This is going to seem silly to some of you, but I just beat my head over it for 20 unnecessary minutes, so damnit, I’m making a public note. Here’s how to fix errors trying to use ArduinoISP.
alexw Posts
I got the USB IR Toy v3 as a free PCB from Dangerous Prototypes a few weeks back, but until recently I haven’t had much time to track down all the parts for it. Given that this is a v3 and not a v2, there isn’t a simple shopping cart of parts at Mouser kicking around. So, I decided to make one!
I’ve been getting great use out of my modded Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories Bulbdial clock (you might remember, I modded it with a touch sensitive strip to turn the display on and off), but it’s been having some problems lately. Because I couldn’t solder to the aluminum tape I previously used, the contacts taped in place were getting loose, causing the clock to flicker on and off. The loose contacts also made functionality very sporadic. The solution was to swap the aluminum strips out with the copper foil I bought a while back from Sparkfun for a whopping $3.
ST Micro in the last few weeks was the first to market with the brand new ARM Cortex-M4 32-bit microcontroller core. The really interesting new feature is the ‘F’ in the name – this is the first low-cost, low-ish-power light duty microcontroller to include a built in, single cycle per instruction 32-bit floating point unit. In typical ST fashion, the development board is awesome – it’s got a built in ST-LINK/V2 programmer and in-circuit debugger on the top half. The bottom half contains the M4 and a host of fun peripherals to play with, including a 3-axis MEMS accelerometer, an audio DAC with class D output driver, a bunch of LEDs, and all GPIOs broken out to .1″ headers.
This may seem tirade-ish, and if so I’m sorry. This was spurred by the story posted here at TUAW. Basically, there’s a little USB pass through dongle that you can buy to eliminate your iPad “not charging” woes. TUAW kind of misses the boat on bothering to explain or understand it, so here’s how it works, in comment-on-the-article form (so read the article first):
A few people asked about this. I’ve seen breadboards with binding posts before, but usually they’re nothing special, just some banana plugs near the board that you can screw a jumper wire into. I wanted something a little more full featured, so I whipped this up.
UPDATE: People keep asking about the breadboard setup. Fair enough. I’ll throw together a quick overview when I get home today.
UPDATE: here it is: http://www.alexwhittemore.com/?p=462
The Bulbdial clock from Evil Mad Scientist is probably the coolest clock idea I’ve ever seen. Even cooler are my parents, who got the kit for my birthday. The basic idea is that three rings of LEDs cast shadows onto a clock face to form H/M/S hands, somewhat like a sundial, with the hands slowly animating around. A lot of thought clearly went into making this kit, and it’s very nicely done, but there’s a major drawback: I want to use it on my bed side table, where I usually keep a clock, but it’s too bright for me to fall asleep! Of course, that’s been thought of too: in the normal view mode, the three buttons at the bottom of the clock are brightness up, down, and “mute,” which turns off the LEDs entirely. But they’re hard to get to buried underneath the frame of the clock, and it makes muting the display cumbersome in the dark. Let’s fix that!
Say what you will, but iPhones are pretty awesome, and so are the headsets that come with them. At least up until you put them in your ears. The inline controls are awesome, but the speakers are uncomfortable, lacking in low end punch, and do nothing for sound isolation. Other, much better headphones exist, but for under a gajillion dollars, none come with the same kind of inline controls. Here’s how to have the best of both worlds.
Here’s a quick note on how Backgrounder, from the wonderful http://twitter.com/ashikase interacts with Xcode’s Build and Run functionality.