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I just finished Among Heroes and Darknet, both of which I enjoyed. This week I am reading How to Catch a Russian Spy and a print copy of On Lisp.
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This weekendish I started putting together a set of tutorials on embedded development. Some of my friends wanted to get started in embedded and “bare-metal” programming, so I started writing them the guide I’d wished I had. I found a lot of the material that exists either moved to slow because they assumed you didn’t know much about programming or moved too fast because they assumed you knew too much about embedded systems. I picked the Arduino (though programming it with plain C, not the Arduino environment or Processing/Wiring) because they’re fairly low-cost to start with and you get started right away; the AVR architecture is also not so complex that you have to learn a lot of additional stuff while trying to figure out how to write your program.
Also, I’m slowly burning out on the tech industry and finding some refuge in building a small rover-like robot.
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Thank you already for the tutorials you’ve written so far. Learnt a huge amount from reading them, looking forward to pulling out my Arduino and playing a bit more. Not gone outside the Arduino editor before, but reading the intro guide make a whole bunch of stuff in my head just click. Maybe my ‘duino controller RC car might get finished this year now. (Was previously attempting to control with an RPi, using Go. Never finished it.)
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Glad it was useful! If there’s anything in particular you’d like to know about, I’m always looking for ideas. I’ve got analog inputs, I2C, SPI, and maybe threading as planned future posts; once the AVR series is done, I’ll probably start a series on ARM and/or the MSP430. I’d love to hear more about the RC car as you work on it (maybe in future weekly threads?).
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Having failed to find my ‘duino, I’ve just picked up a micro on eBay cheaply to play with for this, heh.
My adventures with the car so far have been hooking up a RPi through a L298N controller to get the forward/backwards & left/right motors in the car working independently. (It’s a cheap kids remote control car that I think the RC crystal has been busted in. Wasn’t working with any of my remote handsets at least.) I kinda stagnated at that point, needed to get an interface in there somehow to have remote control of it (I was thinking from my phone over wifi at that point, hence having it controlled via a Go program.)
I’m now thinking I might try and have the arduino control the motors through the L298N (if required? Not sure, need to look up the voltage specs of the ‘duino), and control it via serial to start with. Possibly piggyback the RPi on there or try hooking a bluetooth or wifi module into the 'duino.
Not really done much hardware stuff beyond making plug n play devices work on OS' that don’t have out the box support for them before. Got a bunch of LEDs & buttons to start learning with though, but having the car project progressed me from “I’ll learn this stuff one day” to “how do I get this thing moving forwards”.
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I like these small 4800 bps transmitters and receivers when I want something dead simple. You might find those easier to work with for radio control than wifi or bluetooth.
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Also, I’m slowly burning out on the tech industry and finding some refuge in building a small rover-like robot.
Is there anything in particular driving that, or just general constant churn from the industry?
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Fair enough, over the years I’ve wondered about the various drivers behind burn out, looking at ways to dampen their effect. Alternatively, they can become a catalyst for something else. Obviously it is different for every one person.
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This is always great news!
sqlite is amazingly light and fast as it is… But since it’s use is so universal, this will make a difference in life.
ps: If you ever need a gui front end to sqlite, the firefox addon sqlitemanager is fantastic.
Quite the best datamining tool available.
I work on SQLCipher so I’ve become accustom to using the command line shell interface, however there slowly becoming alternative GUI options available for folks.
Can you recommend any Open Source app for SQLite on OS X?