Archive for March 2011

More Multimedia Boards

It’s about time for an update on the latest and greatest demo boards for the PIC24 and PIC32.

MikroElektronika has been busy in the last year cranking out new demo boards almost every quarter. While I was happily playing with their very first MultiMedia Board the PIC32MX4 based MMB,

MikroE MMB

they introduced a PIC32MX7 version (adding Ethernet connectivity)

PIC32MX7 MMB

and shortly after that a “microMMB” version with the MX4 processor:

PIC32MX4 uMMB

so small that it barely gives you room for four screws around the display to fix it to a panel.

These boards are great to experiment with the Microchip Application Library (MAL) and in particular with  all things graphics, touch, audio and USB. But they are also ready for being mounted in your embedded control application and to became it’s user interface if not the brain.

I wrote a lot of code for them and I intend to share it and document it gradually in the coming weeks to show you how to get the basic functionality (user interfaces) but also to show you things that many believe would only be possible with much more expensive and complex systems.

You can get a glimpse of it on the new page of the Exploring PIC32  web site dedicated to the Multimedia boards and the Multimedia demo projects.  I am so fond of them, that I have decided to   help MikroElektronika re-sell them and to provide documentation and support on this blog and on my two companion web sites.

Real World Instrumentation with Python

 There is a new book on my nightstand, and it is one of the best I have read in years: it is called “Real World Instrumentation with Python” by J.M. Hughes, published by O’Reilly!Less than a month ago I was readying about Ruby. Then one thing got to another and I followed a friend’s suggestion to look into Python instead. Read a lot about it mostly online, then again, I strolling through a bookstore last Saturday and I stumbled onto a copy of this new book (published this past November 2010).  I am amazed by the amount of information packed in so few pages and how smooth and fast it reads. I am now a big Python fan, it’s official, but an even bigger fan of J.M. Hughes.

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