Monthly Archives: October 2015

First Look at the PIC16F188xx family

Back in August a press release announced the imminent launch of the new PIC16F188xx family [link]. This was bundled with another similar launch for the PIC16F157x family that I have reviewed with a tiny bit more detail in this previous post … Continue reading

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Saleae Logic Analyzer

Saleae Logic Analyzers stand to similar (low cost- USB) products as an iPhone stands to an old Nokia soap-bar. And it is not just a matter of (modern) looks, although they decidedly aim at an Apple-ish look and perhaps beyond. It’s the software that … Continue reading

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Tiny Basic for Curiosity

Watching a retro Basic interpreter running on a modern MCU is somewhat poetic to me… Even better if the Basic interpreter is in its turn running on top of a (retro) Virtual Machine as is the case of the TinyBasic … Continue reading

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Learning Bluetooth LE with the BLE2 Click

Playing with the Bluetooth Low Energy Click board (BLE2 based on the RN4020) on a Curiosity board is a fun way to get acquainted with this technology. My first humble step was to get the simplest example offered in the … Continue reading

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mruby

mruby is a lightweight implementation of the Ruby language designed to be linked and embedded into other applications. It is a branch of the original project initiated by the same author Yukihiro Matsumoto (a.k.a. Matz) and a strong international team … Continue reading

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NESI – Ready for Blast Off

I learned today about the NESI board (photo above), a PIC24 based data acquisition board designed to fit in the NanoRacks, a platform for research on microgravity effects on board of the International Space Station. It has been created by … Continue reading

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VGA Curiosity

The idea of driving a VGA display directly from the I/Os of a small 8-bit microcontroller might seem crazy at first, and perhaps because of this, it is certainly entertaining, and possibly useful to some of you. It is actually easier than most … Continue reading

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A (not so) Virtual Machine for Oberon 0

The Oberon 0 compiler  I recently wrote (in Python) after following the online Compiler Construction course [1, 2] included much more than a single pass compiler. In the best tradition of such courses based on the work of N. Wirth, the lexer and parser … Continue reading

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