Monthly Archives: February 2017

Creating a sensor or peripheral with an SPI (slave) interface

Designed to interact with a 16-bit I/O expander, the firmware was ready for testing.  Though I was still waiting on parts, I wanted to make sure it would all work as expected.  What’s an impatient developer to do?  Create his own SPI slave to replace the missing part, of course! If you’ve gotten anywhere beyond…

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Real world Kicad project postmortem and more tips

As a follow-up to my intro/tutorial, I’ll go over a few more lessons learned using Kicad including some tips that should be of help to anyone embarking on a similar journey. The power module project was selected for a first adventure using Kicad as it was relatively small while being non-trivial.  The circuit holds around…

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A challenge for “hackers”

After encountering a bug and finally finding a work-around, I documented the circumstances and fix and posted it here.  A day later, I found that the page had been defaced and all that remained was a message to the effect of “HACKED BY TINYNUTS“. It turns out, the version of WordPress used on the site…

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Mystery black window workaround: Druid back in development

Months ago, I was forced to get a new laptop (thanksalot, kitty!) which uses an Intel HD Graphics 520 graphics card.  When I got around to working on druid4arduino I hit a mystery bug with the display, as described previously. In short, a nice black window that wouldn’t display anything but the void.  Development was…

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