If you’ve ever wanted to program a microcontroller “in the cloud,” you might want to head over to Inventor Town, an online IDE that allows you to write and compile firmware for the MSP430 series of microcontrollers. After logging in with your Google account, you’re presented with a ‘My Projects’ page. From there, you can [...]

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The Arduino folks took advantage of Maker Faire New York to announce their new line of products. There’s several interesting new additions to their product line. They’ve got a WiFi shield in the works that utilizes a module from H&D Wireless in conjunction with an AVR32 processor to take the workload off of the ATmega [...]

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Relief is here from long compile times when developing firmware for your Arduino project. [Paul] was puzzled by the fact that every file used in a sketch is fully recompiled every time you hit upload–even if that file didn’t change. To make things more confusing, this behavior isn’t consistent across all Arduino compatible hardware. The [...]

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Following Maker Faire, we’ve had a few days to poke around with Digilent’s 32-bit Arduino-compatible chipKIT boards and compiler. We have some initial performance figures to report, along with impressions of the hardware and software. Disclaimer: Digilent has provided Hack a Day with Uno32 and Max32 boards for evaluation. chipKIT isn’t the first attempt to extend the Arduino [...]

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If you’ve been hungry for more power for your microcontroller projects, but reluctant to dump your investment in Arduino shields or the libraries and community knowledge that go with them all, Digilent has you covered. Their new chipKIT boards are built around the Microchip PIC32 MCU…a powerful 32-bit chip that until recently was left out [...]

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shackspace member [@dop3j0e] found himself in a real bind when trying to recover some data after his ThinkPad’s fingerprint scanner died. You see, he stored his hard drive password in the scanner, and over time completely forgot what it was. Once the scanner stopped working, he had no way to get at his data. He [...]

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TI has recently been fighting to gain traction in the market of low-cost microcontroller development platforms with products such as the MSP430 Value Line Launchpad.  In order to meet the needs of a rapidly growing customer base and appeal to a broader market they have recently released Grace beta Graphical Peripheral Configuration Tool. Grace is [...]

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[Chris Hulbert] is making it easy for Arduino users to program MSP430 chips with a header file that allows you to compile Arduino sketches for the Launchpad. This makes sense, as the growing number of Arduino sketches available, and the low cost of the TI Launchpad make for a good bedfellows. It’s really wasn’t that [...]

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A common complaints of beginners to microcontroller programming is the availability of DIY tools that do not require a parallel port.  Using not much more than a couple of 74xx series chips and some protoboard, [Rue] was able to create an AVR programmer for less than the cost of some chips it can program – giving parallel programmers a run for thier money. [Rue] used Linux treat [...]

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There are a lot of solutions to programing an Arduino: the default avr-g++, Studio, etc. But [Sandeep] let us know about using one of the more powerful IDEs out there, Eclipse, to do the same. We’ve already outlined why Eclipse is a great IDE but now the fact that you can use it in your [...]

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[Geordy] wanted to use some IDE devices but he didn’t have an interface card for his XT system, which can’t handle 16-bit  IDE. He looked around for 8-bit ISA controllers but they were hard to find and quite expensive. Lucky for him there’s an open source project that makes a solution to this problem. The [...]

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[Shoji Ito] has a beloved sequencer that went out of production ten years ago. Unfortunately the storage options are also 10 year out-of-date as SCSI is the stock option for storing his loops. Using a series of adapters he added Compact Flash storage to his Akai MCP-2000 Classic. The board has a connector for 25-pin [...]

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I’m already using few tips described here. From the article:
So I like vim a lot, and I’ve been using it on and off for a few years, but recently I’ve been using it full-time to code in Python. I learned a few things along the way and I made vim a better IDE for [...]

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