I’ve had a VC99 multimeter for a while, and one of the nice things about it, is that it can be hacked to give it RS232 output pretty easily. The hack is possible because the VC99 uses a rather standard DMM chipset that has serial-output capabilities built-in. You can check if the feature is there […]
It happens that I quite like scientific calculators, and lately I’ve been adding a few to my collection. Several calculators are CAS (“Computer Algebra System”)-capable, meaning they are powerful enough to do symbolic / algebraic processing, and thus are able to understand and manipulate algebraic expressions containing any mix of unknowns, operators and numbers, and […]
A couple of months ago I was asked if I could prepare a sort of workshop on one of my favorite topics: ASM Programming for PIC microcontrollers, which I of course accepted on the spot. Now, I wanted to include a couple of “hands-on” lab sessions in this workshop, and because of this, I needed […]
You don’t see them around that much anymore, but a few years ago the ESP-01 modules took the world by storm as quick “serial to wifi” bridges for microcontroller projects. With a few serial commands you could quickly connect even the most basic microcontroller to the internet over Wifi!
It took me a really long time to do this second part of my Pi-based Logic Analyzer project, mostly because of two things; the first one being that at one point (after I had pretty much all the case design, extra hardware and software tweaking done for my RPi1) I decided to switch to a Raspberry Pi […]
It has become pretty common for me to have one or two unfinished projects on my bench or the shelf, because “I just can’t find the time” to complete them, or because I’m “waiting for something the project needs”. And both things happened in one way or another with a Linear Power Supply kit that I bought after […]
I got the chance to play with an Intel Edison board a couple of months ago, and I just got my own board today, so I spent a bit of my afternoon settings things up, and playing with it. One thing I noticed, is that most tutorials and guides for the Edison were written for the version of the […]
If you are using your Arduino’s PRNG (Pseudo-Random Number Generator) for anything more serious than flashing random lights for your Christmas decorations, there’s a chance you might run into some unexpected issues, as the random() function in Arduino seems to be somewhat broken. Why? Let me explain. Background Most basic random number generators in programming libraries and platforms are based on what is called […]