The Morning After..

Hi all.
Excuse the long delay between posts. Its been a rather hectic week here at the DEE (tests all over the place :-x). Its still a busy set of weeks, but I missed my computer so much we're having a fun afternoon together ;-)
If I recall correctly, I said something about talking about Microcontrollers and things related to them.
Starting out roughly three years ago was a very sucky experience-at first. There never seemed to be one guide to understanding everything you needed to know. Hence three years later, I began to pen a small piece on AVRs, hoping to ease the process for anyone interested. There are two of them, but I'm going to upload only one. It needs lots of work but with your help and comments I'm sure we can get it off the ground. If you like it enough, I'll post the other and hopefully subsequent pieces. Although due to limitations on Blogspot, you'll need to drop a line in the comments so I can get it across to you. I'll see if I can get hosting during the week though.
And yeah, 'fore I forget, our Engineering week is coming up and there's been an open invitation for students to give a talk. I want to, just for kicks. Thinking of a Bluetooth/WiFi enabled thing possibly controlled from Android, or Voice Recognition with C#.NET, or Object/Face tracking. Any ideas?
I've also been working with a really nifty fingerprint module. Never really been into biometrics but its pretty neat. I wrote a small program in C# to communicate with it. May possibly upload source code if anyone wants it (Ps: The fingerprint module is based around an FPM10A chipset-there are several others, apparently). Hopefully if there's time I'll write a small guide on that. And, a guide to using Speech Recognition in C# (its actually really easy :-) )
Will keep you posted on the Engineering week proceedings, me hearties!
Ps: This post is named weird, I know. But I like it like that :-P

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Bitbanging SPI on the Raspberry Pi (via spi-gpio)

Image
Hello all and happy holidays to everyone! I’m taking a break off work for the holidays so I have a little bit of time on my hands. I will therefore regale you with tales of my exploits! From my last post, I talked about the somewhat “edge” case where you’d want to add (cheap) Ethernet to a Raspberry Pi, probably the A+ or Zero as the case may be. I haven’t figured out the fixed MAC thing just yet, but I’m working on it. Anyways, after some time, another edge-edge case came to me: The ENC28J60 takes up the only SPI peripheral available on the Pi, so what if you needed to use both the ENC28J60 AND some other SPI device? The Pi’s SPI peripheral has two chip selects, so it is theoretically possible to use the exact same bus while using the first chip select for the ENC28J60 (which it uses by default) and using the second chip select for the other device. However, it goes without saying that network communications require some serious computing firepower so it might cause a bit of a perfo
Read more

Getting Started with Logic Analyzers and Pulseview

Image
Hey all, Been a while. Hope you’ve been up to no good, hm? A couple of days ago, I had to do some low-level I2C work on a bare-metal ATMega328P. Digging out the datasheet, I cobbled a simple I2C driver together, the purpose of which was to permit me write a driver for the particular peripheral which would call the lower-level functions the driver provided (i.e things like i2c_start(), i2c_stop(), i2c_address(), etc etc). When I finished the I2C driver, I tested it out with an MMA8452Q I had lying about and it seemed to work just fine. Believing everything to be dandy, I went ahead and wrote the peripheral driver for the component I was working with. And that was when the funny stuff started. To cut that long story short, it wouldn’t work right when deployed to the hardware. At all. I was in a bit of a bind – the code looked great, no errors no nothing, so it was time to look at the hardware/wire-level end of things. Logic analyzers (in my limited understanding) are tools/instrume
Read more

Enabling SPI1 on the Raspberry Pi B+/Zero/2/3

Image
Me hearties, Let us plunder and pil.. Sorry, wrong blog. Ahem. Hey all, Its been a while. Been busy at work as usual, and haven’t really had much time to write much. As penance, I will post not one but two updates! This particular post is in relation to Raspberry Pi users specifically. I had earlier talked about the vagaries involved in emulating SPI over GPIO in order to get an additional SPI peripheral. It was a moderately involved process, but the rewards were great With the most recent release of the Raspbian Jessie distribution (2016-05-10), a number of improvements have been made to both the desktop parts and the “under-the-hood” parts, perhaps most significantly the kernel. This new release uses Kernel version 4.4, which now adds the ability to use the second hardware SPI peripheral, SPI1, on the Raspberry Pi. This is only available to devices with the 40-pin header (as seen from the title of this post) so users of the original model A and B will probably need to turn to
Read more