So you’ve got an FT90x–a cool IC that lets you behave as both a USB device and USB host–and you’ve coded for it using the sweet GCC/Eclipse toolchain. Thing is, now you want to burn your shiny new firmware but you planned to use a mikroe mikroprog for FT90x to do the job only to…

Read more

It was already sizable, but then it just kept getting bigger and bigger… The long awaited update to druid4arduino is finally on its way–it’s currently awaiting publishing in the app store–but it took a whole lot longer than expected, in part because of the enormous endeavour it morphed into along the way. It began with…

Read more

The next version of druid4arduino is ready and I think it’ll be awesome! I’ll be posting updates here, and there’s a dedicated project site in the works.  Some parts of druid4arduino have yet to be implemented in the newer version, but the changes make it worthwhile anyway, and those functions will be implemented in future…

Read more

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…

Read more

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…

Read more

Kicad is an cross-platform, open source, electronics design suite.  I’d toyed with it in the past, but had never made it to actually designing real projects with it until recently.  Here, I’ll go over my experience and initial impressions, and provide a few pointers and resources for anyone curious about trying it out.  We’ll tour…

Read more

The vagaries of life and a few real clients got in the way of druid2 development until recently.  I was all set to get going when the angry and fickle 4-legged god I live with changed my plans a bit… Thanks, kittie.  I’d been thinking of a new laptop anyway and managed to get one…

Read more

Hallo all… An updated, more powerful and much improved versions of druid and SerialUI are on their way in the coming weeks.  I’m looking for a few people who’d be willing to act as beta testers for the new versions–the more hardware, and platforms, you have access to, the better but any supported combination should…

Read more

As promised, the NanoKeys library has been made public and is now available on it’s own project page! One noteworthy change is a modification to the key send/key clear algorithm that allows for much quicker transmission of key strokes and a snappier user experience.  Here’s a short clip of the new functionality in action: And…

Read more

I’m finishing up the docs for NanoKeys, a small BLE Nano (and probably any mbed BLE API supported devices) library that gives you an easy way to create a bluetooth low energy keyboard that you can pair with using any mobile device. The project page, code and documentation will be up shortly (in the projects…

Read more