I enjoy working on embedded systems, but there’s a significant amount of work you have to do in getting the platform ready before getting to the more interesting business logic. The Raspberry Pi Zero W solves most of these problems: it’s small, has decent I/O, a decent price ($10 + $6 for storage + $4 for shipping) and runs full Linux so I can use my current language of choice.
I’m working my way through Cracking the Coding Interview as a way of learning the new features and tool ecosystem of C++17. Q1.9 reminded me of those games where you need to make a shape by drawing straight lines through dots.
go get has a nice feature where it will fetch the package URL and, based on a meta tag, redirect to the actual location. Here’s the nginx config I use to redirect go get juju.
I ordered two FIT0441 brushless motors for use in v2 of my balancing robot. The DFRobot wiki page on the motor is incorrect so I thought I’d blog about it so someone else can find it 🙂
github.com/eriksl/esp8266-universal-io-bridge looks cool – it exposes the I/O of a ESP8266 wifi module including the GPIO, I2C, PWM, ADC, and UART via a line based telnet interface.
I’ve released a toy compiler for the PL/0 educational language at https://juju.net.nz/src/cgit.cgi/pl0.git/ or https://github.com/nzmichaelh/pl0. I did this as, despite working with compilers for a fair part of my life, I’d never written one from scratch.
We went to Maker Faire Bodensee on the weekend. The kids spent so much time with Paula Pongratz’s Post-apocalyptic jewlery that they missed most of the rest (heh). Other standouts were the breadboard / pus pin based electronic organ from [
Someone recently mentioned that you can ‘hear’ a TV remote control by hooking a solar panel to a speaker and pointing the remote at it. It was a rainy weekend this weekend, so my son and I gave it a go:
It’s taken a while (as you can tell from the date on the box), but here’s my web connected NeoPixel ring: https://juju.net.nz/michaelh/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Vid-20160207-165253-1.m4v Chroma trail: a comet with a trail that cycles through the colours of the rainbow.
Here’s my hack of the moment: text fading in on a OLIMEX 128×64 OLED display. The interesting bit is that this is a TTF font which is rendered by SDL2 into a buffer, dithered into black and white using Floyd-Steinberg error diffusion, and then written out using the Intel IoT upm display driver.