I got my AVR to blink my initials in morse code last night. It was a very exhausting battle that took hours. Here’s what I learned: AVR assembly can often highly depend on which actual AVR you have, and they are all very similar but not alike, so cutting and pasting assembly language code rarely, [...]

I’ve been a little worried that I’m losing most of my non-technical readers with the recent microcontroller postings. As far as my mental picture of my weblog audience goes, I think I have 5, maybe 6 regular readers who understand this electrical engineering / microcontrollers stuff, and maybe only two or three of those care [...]

I built my AVR programming cable. I had to desolder the existing wires off of the connectors, and then double check the pinouts of the 10 pin in circuit programming interface, trace the leads on the Olimex board to make sure everything was kosher, figure out which wires connect to which pins in my female [...]

My Olimex 28 pin AVR microcontroller prototype board from Sparkfun arrived the other day.

The past week or so has been busy at work and at home (what’s new?) but I’ve managed to squeeze in a few moments here and there to start studying AVR microcontrollers. For my non-technical readers out there, a microcontroller is like an entire computer on a single chip. Modern computers use lots and lots [...]

Around about 1996 or 1997, the MTU Bookstore changed their original supplier of Engineer’s Computation Pads to a cheaper supplier but still kept selling them at the same price. The pads went from a pleasing yellow green with a smooth finish, to a nasty yuck green with a more pulpy, less durable feel. So I [...]

Tonight I was hooking up the TV so we could watch the Olympics. The A/V gear was still in a heap from The Move and as I was unearthing the VCR, I had to move the Playstation 2. “I’ll put the Playstation over here,” I said. “Pay-stasion,” came the echo at my feet. I paused. [...]