256Mb doesn’t do what it used to…
So, this last week I got an email from rackspace saying that my server was thrashing the hard drives and lowering performance of everyone else on that same machine. In consequence, they had rebooted my...
View ArticleDatabase Abstraction in Python
As I was recently working on trying out the Flask web framework for Python, I ended up wanting to access my MySQL database. Recently at work I have been using entity framework and I have gotten quite...
View ArticleLessons in game design…in a car!
For the greater part of this week I have been trapped in a car driving across the United States for my sister’s wedding. Of course, I had my trusty netbook with me and so I decided to do some...
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Raspberry Pi as an AVR Programmer
Introduction Recently, I got my hands on a Raspberry Pi and one of the first things I wanted to do with it was to turn it into my complete AVR development environment. As part of that I wanted to make...
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Pop ‘n Music controller…AVR style
Every time I do one of these bus emulation projects, I tell myself that the next time I do it I will use an oscilloscope or DLA. However, I never actually break down and just buy one. Once more, I have...
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First thoughts on the Teensy 3.1
Wow it has been a while; I have not written since August. I entered a contest of sorts this past week which involves building an autonomous turret which uses an ultrasonic sensor to locate a target...
View ArticleTeensy 3.1 Bare-Metal
Introduction A couple of weeks ago I saw a link on hackaday to an article by Karl Lunt about using the Teensy 3.1 without the Arduino IDE and building for the bare metal. I was very intrigued as the...
View ArticleExtreme Attributed Metadata with Autofac
Introduction If you are anything like me, you love reflection in any programming language. For the last two years or so I have been writing code for work almost exclusively in C# and have found its...
View ArticleA new server
So for the past couple months my server has been going on and off due to the fact that rackspace increased their retirements of swapping and such. I made the swap to Amazon EC2 today and so over the...
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Teensy 3.1 bare metal: Writing a USB driver
One of the things that has intrigued me for the past couple years is making embedded USB devices. It’s an industry standard bus that just about any piece of computing hardware can connect with yet is...
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Writing a preemptive task scheduler for AVR
Wow it has been a while. Between school, work, and another project that I’ve been working on since last October (which, if ultimately successful, I will post here) I haven’t had a lot of time to write...
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Dev boards? Where we’re going we won’t need dev boards…
A complete tutorial for using an STM32 without a dev board Introduction STM32F103C8 Tray from eBay About two years ago I started working with the Teensy 3.1 (which uses a Freescale Kinetis ARM-Cortex...
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Quick-n-dirty data acquisition with a Teensy 3.1
The Problem I am working on a project that involves a Li-Ion battery charger. I’ve never built one of these circuits before and I wanted to test the battery over its entire charge-discharge cycle to...
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The LED Wristwatch: A (more or less) completed project!
About 2009 I saw an article written by Dr. Paul Pounds in which he detailed a pocketwatch he had designed that fit inside a standard pocketwatch case and used LEDs as the dial. While the article has...
View ArticleArranging components in a circle with Kicad
I’ve been using kicad for just about all of my designs for a little over 5 years now. It took a little bit of a learning curve, but I’ve really come to love it, especially with the improvements by CERN...
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Bare metal STM32: Writing a USB driver
A couple years ago I wrote a post about writing a bare metal USB driver for the Teensy 3.1, which uses Freescale Kinetis K20 microcontroller. Over the past couple years I’ve switched over to instead...
View ArticleCross-platform driverless USB: The Human Interface Device
During my LED Wristwatch project, I decided early on that I wanted to do something different with the way my USB stuff was implemented. In the past, I have almost exclusively used libusb to talk to my...
View ArticleBuilding a USB bootloader for an STM32
As my final installment for the posts about my LED Wristwatch project I wanted to write about the self-programming bootloader I made for an STM32L052 and describe how it works. So far it has shown...
View ArticleBootloader for ARM Cortex-M0: No VTOR
In my most recent project I selected an ARM Cortex-M0 microcontroller (the STM32F042). I soon realized that there is a key architectural piece missing from the Cortex-M0 which the M0+ does not have:...
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The IoTree: An internet-connected tree
For this Christmas I decided to do something fun with my Christmas tree: Hook it up to the internet. Visit the IoTree here (available through the 1st week of January 2019):...
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