This category contains experiments and tests, which for me usually means messing around and playing with a particular concept, technology, device or whatever. May or may not contain actual “lab” tests.
DISCLAIMER: This is a rather long post on the topic of random numbers, so …uh, sorry for that. I want to talk about a couple of interesting things related to randomness and its many nuisances especially when applied to games. But before we get to that I guess I’ll introduce the basic notions for those of you who are not […]
Not long ago I purchased a few 320×240 touchscreen displays from ebay that looked pretty decent and were also fairly cheap. They conform to the Arduino shield form-factor, so they snap directly onto any standard Arduino board, making them really easy to test and use. They also have an integrated microSD slot (connected to the same bus used by the display controller) which is a nice touch and widens […]
I wanted to add a temperature sensor to a project I’m working on, and while I already had selected the perfect IC for the job, I decided to test a couple of other options I had, to see how they fare in comparison. I was originally going to compare only 3 sensors; the popular LM35, the not-so-popular LM335 and the […]
Ok, so this is probably the last post I’ll make about my Brainfuck-on-Arduino project, basically because it has reached a point where I’ve already tried all the things I wanted to try and I’ve decided that there’s no point in taking it out of the breadboard and build a board for it. At least not […]
DISCLAIMER: Over the course of this post I’ll be dealing with parsing, programming practices, code refactoring, SPI bus oddities, caching techniques,etc. It’s a mixed bag of things and it’s far from being serious analysis on the topic of optimization. Please don’t expect anything particularly smart in this post like branch prediction, overlapping cache windows, partial block reads, etc. This […]
So I’ve been fiddling a lot these days with Arduino’s SD Library. I’m doing experiments with SD Cards as part of my BOA (Brainfuck on Arduino) project and I already have a completely functional Brainfuck interpreter that runs on my Pro Mini board and uses a 23K256 (32KB) SPI RAM as BF “RAM space”. The problem I’m trying to solve now is PROGRAM space (where […]
I was pretty excited when I learned that Texas Instruments has a line of cheap & open-source development tools for their MSP430 microcontroller family (10 years ago they only offered ridiculously overpriced proprietary tools). They apparently created this new line of programming hardware back in 2010, so I ordered one of their Launchpad boards the other day, which is a MSP430F5529 evaluation board […]