Nothing beats a scripting engine when it comes time to customize and psypnp provides both cool scripts to use with OpenPnP right away, and a set of python modules to make creating your own really easy. The project is split into two parts: a set of scripts that automate away a lot of the drudgery…

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This is everything you need to know to get a running start with PLCs if you’re already familiar with programming or engineering embedded systems. Programmable Logic Controllers have been around a long time and there are tons of online resources devoted to the devices but I’ve found these lacking when it comes to addressing the…

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So you’ve got an FT90x–a cool IC that lets you behave as both a USB device and USB host–and you’ve coded for it using the sweet GCC/Eclipse toolchain. Thing is, now you want to burn your shiny new firmware but you planned to use a mikroe mikroprog for FT90x to do the job only to…

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I’ve recently had to determining the frequency of some arbitrary repeating signal, from a stream of sampled values. In a simple universe, you could just wait for a specific value to come in–say the peak value–or monitor for the zero crossing or somesuch. However, the particulars in this case included the fact that, in addition…

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I do not enjoy dealing with the vagaries of calendar dates and times… Actually, I pretty much hate it. It’s mostly because I have little patience for arbitrary rules and convoluted systems, and anything as old as the notion of date-times is always filled with historical cruft: half-baked rules, a bunch of incompatible, random-looking, bases…

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A few hints about squeezing maximum performance out of Raphaël. When you want to generate dynamic SVG images using Javascript, either on a website or within a Cordova-type project on mobile devices, the Raphaël library is pretty sweet.  Raphaël has a nice, clean, API and lets you do pretty much anything graphics-related and it sticks…

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I love the Arduino platform, especially for prototyping, and have been playing with the Atmel ATmega chips for a long while.  Once you’ve designed your project, some of the smaller derivatives (like the Ardweeny I’ve mentioned before) are cheap enough to leave embedded everywhere and, in any case, you can always move from an Arduino…

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I happened upon a questionnaire–How did you learn to program?–and chose to take a few minutes to fill it out. Doing so forced me to look back at the years I’ve spent coding, how I got started and the lessons I’ve learned along the way. I ended up spending a good while filling in my…

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