Yesterday I went along to another meeting of the Ipswich Makerspace. This time we were in a larger hall at Holy Trinity Church, just across from the small room we met in last time. We had a few more people turn up, but there’s still plenty of room to grow! This week we had a …
Continue reading ‘A new meeting place for the Ipswich Makerspace’ »
Generic PC components are astonishingly cheap, due mainly to economies of scale and the continuing demand for the newest and greatest. This gives a lot of opportunities for anyone with an interest in tinkering. Take for example the PC power supply unit. Since the introduction of the ATX connection standard about 20 years ago, pretty …
Continue reading ‘Dangerous Prototypes bench power supply’ »
This is exciting. A Raspberry Pi Compute Module Development Kit (a.k.a “Model C”) arrived in the post today. At last I have a “Raspberry Pi” with a decent number of GPIO pins. Just as when the Original Pi launched, there is not much information or third-party support yet. In particular, I’d love to see a …
After several attempts ( blogged here, here, and here ) at getting an Atmel AVR chip on a daughter board to communicate with a Raspberry Pi, I am now excited to report that I have it working. I turned out here were several things wrong: I needed to stop the Raspberry Pi serial port console …
Continue reading ‘Arduino serial communication finally working’ »
Another demo that I saw while at the Freescale Tech Day was also pretty simple, but already moving a step beyond the traditional Arduino examples. It’s just blinking a LED, but rather than the “brute force” approach of switching the pin then forcing a wait before switching it again (the algorithm in the classic Arduino …
Continue reading ‘Using a timer interrupt with KDS and K64F’ »
Yesterday I drove my daughter over to Reading for a university open day. Even though it feels as though she has just started A-levels, it’s time to think about what happens after sixth-form. Things kicked off at the university at 09:30, so we left a little before 07:00 to drive the 130 miles or so. …
So I’m still banging my head against the difficulty of making a simple serial connection between my Raspberry Pi and an ATMega chip on a daughter board. And I still have not got it working properly. Overnight it occurred to me that I ought to have turned off the serial port login on the Raspberry …
Today, I thought I’d have a go at running one of the simple demonstrations I saw at the recent Freescale Tech Day in Milton Keynes. I have a FRDM-K64F development board which I bought a few weeks ago, and my fresh installation of the KDS IDE. The K64F is a lovely board with a powerful …
Continue reading ‘A first project with FRDM-K64F and Kinetis Design Studio’ »
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?’ »