I was debugging IR protocol RC5 and was regretting again and again that I still don’t have a scope at home or at least some small handy logic analyzer. All of a sudden I found the interesting item in the tool menu of Pickit2 software:
I completely forgot that the tool has a couple of useful items – uart, the logic analyzer, some kind of the debugger tool.
Continue readingThe post-instruction me not forget the pain and the flow I used for it.
So I’ve heard recently about the docker and I really liked the idea to have a self-container with basically anything you want to run and test. Why I was thinking about it? Because I always was afraid of what will happen if my provider will kick me off the hosting and will I be able to move my backups to a new server with minimum effort and pain.
A long time ago, I tried to create a local server with a lot of crap settled on my pc. It worked out, but I really did not like the way how I was doing this. The idea to have it in a single self-contained place where I can (theoretically) easily move it to another server with docker running without any struggle seems way more attractive.
Continue readingDescribing my struggles with a menu for my home small project – an audio amplifier. The main challenge is that we have just 3 buttons (the encoder), and two of them are actually not buttons but rotation directions.
First of all, I drafted a block diagram with the logic of the operation (right-left is a rotation direction, down – the button is pressed).
In the previous article, there were a number of faulty determinations. Initially, I thought it should be OK for me, but after some debugging, I realized that such a fault percentage is not tolerable for my project.
Sometimes the cleanest way to design a nice readable schematic in Proteus is to create a separate model with its own graphical symbol with pins attached to this model, not the fastest way but a kind of proper approach within a normal working process.
I was interested in the encoder as you may know, which is not available in the standard proteus component library, starting from a simple drawing of the symbol I would like to use at higher levels:
I needed to get my hands on the encoder, so I started to explore things around it.
First of all, what is the encoder? This is a thing that helps to convert the rotation angle and a direction of rotation to some numbers we can use for our further advance.
Usually, the encoder has three terminals, to connect it I have used the following circuit:
All resistors have a nominal equal to 4.7KOhm.
Continue readingI was working on my personal project – an audio amplifier and needed the LCD display functions, I had already described in my experiments the way to do so, but there were some flaws, so here we are again. What do we need?
There are tons of articles out there, but I decided to make my own device at the moment:
I had thoughts to make such a device long ago, but at this point of time, the necessity of having this stuff increased significantly. Initially, I found a cheap CP2102 IC, it was cheaper than the huge FT232RL, which has a lot of redundant for me functions. Then I went shopping (here I’m talking about Belarus like 8 years ago) and realized that for us CP2102 is more expensive than FT232RL. Well, my choice was kind of obvious.
Continue readingIn a previous experiment, I made an application (well borrowed) with help of C++ Builder, but I really did not enjoy/like it much. So, I was exploring the web again and found an article. It was much more logical and simple to me, so I decided to give it a shot.
Firstly, we need the Qt SDK. Then we should take sources from here: qt.gitorious.org/qt/qt/trees/4.7/src/corelib/kernel files qwineventnotifier_p.h and qwineventnotifier_p.cpp and place them QtSDKDesktopQt4.7.4mingwincludeQtCoreprivate
Also, download the library dedicated to working with a COM port. Good enough, now we are prepared.
The terminal is a cool thing, but sometimes the app is more handy thing to use, plus it simply more attractive than a blank black window. At the moment I was exploring C++ Builder and decide to make a simple GUI for my devboard, so I can control it from my PC.
