xGoat
More tea please.

Isn’t free software great

I’m currently:

Oh, but wait, msp430-gdbproxy and friends aren’t free. Arrrrgh. I can feel my soul dissolving.

If I ignore the dissolving for now, it’s all amazing. So much debugging.

Posted at 11:50 pm on Monday 26th March 2007

XBee <-> Ethernet

Just found an interesting article on Circuit Cellar about a guy who linked an XBee to one of those Microchip ethernet chips. Nice.

Posted at 2:27 am on Wednesday 21st March 2007

Once again annoyed.

Was trying to locate a button cell on Farnell. Of course, I for some reason forgot that Farnell don’t want me to be able to find the product I want, and foolishly selected “1616” from the list. After much main and anger that they didn’t have the batteries that I wanted, I found the “CR1616” option as well. Grrr.

Posted at 2:25 pm on Monday 5th March 2007

TI MSP430 Debuggers and Linux

My Texas Instruments MSP-FET430UIF, and the EZ430-F2013 I ordered for robotics arrived on saturday. I plugged them into my laptop, and to my dismay, they didn’t immediately work. However, after a little work they both work properly. The programming speed I get now with the UIF is 12 Kbytes/sec, around seven hundred times faster than I was getting with the parallel adapter!

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Posted at 2:11 am on Monday 5th March 2007

Jesus Christ!

It just happened. There is a PCB that was generated from the parts of some laser printers!

I think I’m going to go absolutely insane with joy. Maybe after some sleep.

Posted at 5:13 am on Saturday 3rd March 2007

MSP430 Debugging Hardware

This is possibly the most informative post I’ve found on the mspgcc-users mailing list so far. It’s possibly amazing. I should be able to use either the UIF or EZ430 tool that TI sell.

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Posted at 6:55 pm on Thursday 1st March 2007

Breaking the known laws of physics

I’ve just read a variable resistor’s datasheet claiming is has a resolution that is “essentially infinite”. Perhaps we can somehow use this device to break Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and perform some other sorts of witchcraft.

Posted at 4:06 pm on Monday 26th February 2007
2 Comments

xBee slip

Hello! I am writing this post over a serial line. This is no ordinary serial line. I’m in the garage on my laptop. My laptop is connected to a USB-to-serial device. That device is then connected to an xBee zigbee module. I’ve got a very similar setup on my PC in my room. The zigbee transceiver on my laptop is just out of range of the transceiver on my PC. There is a third xBee module sitting in our lounge. It has it’s receive line connected to it’s transmit line.

I’ve then got a slip connection running over that serial connection, which is 9600 bps. It’s also incredibly latent:

[rob@prefect ~]$ ping -c 5 192.168.2.1
PING 192.168.2.1 (192.168.2.1) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 192.168.2.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=596 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.2.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=596 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.2.1: icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=598 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.2.1: icmp_seq=4 ttl=64 time=595 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.2.1: icmp_seq=5 ttl=64 time=596 ms

--- 192.168.2.1 ping statistics ---
5 packets transmitted, 5 received, 0% packet loss, time 4000ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 595.813/596.868/598.809/1.156 ms
[rob@prefect ~]$ 

These xBee modules are cool!

Posted at 2:58 am on Saturday 3rd February 2007
2 Comments

Telex Speed

Apparently my MSP430 programming arrangement is only twice the speed of a 1930s telex system.

Posted at 4:05 pm on Sunday 14th January 2007

Stuff of 12-01-2006

Interesting links du jour:

Posted at 2:38 am on Saturday 13th January 2007

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