As part of a bigger project (that I’ll reveal later) I set on the journey of designing a simple “keyboard”. It needed to have enough keys to be usable as a general purpose input device (so it requires alphanumeric chars, common symbols, ENTER, ESC, etc) and preferably built around components I already had (like the bunch of 6x6mm push buttons that I don’t […]
So I’m writing a program in C that needs to interact with a custom HID device I built. This program will be running on a Raspberry Pi. This isn’t a massively complicated task but it can be daunting when there’s not a single “barebone” example or tutorial out there on how to do this. So I decided to write this sort of […]
Ok, so this is probably the last post I’ll make about my Brainfuck-on-Arduino project, basically because it has reached a point where I’ve already tried all the things I wanted to try and I’ve decided that there’s no point in taking it out of the breadboard and build a board for it. At least not […]
DISCLAIMER: Over the course of this post I’ll be dealing with parsing, programming practices, code refactoring, SPI bus oddities, caching techniques,etc. It’s a mixed bag of things and it’s far from being serious analysis on the topic of optimization. Please don’t expect anything particularly smart in this post like branch prediction, overlapping cache windows, partial block reads, etc. This […]
So I’ve been fiddling a lot these days with Arduino’s SD Library. I’m doing experiments with SD Cards as part of my BOA (Brainfuck on Arduino) project and I already have a completely functional Brainfuck interpreter that runs on my Pro Mini board and uses a 23K256 (32KB) SPI RAM as BF “RAM space”. The problem I’m trying to solve now is PROGRAM space (where […]
I was pretty excited when I learned that Texas Instruments has a line of cheap & open-source development tools for their MSP430 microcontroller family (10 years ago they only offered ridiculously overpriced proprietary tools). They apparently created this new line of programming hardware back in 2010, so I ordered one of their Launchpad boards the other day, which is a MSP430F5529 evaluation board […]
As a break from my regular activities I decided to spend a week designing and building something with parts and components I’ve purchased over the years but never had the chance to use in a project. This is the result: A sort of portable gaming device powered by a really old AVR microprocessor. I’ll try […]
Someone I follow on twitter shared this a while ago: 8-Bit color cycling in HTML5 canvas. And while it’s basically a sort of HTML5 tech-demo, it shows a very old but interesting technique used in games and interactive media back in the day: Animating complex landscapes by cycling colors in the palette. This is how complex […]