Quozl's Open Source

Quozl works in outback Australia as a firmware and test engineer for a non-profit in Miami that makes laptops for children, and for a business as a systems administrator.

Quozl worked on Open Firmware (IEEE 1275-1994), which uses the Forth programming language. For many years Quozl maintained the version that is used on the One Laptop per Child computers, the most complete and extensive version ever.

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Embedded.fm on Telescope

Social
Quozl was interviewed on embedded.fm about working at a telescope:

Errata:

  • 400 fibres is actually 200 targets per plate,
  • satellite solar panel glinting is in the south east before dawn,
  • OpenVMS was used in other roles, not the telescope control system,
(8 January 2026)

Fluke PTi120 Calibrating

Electronics
Quozl found his Fluke PTi120 thermal imager would pause to calibrate every few seconds. Often this got in the way of measurements.

A fix was to use adb shell to set boolean auto_shutter_switch to false in the file /data/data/com.guide.pocket.main.pocketmeasure/shared_prefs/com_guide_pocketmeasure_expert_settings.xml, if necessary by adding it, and then rebooting.

However, measurements after a while are affected by temperature changes and another recalibration will be needed; by rebooting as there's no user interface for the feature.

(22 July 2025)

C Forth for PlatformIO

Forth Programming
Quozl brought up C Forth on PlatformIO for these target boards;
  • Raspberry Pi Pico RP2040,
  • Adafruit Feather M0,
  • Teensy 3.1, 3.2, 3.5, 3.6, and 4.0,
  • Espressif ESP32.
C Forth is a Forth language environment optimised for embedded use in semi-constrained systems such as System-on-Chip processors.

See Mitch Bradley's C Forth repository on GitHub.

(19 November 2022)

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quozl@us.netrek.org