No post yesterday, as I was attending a “Designing with Freescale” Tech Day. If you have been reading this blog for a while, you will probably know that I like working with Freescale ARM microcontrollers, particularly with their low cost and surprisingly powerful FRDM range of development boards. For once, I had a day where …
Last week when I met up with some other local makers, there was a box of strange kits on the table, surplus to requirements, offered for anyone who could think of something interesting to make with the bits. I grabbed one, as much for curiosity as anything else, and I have now had a look …
Continue reading ‘What should I do with a free Velleman MK158 kit?’ »
Yesterday I wrote about how I managed to get an “Arduino” (or at least the AVR ATMega328 chip which powers one) attached to and programmed by my Raspberry Pi. However exciting a blinking LED may be, though, it’s not much use if the only way to change its behaviour is to completely re-program the chip. …
This is, after all, supposed to be a blog about Raspberry Pi. With all the stuff about Arduino and Atmel AVR chips, you might think I have wandered off. However, just to prove that Pi and ‘Duino work well together, here’s how I hand-built a board to sit on the Raspberry Pi GPIO pins and …
Last time I used my Bus Pirate I had problems with using it to communicate with a high-speed SPI ADC chip. At the time I abandoned it and moved on to communicating with the chip directly from the Raspberry Pi. In the back of my mind, though, I knew that I really ought to update …
For a few months now I have been involved with the Ipswich Makerspace (formerly Ipswich Hackspace) group. The aim is to find a way to find somewhere permanent where we can set up equipment, make stuff, learn and teach. For now, though, we are limited to meeting from time to time in borrowed premises. Yesterday …
As I mentioned at the end of my previous Arduino post, I want to build my “learning timer” into a stand-alone project, with its own battery and enclosure. While I could just transfer the circuit exactly as it is to some proto board, I thought I’d take the opportunity to see how much more I …
Continue reading ‘Simpler than a Shrimp – Arduino with no crystal’ »
The programming language landscape is always changing, and in my “day job” as a software developer I use a wide range of languages. Over the last year or so I can remember working with Awk, C, C++, Java, JavaScript, Ruby, shell script and SQL. And that’s not counting all the specialist configuration, scripting and data …
Continue reading ‘Installing and using node.js on Raspberry Pi’ »
It’s been a while since I last posted here. It’s the nature of my work that from time to time I have to concentrate on client business at the expense of my own projects. Occasionally, though, I am lucky, and client work coincides with my interests :) Over the last few days I have been …