GNU Toolchain Cross-Compile Challenges
For the last several days I've been working to compile the latest free GNU Toolchain for ARM published by CodeSourcery (now owned by Mentor Graphics).This process has not been easy. In this lengthy...
View ArticleOctoWS2811
Last night I released OctoWS2811 ... after spending pretty much all Sunday making this 3 minute video:Everyone at the meetup a couple weeks ago saw this right when it was first showing video. Since...
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Big 7-Segment Countdown Timer
A few months ago I was feeling inspired to create a nice countdown timer. With the next Dorkbot open mic only days away, I finally had the motivation to actually put it together...Click "Read more"...
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Teensyduino Regression Testomatic, 1st Try...
Over the last couple weeks I've been working on a automated test system for Teensyduino, which someday will verify nearly all the Arduino functionality on every board and also test most of the Arduino...
View ArticleUnix Select-Paste in Arduino Editor
The Arduino IDE editor's lack of support for X11's select-paste mechanism has always annoyed me. Well, I finally got around to adding it. Especially for helping people with their Arduino troubles...
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Maker Faire 2013
The Dorkbot booth at Maker Faire worked out really well. Here's a couple good photos Zach took:This is the right-hand side, with my extremely bright OctoWS2811 Arduino library demo triggered by stomp...
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AD75019 Crosspoint Analog Switch
On my post about the regression test set, jeppius asked if I had sample Arduino code for these AD75019 chips.Click "Read more" for the Arduino code and details....First, a bit of background. The...
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USB Virtual Serial Benchmarks
Recently I've put a lot of work into improving USB virtual serial receive speed. Here's a detailed article with complete source code for the benchmarks.
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DMX Lighting Sequence Player
Portland CORE effigy at Burning Man will be using DMX controlled lighting this year. At least that's the plan, but a low-cost and low-power way to automatically play the lighting sequence (without a...
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Measuring microamps & milliamps at 3 MHz bandwidth
Recently I needed to actually "see" a current waveform in the 100 uA to 5 mA range with at least a couple MHz bandwidth. This extremely expensive probe would have been perfect, but instead I built...
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Audio clip player
Yesterday I made a little audio clip player for a Monty Python Flying Circus theme party. It plays the 3 second dramatic sound for the unexpected Spanish Inquisition entrance.Click "Read more" for the...
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Quality Audio on Teensy3 with Arduino
Over the last couple weeks I've been working on supporting quality audio (44.1 kHz, 16 bit) on Teensy3 using very simple Arduino style programming. This weekend I added buttons and knobs to control...
View ArticleEncoder Library Testing
In a recent forum conversation, it was suggested my Encoder library has only been tested with rotary knobs and "lab" signals, not a high-res encoder turned by a motor, implying it might not work "in...
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Battery Pack Load
I purchased a cheap USB power pack, thinking it would be ideal for powering small projects. But it automatically shuts off if the device isn't drawing a lot of power, since it's meant for charging...
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Maker Faire 2014
Maker Faire went really well. I had a booth about the new audio library, and we also built a OctoWS2811 LED display for Freescale's booth.Click "Read more" for more photos... This is a large 4320 LED...
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Large LCD Reverse Engineering
Years ago, around the time DorkbotPDX's meetup moved from Vendetta to NW Lucky Lab, Ben Bleything brought LCDs from decommissioned point-of-sale terminals to the meetup. I did some reverse engineering...
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RFM69 Wireless & SPI Bus Sharing (feedback wanted...)
Recently I've been working to improve the Arduino SPI library, to better support multiple SPI devices with different settings, and SPI devices requiring interrupts.Today I discovered a new problem...
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SPI Transactions in Arduino
For the last several weeks, I've been working on SPI transactions for Arduino's SPI library, to solve conflicts that sometimes occur between multiple SPI devices when using SPI from interrupts and/or...
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Display & SPI Optimization
Recently I've been working on an optimized ILI9341 display library, to take advantage of Teensy 3.1's more capable SPI hardware. Here's a quick video demo, so you can see how much of a difference it...
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Node-RED Hacking - Audio Library Front-End
When I started the Audio library, a nice GUI (like Puredata or Max/MSP) seemed an impossibly distant dream. Then, in this forum thread, I learned of the open source Node-RED project.Over the last few...
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