Category Archives: mecrisp-stellaris

Hacking an Inspection Microscope

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Sometimes I need to be able to take photographs of very small things, and the so-called macro mode on my point-and-shoot camera just won’t cut it. And it never hurts to have an inspection scope on hand for tiny soldering jobs, either, though I prefer a simple jeweler’s loupe in one eye for most tasks. So I sent just over $40 off to my close friend Alibaba, and a few weeks later was the proud owner of a halfway usable inspection scope that records stills or video to an SD card.

Unfortunately, it’s only halfway useable because of chintzy interface …read more

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Making a Solar-Cell Tester With Mecrisp-Stellaris Forth

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In the last two articles on Forth, I’ve ranted about how it’s beautiful but strange, and then gotten you set up on a basic system and blinked some LEDs. And while I’ve pointed you at the multitasker, we haven’t made much real use of it yet. Getting started on a Forth system like this is about half the battle. Working inside the microcontroller is different from compiling for the microcontroller, and figuring out the workflow, how to approach problems, and where the useful resources are isn’t necessarily obvious. Plus, there’s some wonderful features of Mecrisp-Stellaris Forth that you might not …read more

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Wireless Nunchuck R/C Remote!

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[Dan], admirably rose to the occasion when his son wanted a new toy. Being a dedicated father — and instead of buying something new — he took the opportunity to abscond to his workbench to convert a Wiimote Nunchuck into a fully wireless controller for his son’s old r/c car — itself, gutted and rebuilt some years earlier.

Unpacking the nunchuck and corralling the I2C wires was simply done. From there, he combined a bit of code, an Arduino pro mini, and two 1K Ohm resistors to make use of an Aurel RTX-MID transceiver that had been lying around. Waste …read more

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Forth: The Hacker’s Language

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Let’s start right off with a controversial claim: Forth is the hacker’s programming language. Coding in Forth is a little bit like writing assembly language, interactively, for a strange CPU architecture that doesn’t exist. Forth is a virtual machine, an interpreted command-line, and a compiler all in one. And all of this is simple enough that it’s easily capable of running in a few kilobytes of memory. When your Forth code is right, it reads just like a natural-language sentence but getting there involves a bit of puzzle solving.

Forth is what you’d get if Python slept with Assembly Language: …read more

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