AVR For PIC People, Part 1: The Basics

Posted on October 19, 2012 by Steve

If you followed TuneConsole, you know I’m a PIC guy.  Unfortunately for me, Microchip hasn’t kept up with the times:  their toolchain feels like late ’80s Borland tools, and that’s a very generous comparison.  Turbo C was never this bug-ridden, and was far more modern to boot.

Microchip also isn’t very open-source friendly, as evidenced by their non-redistributable USB stack.  The combination of these issues is a powerful motivator to check out their competition in the form of Atmel’s AVR series.  Open-source friendly with a gcc-based toolchain?

Yeah, that’s pretty attractive to someone like me.

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Posted in AVR, Hardware Hacking | 1 Comment

Centering A Dialog Under A Status Item In Cocoa

Posted on October 18, 2012 by Steve

So you have an NSStatusItem, and you want it to pop a dialog for whatever reason, perhaps a settings window.  Where should that dialog be positioned?  If you’re not placing it centered on the main screen, you probably want it under the status item itself. How does one get it there?

The basic answer is surprisingly simple.

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Radiance: Stupid Developer Tricks

Posted on October 17, 2012 by Steve

As some of you likely know now, I’ve been working on Radiance 2.0, which will hopefully be a significant improvement.  The current application is a hack at best; I wrote it for me rather than for the masses.  I’m working on polishing it up.

Part of that is Sparkle integration for automatic updates, and that led to my Stupid Developer Trick of the week.

During development, I absently tossed a radiance directory on macdweller.org to host product updates.  I wasn’t really thinking, and (for some dumb reason) expected WordPress to just handle it, which it didn’t (duh!).  It overrode the usual Radiance page in WordPress (of course), and a few of you therefore had access to a very, very early build of the next iteration of Radiance.

If you have build 301, I suggest you ditch it; the UI is incomplete and extremely buggy.  It’s also missing half the features that the final version will have, and the auto-update code isn’t finished yet either, so it probably won’t work when 2.0 arrives.  In short, please use 1.2; you’ll be much happier with it in the end.

It’ll be a while before 2.0 is ready since I’m only working on it in my spare time – but stay tuned.

S.

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The Macdweller Part Storage System

Posted on October 13, 2012 by Steve

Proper storage of electronic parts is a pain in the neck, and I’m not the only one who thinks so.  Every serious hacker has to deal with this at some point, and the solutions are all over the map, ranging from a cardboard box to complex custom shelving units.  If you haven’t dealt with this, you probably don’t do much hardware hacking.

Since Hackaday published a request the other day for people to send in their methods, I thought I’d share mine.

Your mileage, of course, may vary.

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Posted in Hardware Hacking | 9 Comments

Locking And Unlocking Files From Terminal

Posted on September 19, 2012 by Steve

Ever needed to change finder’s lock bit on a file from the command line?  Well, it isn’t really a finder thing.  To wit:

# Lock a file
$ chflags uchg /my/favorite/file

# Unlock a file
$ chflags nouchg /my/favorite/file

I would say this is useful given that the OS likes to automatically lock inactive files, but that feature was apparently stripped from Mountain Lion.  Too bad, really; I actually kinda liked it (though I’m apparently the only one!).

S.

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Radiance 1.2: Now Supporting Mountain Lion

Posted on September 14, 2012 by Steve

So I finally got around to updating Radiance for Mountain Lion, which was more difficult than it sounds.

The old version used the undocumented O3Manager API to control display brightness, but Apple removed it in 10.8.  External displays can’t be controlled via the IODisplay API; instead, you need USB HID.  The current implementation matches a display to a HID device by serial number; we’ll see how that works out.

If you’re interested in doing something similar in your own application, you can grab the new MDDisplayManager object from this page.

Posted in Mac Hacking, Mountain Lion Hacks, Radiance | Leave a comment

Review: Gold Phoenix PCB

Posted on June 15, 2012 by Steve

The Breakout Fin is here!

Since the boards were coming from China, I expected it to take a lot longer to get them – if nothing else, due to customs and shipping delays.  Apparently, I was wrong.

They arrived on Tuesday…

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Posted in Hardware Hacking | 2 Comments

The Double-Sided Breakout Fin

Posted on June 5, 2012 by Steve

Arduino has its shields.  Raspberry Pi apparently now has Pi Plates.  BeagleBone has capes.

I’ve now decided that my toys shall be called Fins!  Hah!

But I digress.

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Solar Harvesting & Supercapacitors

Posted on May 30, 2012 by Steve

I happened to go spelunking on google today for some information on super capacitors, and I stumbled upon a gem.  Seems that someone over at CAP-XX gave a presentation at some conference somewhere some time ago, and this is the PDF of his powerpoint deck.  The topic?

Using a Small Solar Cell for Harvesting and a Supercapacitor for Power Management in a Wireless Sensor.

While I’d prefer an actual paper, the deck is still quite interesting.  Enjoy!

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Guide To Blocks & Grand Central Dispatch

Posted on May 26, 2012 by Steve

I needed extremely simplistic concurrency support for an application I’m working on, and that led me to stumble over a 2009 article on Grand Central Dispatch.  I have to say, it’s one of the cleaner implementations I’ve seen, and I’m impressed.  Not relevant for my current project, but still exceptionally useful.

Read the article over at Cocoa Samurai.

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