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Showing posts from 2014

New Toys!

Hello all, Hope you’ve all been good. Been kinda busy with finals, but yippee, I’m done! Hopefully, that is. I recently stumbled upon the PSoC 4 CY8CKIT - 049 4xxx, which is a $4 development board for Cypress PSoC hardware, specifically the PSoC 4 family (apparently there are PSoC 1, PSoc 3 and PSoc 5 families as well). If you don’t know what a PSoC is, you can find out at Wikipedia. Trust me, their explanation is pretty good. In a nutshell, I was intrigued by the notion of a device like the PSoC, which, rather than relying on the traditional code-centric approach we’ve all come to love/hate (as the case may be), relies on a drag and drop style of development. At compile-time, the top-level design resulting from all that dragging and dropping is converted into code for the PSoC core. The interesting part is that the PSoC is really closer to a mash-up between a microcontroller and an FPGA. Thus, it’s probably more accurate to say that the top-level design is errm…synthesized into

Book Review: Arduino Networking, by Marco Schwartz

Hey all. Been a while. Hope you've all been having fun adventures ;-) I recently got a copy of the book "Arduino Networking" from Packtpub, for review purposes. Its written by Marco Schwartz of http://www.openhomeautomation.net. It contains six chapters. The first is essentially about getting set up. Here you learn about the materials needed, how to connect them and test that they're ready for network/internet based interaction. Chapter Two deals with using the Arduino to send sensor data to a remote server. Both local and internet-based server scenarios are explored. Chapter Three deals with using the Arduino to log sensor data to an SD card, and having it act as a server which serves sensor data to clients. Chapter Four talks about how to control the Arduino over the internet. Chapter Five talks about logging data to the Xively cloud platform, and Chapter Six talks about using the Temboo platform to interact with other online services (Gmail and Google Spreads