Programming Backwards

I ordered a variety of ATtiny microcontrollers and one ATmega328 (what Arduino uses). The ATtinys are really small! I’ll use my teensy to program them. Much less expensive than buying an ISP and possibly more fun. I think I’m ready to wire up a microcontroller on my own without using a pre-made Arduino or dev board.

I saw a blog post complaining about how the purpose of the iPad is to get you to spend your money by regularly buying apps. And that it does this with its “seductive” interface and physical feel.

I looked up the word Application in the dictionary and I’m really happy to have a tablet device that tries hard to give me plenty of the following:

“A program or piece of software designed and written to fulfill a particular purpose of the user”

It tries to fulfill my needs! How exploitative of my wallet!

I would be even happier if anyone could develop and distribute apps without Apple’s strict and arbitrary approval but I’ve noticed that there are far more and diverse apps for my iPad than for my Android phone. Go figure.

Since I wrote a lot of code, I put a lot of effort into knowing my text editor really well. No editor I have used has been perfect but several have really great features or ways of working.

My ideal editor would work somewhat like vim, have a more hackable codebase, a good extension language, have the advanced display support of Emacs, and better IPC than either vim or Emacs.

In short, I think a vim-inspired editor implemented using modern software design would be incredible. You might ask why I don’t use Emacs with vimpulse to get the best of both editors. I have the same reasons an Emacs maintainer stopped developing for Emacs and primarily uses gvim.

I just received Building Wireless Sensor Networks and started reading it last night. I want to get a few XBees and do something cool with them but I am not sure exactly what I want to build and it wasn’t immediately clear whether I should get the simpler series 1 version or the nifty mesh-able series 2 version.

The book assumes you have series 2 XBees which support the Zigbee protocol and can be (metaphorically) stuck together in really neat ways. They support some pretty fancy routing and semi-automatic discovery/configuration. I won’t go into the details since that is what the protocol spec and the book are for.

There is a doorbell project in the book. Our doorbell really sucks so this might be the perfect project for me. Whatever my next TBD project is, I’ll be making it wireless!

TAB Books started following me on tumblr. I had just received the TAB guide to electronics and electricity (by G. Slone) a few days before! Funny coincidence.

It has been a great ground-up intro. I am already familiar with the material in its basic components chapter but the chapter about setting up your workbench and the author’s tool recommendations were really helpful. I don’t have electrical engineer friends readily available to answer those questions for me so I appreciate this author sharing his experience and working technique.

Consistent with its lack of useless vowels, tumblr is designed for small posts and a compact feature set. I chose it for the many client applications for posting photos and the tumblr apps for phones. I also like its integration with other social networking doodads like Facebook and Twitter. I experimented with Wordpress which has lots of great features but tumblr takes fewer steps to use and has excellent features where they count the most.

I may be missing something, but I don’t see any category system or a particularly fancy comment management system. I am willing to sacrifice super-flexible organization for a few choice options and ease-of-use. Especially with my spotty record.

Here’s to tumblr helping me write more useful things down.

I got the urge to play with electronics again after a many-year hiatus. I don’t know where my old collection of components and junk went but I still had my soldering iron around.  I last used it to solder headphone wires together that my cats had chewed apart. I remember it being unpredictable and slow to heat. I got this thing at Radio Shack years ago and it was one of their deluxe models with a stand and sponge. So much for deluxe:

After diving in and ordering parts from SparkFun, I waited a whole week for the parts to get here. Once they arrived, I had a bits and pieces in hand including a voltage regulated power supply. This little thing is meant to snap onto a breadboard and give your project reliable safe power. It requires soldering header pins on each side which will slip into the rails on the sides of the board. Great, that is what my soldering iron is for! I had misgivings about this deluxe piece of junk so I researched the alternatives and I found out that the Radio Shack products are popularly called Fire Starters. Mine acts more like a luke warm piece of metal. It can’t handle soldering a handful of pins onto a board; the most simple soldering task in the world. I tried soldering headers into the holes on the power supply and got nowhere. Hoping my rusty skills weren’t at fault, I gave up.

After days of deliberation,  I went to Fry’s Electronics and picked up a Hakko FX-888. I figured out a reasonable temperature to set it to (about 340C) and letting it warm up for a moment, I tried my hand at those pins again. It worked instantly! The solder melted and stuck to the pin I had briefly heated up.

My first little project consists of a teensy board, some components on a breadboard, and this power supply. I will post schematics, code, and pictures in a separate post.

I found the melting points of solder and added 150C according to some guy’s post somewhere on the net. This added up to around 350C which confirmed the number I had seen somewhere else.