They’re back! It could be squirrels. Maybe mice. Possibly rats. But whatever they are, the bastards are making themselves at home in the engine compartment of the car again. We had this with the Citroen C5. Twice the twitchy-nosed little feckers chewed through the cables for the top-dead-centre sensor, leaving the car in a state where it would turn over… Read more »
Don’t you hate it when something that was working stops? You can safely bet that it’s because, somewhere along the way, something has been ‘improved’. I needed to make a change to the code running on a couple of IoT room thermometers. These are built around the Adafruit Huzzah ESP8266 board (the non-Feather version). And they’ve been running flawlessly for months…. Read more »
How many remote controllers do you have in the house? One for the TV, one for the DVR, one for the Blu Ray player… There are five remotes sitting on the coffee table in our living room. Plus another couple scattered around the house, controlling table lamps and other TVs. And do you know what? This post isn’t even about… Read more »
Recently, I found myself wanting to share some code via Github, but realised it contained my wifi password. That’s not a huge issue (see below), but neither is it a good idea. You should never hard-code credentials into your software – in principle. But when you’re hacking together an Internet of Things (IoT) toy for personal use in your own… Read more »
The overall architecture of the Sheldon robot is going to be modular. Aside from a central computer (probably a Raspberry Pi or some such), there will be multiple computers or microcontrollers each managing some sub-system. And the first of these is for motion control. I decided on this hierarchical approach because of previous experience building robots. Most of these were… Read more »
Right from the beginning I knew that the Sheldon robot would have a multi-processor architecture. This appeals to me the same way object-oriented programming appeals – you can create a modular system in which each part does a specific task and can be treated like a black box. The structure will be hierarchical. At the top – what I’m going… Read more »
I’ve wanted an Altair 8800 for a long time now. It’s not that you can do much with it. But it is such an important part of computing history. Famously, the January 1975 edition of Popular Electronics featured the Altair 8800. Or rather, it featured a non-working prototype. The first working machine had gone missing in the post. The magazine… Read more »
One of the more challenging aspects of writing code for microcontrollers is not being able to liberally sprinkle your code with PRINT statements to show the state of variables and whatnot at particular moments. If you’re working with Arduino-type devices you can always fire up the Serial library and print stuff that way – back down the wire to a… Read more »
Why is it you can never find the data sheet you need when you’re in a hurry? I’m currently exploring (or as my More Significant Other puts it, ‘twotting about with’) AVR microcontrollers. This is a natural extension of my earlier addiction to Arduinos, which are the gateway drug of the microcontroller world. Sooner or later you start feeling constrained by… Read more »
So I was looking around for a case for a Raspberry Pi and I noticed this old radio gathering dust in the cupboard. And it all just got out of hand from there. The HMV Model 1376 valve radio dates from 1960. When I bought it in a junk shop for a few quid it was working. When I took it… Read more »
I confess I’m really enjoying delving into the secrets of AVR microprocessors. Having used Arduinos for some time now – as well as other AVR-based boards such as the mighty and wonderful Teensy – I came to the conclusion that I’m a master at µcontroller hacking. Working with ‘raw’ AVR processors quickly disabused me of that notion. The Arduino ecosphere shields you from a… Read more »
Sometimes, before you can make a thing you have to make the tools to make the thing. Or to put it another way … while having a bunch of breadboards tenuously connected by a rats nest of inscrutably coloured wires might be impressive (when it doesn’t look like a bomb), on occasion it’s good to have a tool that simplifies… Read more »