Yet another little corner of the web

Random thoughts and experience, committed to electrons

My Experiences With a Cheap 3D Printer

I’ve been intrigued by 3D printing for quite a while now. Whilst I’ve liked the idea of playing with a 3D printer, I have not wanted to expend the time and effort required to individually source parts and, as I haven’t really had a good plan of what to do with one once I’ve got it, the cost of buying the more consumer focused, pre-assembled ones has been just not been financially viable.

2 Aug 2016 #3D printing #electronics

Pi2com: Serial and I2C Board for the Raspberry Pi

I finally succumbed and bought a Raspberry Pi. I’d been holding out for quite a while, I had a ARM based NAS box (NAS4220) that I had bought a few years back with the intention of learning a bit more about Linux on ARM and as that was the only real reason I could think of for buying it, I didn’t feel the need. A need did however finally present it’s self, I wanted a small device to use to do some simple temperature logging.

30 Mar 2013 #electronics #linux

Using PicStart Plus Under Linux

Microcontroller development under Linux at times is still a little problematic. Many applications exist to enable compiling of C, assembly language and for programming many different microcontrollers. Here we will consider how to program Microchip’s PIC family of microcontrollers. Programming To program a microcontroller two aspects need to be in place: A hardware programmer A software driver for the programmer Hardware There are a large number of programmers available for the PIC microcontroller range.

28 Jul 2007 #electronics

So What Is a Pic and How Do I Program It

So what is a “PIC”? Well, a PIC is a microcontroller sold by a company called Microchip. That’s the short answer, the longer answer is that “PICmicro”, usually shortened to “PIC” is the brand name for a family, in fact a series of families, of 8-bit RISC-based microcontrollers. RISC or “Reduced Instruction Set Computer” describes the philosophy of designing “a processor whose design is based on the rapid execution of a sequence of simple instructions rather than on the provision of a large variety of complex instructions”[1].

28 Jul 2007 #electronics

Installing and Using SDCC on Linux

SDCC, the Small Device C Compiler, is an open source C compiler for a number of microcontrollers and small platforms. This document describes how to get SDCC installed and working under Linux, provides an example code and a description of how to compile it for the 16f877, 16f84 and 18f252. Installing gputils Before installing SDCC it is wise to first install gputils if you are going to be compiling for the PIC platform.

28 Jul 2007 #electronics

SDCC Library for Controlling a 16x2 LCD Display From a PIC

So, you have a small LCD character display, with a Hitachi HD44780 compatible controller and a PIC. You want to control the LCD display from the PIC. There seems to be quite a bit of sample code on the web, however, it seems to either have been written or an alternative microcontroller or in assembly. Well, here’s a very basic library for writing to the controller from SDCC. This library provides a wrapper over the configuration options provided by the Hitachi display; it provides a number of defines to make it easier to select individual options; a basic initialisation function and some very basic commands to send commands and data.

29 Mar 2007 #electronics

A JDM Programmer Variant

I have found the the low-cost programmer provided in schematic by Jaakko Hyvätti (which is based on the jdm84v23 by Jens Madsen), though slow, to be acceptable for my needs. I currently have the device working with Picprog on a breadboard, however I would like a much more solid version ;-) I have decided, rather than placing a chip holder on the board, to provide a header with the required control lines.

8 Feb 2006 #electronics