Blog de Joe Freeman

The TI Launchpad  comes with a demonstration program that reports the current temperature of the on chip die back to a connected computer over the Launchpad's Serial/USB bridge.  The code is written in Texas Instruments Code Composer Studio (CCS).  CCS is a nice development environment but assumes a certain level of technical expertise not required when getting started with other environments. The LaunchPad Experimenter's Guide provides a schematic for the board. The folks on the Energia project on github (  https://github.com/energia/Energia  ) project have created a Arduino like development environment for the MSP 430.  Their libraries hide the register manipulation details from the developer though knowing those details is important when tuning the power tuning and performance of the MSP 430 CPUs.  The Energia project has a sample thermometer program that displays the current temperature on an the Nokia 5110 LCD display. Source is located on thei...

After some group success with the Continuous Integration build lights, I wanted an "extreme feedback"  way to graphically show our production traffic either through transaction metrics or through server utilization. People understand gauges and alarms so I wanted to incorporate both of those features into some type of device. The end result is a USB controlled dial gauge with real alarm bells and a single red/green LED status light. The total build cost about $53. It contains a text command console that accepts ASCII strings over the COM port.  The command console extends control over the LED, the servo motor and the bell motor to the connected host.  Hardware Design I know how to do the basic electronics but nice packaging has always been a problem. Ikea came to the rescue here with the $7.00 Dekad alarm clock with a metal case and alarm bells with an external hammer. The case is pretty good size was originally made for their wind up clock. It i...

I previously posted some C# code that I use to gather build status information in a Continuous Integration environment. No CI environment is complete without the Big Red Build  light. In case I'm using a custom dual RGB LED lamp controlled by an Arduino.  This build light communicates through a SparkFun BlueSmirf Bluetooth adapter in it that appears as a COM port on a Windows PC after pairing. The BlueSmirf talks to the Arduino over it's RX/TX pins making it simple to communicate with on the Arduino using it's Serial libraries.  There are newer versions of the BlueSmirf that appear as HID devices for driverless communication but I still like the simplicity of the COM interface and haven't upgraded yet. The ArduinoRGB.cs  C# class accepts a serial port as a constructor and provides a simple API for turning on the various RGB combinations along with programmable blink rates. The API supports multiple RGB lamps in a single device.  TheArduino Uno has 6 PWM ports,...