Operating your Arduino project has never been sweeter.  Version 3 of device druid is out in beta and you can try it out to give a little feedback on what’s awesome and what needs a bit of work.  The new Druid Builder requires no installation, as its now available online, and the client is smoother…

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Building prototypes is fun but can be a huge time sink.  Hunting around on the board–how many 10k resistors are there? where is R15? ugh. Thankfully, Colin O’Flynn created an program to help you while you’re acting as a meatbag pick and place machine.  MeatbagPnP is a python application that takes generated placement files and…

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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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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…

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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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A few hints about squeezing maximum performance out of Raphaël. When you want to generate dynamic SVG images using Javascript, either on a website or within a Cordova-type project on mobile devices, the Raphaël library is pretty sweet.  Raphaël has a nice, clean, API and lets you do pretty much anything graphics-related and it sticks…

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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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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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I happened upon a questionnaire–How did you learn to program?–and chose to take a few minutes to fill it out. Doing so forced me to look back at the years I’ve spent coding, how I got started and the lessons I’ve learned along the way. I ended up spending a good while filling in my…

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