Terminal 28

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...

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...

Hey all. Hope you enjoyed the last post. This post deals with LUFA , the lightweight USB framework for AVRs, which is a...framework...for building USB devices using USB-capable AVR chips. I first came across LUFA a year or two ago when researching doing just that. Back then, I used AVR Studio 4.x, and getting LUFA to compile was no mean task. I have no idea how I managed. Anyone who's had to use LUFA in the past will testify. Its a great project in itself..compiling and using it seems to have a bit of a learning curve though. However, Atmel have since updated their IDE and its bigger and meaner than ever before..enter Atmel Studio! The most current version is Atmel Studio 6.1, which is built on a VS2010 shell. Essentially this means it looks alot like VS2010, and has quite a number of similiarities to it. One of them is the use of extensions. Dean Camera, the creator of LUFA, recently released an extension for AS6.1 which greatly simplifies using LUFA. You still need to know a...

Hey all. Tons of apologies for the silence. I've been extremely busy with the said Industrial Attachment. Apparently real-life work takes it out of you. I hope you've all been doing well, and things have been going great on your various ends of the world. Today I'm going to talk about getting Qt 5.1.0 (latest and greatest at the time of this writing) working with Signal11's HIDAPI , a cross-platform wrapper library for communicating with HID devices. This is particularly useful to me, on account of the fact that I happen to own a Teensy 2.0 which lets me run LUFA , a USB framework for AVR Microcontrollers which simplifies (greatly, let me tell you) the process of building custom USB devices. A year or so ago I happened to do just that: a custom HID device I could control from a PC with custom software written in C# using this library. However, its immediately apparent that such a program could only ever run on Windows. What if I needed to make it cross-platform? A...

Hey all...some...anybody. Once again, sorry for the silence. But I have some..good news. I've now finished my 400L First (and only, thankfully) semester exams, and so for the next six months I'm free as a bird  going to be on Industrial Attachment. Hopefully that'll give me enough time to work on my personal projects and naturally learn a thing or two, while keeping you abreast of what will be cooking. Perhaps I'll return in a week or two. Till then, don't hold your breath :-P M.

Heyy. Its been a while..six months, perhaps? Sorry I've been gone. There's been a crapload of work to do, both in school and out, and I guess I just got caught up. I'll be back soon though, maybe in a month, maybe sooner. And then I'll explain everything. Hang in there!

Hey all. So, another hectic week of tests but its been pretty okay..not too much sweat :-) So, preparations for Engineering Week are underway...magazine launch, customized tee-shirts and Auditions for the exhibition projects. And I hear I'm to be a judge! But only if I behave.. Like before, categories include software, embedded systems, game design and pretty much anything that sounds remotely techy. I'm actually looking forward to this. I'm pretty sure we're going to see some really wild projects. Will you keep you posted as events unfold. Meanwhile, I'm still waiting for comments regarding the Intro to AVRs series. Just drop a line (and leave your email address) in the comments and I'll email it to you. And as promised, here's what we need to begin speech recognition in C#.NET 4.0 (should work from dotNet Framework 3.5 I think): A computer running Visual C# Express 2010 or Visual Studio 2010 A working microphone (the integrated mic array on most ...