Bus Pirate 5 Now Shipping
It’s happened to all of us at one time or another. There’s some component sitting on the bench, say an I2C sensor, a new display, or maybe a flash chip, …read more Continue reading Bus Pirate 5 Now Shipping
Category Archives: serial interface
Spaceballs Get Serialized
As much as we’d love a TV show version of the cult classic movie, we’re talking about a different kind of Spaceball. While there have been many iterations, [Evan] had …read more Continue reading Spaceballs Get Serialized
New Part Day: Lynxmotion Smart Servos
Anyone who shops for robotics kits would have come across a few designed by Lynxmotion. They’ve been helping people build robots since 1995, from robot arm kits to hexapod chassis and everything in between. We would expect these people know their motors, so when they launched their own line of …read more
“DB” = Abbreviated Microcontroller Debugging
We’ve all been there. When debugging a microcontroller project, we just want to put in a print statement to figure out what’s going on with the microcontroller in real time. However, advanced embedded programmers know that printf statements are verboten: they’re just too SLOW. While not fixing this plight entirely, [Atakan Sarioglu] has come up with a clever way to create readable debug messages with minimal runtime overhead.
[Atakan Sarioglu]’s innovation, called BigBug (Github), is a dynamically-generated codebook. The codebook translates abbreviated messages sent over serial (UART here) to longer-form human-readable messages. To generate the codebook, BigBug automatically parses your …read more
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I2C Bootloader for ATtiny85 Lets Other Micros Push Firmware Updates
There are a few different ways of getting firmware onto one of AVR’s ATtiny85 microcontrollers, including bootloaders that allow for firmware to be updated without the need to plug the chip into a programmer. However, [casanovg] wasn’t satisfied with those so he sent us a tip letting us know he wrote an I2C bootloader for the ATtiny85 called Timonel. It takes into account a few particulars of the part, such as the fact that it lacks a protected memory area where a bootloader would normally reside, and it doesn’t have a native I2C interface, only the USI (Universal Serial …read more
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Wrangling RC Servos Becoming a Hassle? Try Serial Bus Servos!
When we need actuators for a project, a servo from the remote-control hobby world is a popular solution. Though as the number of servos go up, keeping their wires neat and managing their control signals become a challenge. Once we start running more servos than we have fingers and toes, it’s worth considering the serial bus variety. Today we’ll go over what they are and examine three products on the market.
Our Friend the RC Servo
Remote control hobby servos are remarkable little devices. Each one is a self-contained closed-loop actuator, available across a wide spectrum of price and torque. …read more
Continue reading Wrangling RC Servos Becoming a Hassle? Try Serial Bus Servos!