For two years, while living in Germany, I had been dreaming about flying again my beloved Cessna 172. Upon my return to the US last summer though, things had been too hectic and I had decided to postpone any flying activity to a later time.Finally last Friday, I flew to Phoenix to meet with Steve and on an early Saturday morning we took off from Chandler municipal for a cross country flight with destination San Francisco.
Continue reading
Browsing through those large book stores, of the kind and size you can find only in the US, is one of my favorite pastimes.
I can loose myself in there for entire afternoons just letting the eye fly (wink) over the shelves and picking out the catchiest titles. My favorite section is of course the technology and programming one, and my first pass is often spent looking for the red spine and Newnes logo, just to make sure they do have copies of my books available. Too often they don’t, which I like to think is a sign of how successful my books are, they must literally fly (wink wink) off the shelves!
But for the last couple of years I have been attracted by books on Ruby, a very trendy programming language, although I never really ended up buying one or getting to dig deeper into the subject. I had this notion that Ruby was just for web site designers and there was little else for me there. Eventually, this Christmas I gave in and bought a copy of “Learning Ruby” written by Michael Fitzgerald and published by O’Reilly.
I choose it (among the many other Ruby’s books) because it promised to be very compact (about 200 pages) and based on a lot of practical examples, which is definitely my idea of the way books should be. Ok mine are thicker, but I promise, the next one will be shorter.
Fact is, I ended up liking this book a lot. I read it all in a single flight (from S. Francisco to Munich) and it gave me the sort of fever I sometimes get when something new gets my neurons all fired up at once!
Of course somebody has already started playing with the concept of porting Ruby to the embedded control world, with the RAD project (somehow it does not surprise me that this was done first on an Arduino platform, the A in RAD).
While I am not yet sure of the results and their application to the average embedded control project, I learned that “modern” interpreted languages are nothing like (bad) old MS-Basic. There are so many powerful concepts, such as reflections, duck typing, and multi-paradigm support to mention a few, that are worth exploring and considering carefully when trading performance (abundant in modern processors) with ease of development and code maintenance.
What is your opinion on interpreted vs. compiled in embedded control?
First of all Happy New Year!It’s been a while since the last posting, a lot of things have happened but my enthusiasm for all things 16 and 32-bit in embedded control is greater than ever.Here is quick link to yet another PIC32 little demo board: the CUI32 from the Overtone Labs.
It will run StickOS (the PIC32 port) and, following Marku’s blog, you will be able to transform it into a small USB sound card …Have fun exploring!
So I am still investigating the animation capabilities of the PIC32 and the MikroElektronika multimedia board… and having a lot of fun.
Do you remember how to solve the Rubik’s cube? Enjoy!
Software v2.0 for PIC32 Starter Kits has been released, and can be downloaded at (link)
This software replaces all 1.x versions of Starter Kit Software, and is inclusive for all 3 PIC32 Starter Kits.
I must admit, the MikroElektronika PIC32MX4 Multimedia Board has recently stolen the little that was left of my free time. I found myself toying around until late at night with it, and I have resurrected a number of old projects. The little QVGA display is so attractive, and I could not resist but try to port some of my favorite graphics programs to it.
Basically, if you have seen the MikroE web site, you have already seen a screenshot of the Mandelbrot project ported to the PIC32MMB. But if you have tried any of the advanced projects I posted on the PIC32 explorer web site, then you already know what I did next.
Graphics animation is more fun! It is different from basic graphics GUI design and support, because you have to add a real time element to it. To provide fluid motion you have to use double buffering techniques, and if there is 3D, linear algebra needs to be mixed in.
While this is all still very much a big work in progress, I would like to share with you a couple of previews of the kind of things you can do with the PIC32MMB.
This is the basic wireframe 3D cube animation (link)
There are four more videos for you to explore:
A more complex 3D wireframe (link)
More objects animated in 3D (link)
Using the onboard accelerometer to move around objects (link)
And finally a Solid (filled faces) rotating cube with hidden face removal (link)
Now things are getting real entertaining… any ideas?
It is Christmas, again, not sure how this happened …
Of all my ambitious plans for 2009 only a few got done, but looking back I am pretty sure somebody must have stolen a couple of months from this years’ calendar. I will be more careful next year, won’t let it happen again.
I have been reading more about RTOSes recently, and specifically FreeRTOS:
My new year resolution: Learn to use (Free)RTOS to give better structure to my projects and practice the art of programming as the real pros!
Happy Holidays !!!
It’s out! They did it!
The new PIC32 multimedia board from MikroElektronika has been officially announced today! http://www.mikroe.com/en/tools/pic32mx4-multimedia-board/
MikroE is world reknown for its well designed, documented and fully featured demo boards and development tools for all Microchip microcontroller families. But if you liked their Big Boards… you are going to love this “small” one.
For less than $150 you get a board that can truly put the PIC32MX460F512 chip to work, allowing you to exercise all its peripherals, including:
Also you can take full advantage of the entire set of Microchip Application libraries to create complex applications fast! In fact the board is designed to be compatible with the following Microchip (free of charge) libraries:
I want one!… CORRECTION.., I need one!… CORRECTION I need a bunch of them!
Continuing on the subject of using printf() as the most basic debugging tool, if you are using the MPLAB SIM software simulator to test portions of your code, you might be aware that the PIC simulator offers the possibility to simulate the UART1 module.
Simply open the Debugger menu, select Settings to open the Simulator Settings dialog box and in the UART1 I/O pane check the Enable UART1 I/O checkbox. This will give you two options:
· Record anything transmitted by UART1 into a file
· Send the transmitted data directly to the MPLAB Output window but in a separate pane, next to the Build pane, the Find in Files pane and the Debugger Output panes.
It has been a hot month of August as I visited back home in Italy and even here in Germany, I mean… everything is relative!
Returning home after a few days off is typically a moment of (small) revelations. Things that had gone unnoticed, in the day to day routine, can stand out when the background changes. Yesterday morning for example, the satellite TV receiver was looking at me sad and lonely from the back of the living room! It had been months since I had turned it on last. Actually I just realized that the only user of the TV screen in my house for the last several months has been my 20 months old son. Not much of a user either, as he has only been watching Bamby II (in 15 minutes installments) before going to bed each night …
What happened to the news? I don’t trust the TV anymore… I check things on the internet.
What happened to the occasional movies? I hate the frequent commercial interruptions (even if less frequent here than in the US) so I mostly watch them off DVDs (on my wife Mac mostly) or streaming directly from the “media server” ( a Linux machine by the way…)
Speaking of PCs, I turned my attention to the “desktop” which is a Windows XP machine we keep in the office room. That one has been off for several months now as well. Last I remember using it was because of a printing job (we are not printing that much either… apparently, good for the trees). The cheap inkjet printer I bought last year (for Euro 59) is not natively supported by my Linux distro (Ubuntu), so I attached it to the XP machine making it probably the last and only useful application for it!?
All the action is now on the Linux media server and my (and my wife’s) laptop(s). While my wife is already on OS X, which covers pretty much all her needs, I am still running on a (company issue) crancky IBM laptop under Windows XP.
Could that last installation of Windows on my lap be replaced by something else one of these days ?
There are three critical systems I use every day on that laptop: Office, Outlook and MPLAB.
The copy of Microsoft Office I use is so old and basic that I am pretty sure it could be easily and compatibly replaced by OpenOffice on Linux or similar package on the Mac.
The version of Outlook I am using is very old as well, and it was not a long time ago when we were using a completely different system. I am not sure why we did the switch to MSFT as I did not notice any advantage in the transition, at least there was none from a user perspective…
But it is truly MPLAB that seems to be last bastion of Windowsness…
Now I heard rumors that that might be changing… well’ see… perhaps next year, I will be writing a similar post and realize that I am now completely TV and Windows free and working on my shiny brand new and ultra-thin Mac Air !?
