How To Shoot A Great Project Video

Creating projects is fun, but the real value, as far as the imaginary Internet points are concerned, is how well you show them off for the clout. Taking a few snaps is fine, but if you want to produce a quality video of your project, it pays to put some …read more

Continue reading How To Shoot A Great Project Video

Choosing The Right RTC For Your Project

When it comes to measuring time on microcontrollers, there’s plenty of ways to go about things. For most quick and dirty purposes, such as debounce delays or other wait states, merely counting away a few cycles of the main clock will serve the purpose.  Accurate to the tens of milliseconds, …read more

Continue reading Choosing The Right RTC For Your Project

Linux Fu: Moving /usr

Linux has changed. Originally inspired by Unix, there were certain well understood but not well enforced rules that everyone understood. Programs did small things and used pipes to communicate. X Windows servers didn’t always run on your local machine. Nothing in /usr contributed to booting up the system.

These days, …read more

Continue reading Linux Fu: Moving /usr

Beyond Printf(): Better Logging Practices for Faster Debugging

All of us who do some programming know that logging is a time-tested way to output messages about the internal state of our code. With varying degrees of adjustable granularity, these messages allow us to keep track of not only the state of the application, but also its overall health. …read more

Continue reading Beyond Printf(): Better Logging Practices for Faster Debugging

Printed It: Print-in-Place PCB Gripper

The goal of Printed It is to showcase creations that truly embrace the possibilities offered by desktop 3D printing. The most obvious examples are designs that can be printed quickly and cheaply enough that they’re a valid alternative to commercially available products. But as previous entries into the series have …read more

Continue reading Printed It: Print-in-Place PCB Gripper

A Beginner’s Guide to Lithium Rechargeable Batteries

Batteries were once heavy, awkward things, delivering only a limp amount of current for their size and weight. Thankfully, over time, technology has improved, and in 2020, we’re blessed with capable, high-power lithium polymer batteries that can provide all the power your mobile project could possibly need. There are some …read more

Continue reading A Beginner’s Guide to Lithium Rechargeable Batteries

Peeking Inside Executables And Libraries To Make Debugging Easier

At first glance, both the executables that a compiler produces, and the libraries that are used during the building process seem like they’re not very accessible. They are these black boxes that make an application go, or make the linker happy when you hand it the ‘right’ library file. There …read more

Continue reading Peeking Inside Executables And Libraries To Make Debugging Easier

Using Valgrind to Analyze Code For Bottlenecks Makes Faster, Less Power-Hungry Programs

What is the right time to optimize code? This is a very good question, which usually comes down to two answers. The first answer is to have a good design for the code to begin with, because ‘optimization’ does not mean ‘fixing bad design decisions’. The second answer is that …read more

Continue reading Using Valgrind to Analyze Code For Bottlenecks Makes Faster, Less Power-Hungry Programs

Using Valgrind To Track Down Known And Unknown Bugs In Your Code

We all know what bugs in code are. We don’t like them when they are in programs we use, and they’re even worse when they are in code which we have written. Clearly, the best code is bug-free, but how do we get there?

This isn’t a new question, of …read more

Continue reading Using Valgrind To Track Down Known And Unknown Bugs In Your Code