen". Produces bars with static caption as shown. Last test sticker from 1996. (what's that, 30 years!?)

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Nathan Dane @nmsni.co.uk · 26/09/2026

Ahhh, buttons and blinky lights. No LCDs. Perfection.

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Nathan Dane @nmsni.co.uk · 26/09/2026

This is a different FPGA Experimenter card from the one you saw before. This one doesn't have an SDI Deserialiser and as such commits fewer crimes against high speed digits. Instead it has an SPI, which copes up to about 80mbps before it gets (very) upset...

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Nathan Dane @nmsni.co.uk · 26/09/2026

I put together a demo with an ESP32 writing text (milliseconds since startup) to my FPGA. So I've sort of made a graphics card...? The counting up reminds me the BIOS RAM test you used to see on PCs.

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Nathan Dane @nmsni.co.uk · 24/09/2026

Quad height teletext isn't real, it can't hurt you Quad height teletext:

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Nathan Dane @nmsni.co.uk · 24/09/2026

Ah, did that involve the SPNs? I've seen reports from an STL that came straight out of one of these.

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Nathan Dane @nmsni.co.uk · 14/09/2026

Latest creation burns in audio meters, derived from SDI embedded channels.

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Nathan Dane @nmsni.co.uk · 14/09/2026

Meanwhile at NMS HQ, heinous crimes against high speed digital electronics are being committed.

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Nathan Dane @nmsni.co.uk · 05/09/2026

FPGA based text overlay. Bonus points to those who guess who's post I copied the test text from, for no particular reason.

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Nathan Dane @nmsni.co.uk · 03/09/2026

important to keep an eye on all the important things...

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Nathan Dane @nmsni.co.uk · 02/09/2026

Messy rack pics again but this is the FPGA taking SDI, creating a 'scope view & outputting as PAL for the left monitor, with the right showing a preview. You can see the FPGA card in the frame, towards the middle with the front entry BNC. Ignore the dangly networks they are necessary & unmovable..

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Nathan Dane @nmsni.co.uk · 24/08/2026

The web viewer is now switched back to the "Worldwide" feed, which allows one to access all the regional news pages. nmsceefax.co.uk

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Nathan Dane @nmsni.co.uk · 23/08/2026

They multipliest. Crazy how cheap these can be acquired without PSUs. Is the overlap of "people who need a vision mixer" and "people who can solder a plug onto a PSU" really so small?

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Nathan Dane @nmsni.co.uk · 21/08/2026

iPlayer asking me, twice, if I've got a TV license - when I'm signing in from *inside the BBC* - will never not be funny

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Nathan Dane @nmsni.co.uk · 21/08/2026

I dunno about you but I feel like these headlines are wildly out of order. And it isn't a problem with my code.

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Nathan Dane @nmsni.co.uk · 18/08/2026

Comparing my rasteriser to a real scope. Mine isn't doing the clever maths required to low-pass the samples to Nyquist and keep them sine-looking. Still cool though...

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Nathan Dane @nmsni.co.uk · 16/08/2026

OK fine, fine, I couldn't let it rest - here are the dots joined up in the appropriate fashion.

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Nathan Dane @nmsni.co.uk · 16/08/2026

You can of course also show a normal outline instead of a filled waveform, but I haven't "joined up the dots" yet.

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Nathan Dane @nmsni.co.uk · 16/08/2026

Tonight's FPGA experiment is an SDI scope. This is the luma bit of a staircase. The grey line shows what line in the picture is presently selected.

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Nathan Dane @nmsni.co.uk · 14/08/2026

NMS Master Control? 😆

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Nathan Dane @nmsni.co.uk · 13/08/2026

Results will appear on Ceefax as we receive them

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Nathan Dane @nmsni.co.uk · 13/08/2026

Pretty cool live shot into Newsline to finish also.

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Nathan Dane @nmsni.co.uk · 11/08/2026

finally some good news:

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Nathan Dane @nmsni.co.uk · 10/08/2026

YouTube are perpetually upset that I send them Decent Quality streams for PFC Frankly they're lucky I don't do it properly and send them a nice 4FSC PAL feed at 170 odd mbit/s, or whatever it was...

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Nathan Dane @nmsni.co.uk · 02/08/2026

...I can literally see the Green Glow from my bedroom. LEDs are out of hand, this was a mistake. 🤣

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Nathan Dane @nmsni.co.uk · 02/08/2026

Have stuck the FPGA Video Experimenter Card in the crate for a bit. It's taking serial in, drawing circles on the live video, and outputting as analogue. Already identified a few more issues that will need to be rectified in upcoming versions. Not least that the LEDs on the board are too bright.

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Nathan Dane @nmsni.co.uk · 30/07/2026

nmsceefax.co.uk#id=WyJubXMtY...

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Nathan Dane @nmsni.co.uk · 29/07/2026

There are precisely two VECs in the entire world right now. However... If you've ever wanted to learn about FPGAs and realtime video processing... That population could increase...

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Nathan Dane @nmsni.co.uk · 29/07/2026

The Video Experimenter Card continues to become more ugly - but also continues to yield promising results, exciting rabbit holes, and additions to the infinite Projects List.

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Nathan Dane @nmsni.co.uk · 27/07/2026

Very quick demo of a Frozen Picture Alarm I am developing with my FPGA experimenter board. It performs a running average of the Luma and compares it with previous fields. If it hasn't changed enough it will increment the green bar. Once full this can give an alarm, for example.

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Nathan Dane @nmsni.co.uk · 25/07/2026

from the datasheet for the SAA5244, used in my in-vision decoder. Weirdly they refer to it as row 25, despite using the correct numbering from zero, like sane people, everywhere else in the datasheet. So not sure if this was a typo. But I did test this years ago and that's what it does.

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Nathan Dane @nmsni.co.uk · 14/07/2026

Isn't this crazy. 5000+ views on Pages From Ceefax in just the past 48 hours. I wonder how many watch "This Is BBC Two" these nights...

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Nathan Dane @nmsni.co.uk · 14/07/2026

My latest addition to the FPGA Video Bodge Board is an SDI Deserialiser. Haven't done anything terribly exciting just yet but it does mean one can draw stuff onto live video and output as analogue, etc. Next I'll have to design a Serialiser!

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Nathan Dane @nmsni.co.uk · 13/07/2026

Seeing record-breaking (for me) audiences on PFC this past few days. www.youtube.com/@AvroVulcanX...

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Nathan Dane @nmsni.co.uk · 27/06/2026

Got R4LW on*, and Ceefax in the background. I know what you're thinking, but sadly I had a word with someone at Ofcom and they strongly recommended I not recreate 198KHz.

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Nathan Dane @nmsni.co.uk · 22/06/2026

Might I humbly suggest these enormous 16x16 parallel multipliers. 64pin DIPs. 40pins on the right for scale.

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