Electronic hardware, gadget designs, do-it-yourself computer modifications. Stuff with parts.
While troubleshooting, another embarrassing discovery is that the thing in question isn’t working because you didn’t turn it on. This rule could come first, as in some sense it’s more basic than Rule #1, but for the simple AC-powered appliance, you have to plug it in before you can turn it on, so I list it second.
Again, there are lots more useful ways to think about whether you’ve turned something on. For instance: read more...
The first in my series of troubleshooting rules:
A surprising number of day-to-day problems are solved when you realize that the thing just isn’t plugged in. Oops.
The obvious sense of “plugged in” is “plugged into the mains supply” - the AC wall outlet.
But there are many other useful senses to look for: read more...
Having been playing with various electronic gadget designs that might or might not be considered “robots,” and recently thinking about buying a Roomba, I was wondering what my own working definition of a robot actually is. Here’s what I came up with while washing the dishes. read more...
Note: This page is obsolete, but I’m leaving it up for history. My current solution for automated control is here.
Microchip’s PICkit 2 is a good, cheap PIC programmer. One nice thing about it is that they’ve made the source code available. So you can tweak it if it doesn’t suit you.
In order to integrate it with the SourceBoost IDE, I added this command-line option: read more...
Here’s some PIC assembly source code (MPASM) for reading a quadrature encoder. It’s fairly raw and simple, but it works. read more...
Here’s some of the source code for a LED driver chip I’m working on. It’s just here for inspection at the moment, as I’m trying to get help with a problem.
