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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I do not enjoy dealing with the vagaries of calendar dates and times… Actually, I pretty much hate it. It’s mostly because I have little patience for arbitrary rules and convoluted systems, and anything as old as the notion of date-times is always filled with historical cruft: half-baked rules, a bunch of incompatible, random-looking, bases…

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I’ve recently had to develop an application using the BLE Nano platform. The BLE Nano is a little module built around the Nordic nRF51822 SoC, along with a minimalist set of support components  including an on-board antenna for the bluetooth wireless connection.  The Nordic itself provides all the Bluetooth low energy functionality and hosts your…

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I love the Arduino platform, especially for prototyping, and have been playing with the Atmel ATmega chips for a long while.  Once you’ve designed your project, some of the smaller derivatives (like the Ardweeny I’ve mentioned before) are cheap enough to leave embedded everywhere and, in any case, you can always move from an Arduino…

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SerialUI, the Arduino serial/terminal user interface, and Druid4Arduino, the automatic GUI for SerialUI-enabled devices, have both been updated and are available for download. SerialUI SerialUI has been expanded to include new functionality, the most important of which are: A “user-presence” callback.  You can now specify a function which will be periodically executed while a user…

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Interacting with vehicles can be pretty tough.  Cars are electrically noisy environments and, being powerful and heavy metal machines, a little tricky (read, dangerous) to play with.  Worse, they’re all different!  Even with the advent of the CAN system and standard, manufacturers can be infuriating in their insistance on doing everything in their own particular…

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A while back, I had a project that required high-side switching of a set of pneumatic valves by a microcontroller. Because the loads were inductive (solenoids) and required a good deal more voltage than the microcontroller supply to activate (24V), I needed some kind of middleware between the Arduino and the valves.  I created a…

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VaRGB, a powerful and rather fun bit of code, has gone public and is now available as OSS. VaRGB is an RGB illumination programming library. You tell it how you want your lighting to behave, and it handles all the details of updating red/green/blue values at the right time for you. The library works on…

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As mentioned before, I love me some LEDs and have a particular fondness for the MegaBrites, powerful RGB modules that are easy to chain together.  The only issue I encountered in using the hardware was with SPI support or, more specifically, lack thereof.  On certain Arduino’s, like the very tiny Digispark, there is no hardware…

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  Druid4Arduino–an automatic/configuration-free graphical user interface for Arduino projects–has just been released as free software (under the GPL), with binary programs available for Windows and Linux. This software enables you to provide a GUI for your device or project without having to spend any time programming windows and buttons.  You need only include the SerialUI…

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