I’ve been working with the A/D converter on the Atmel Xmega AVR processors, and it’s been quite the handful. At this point in time (Jan 2010) the parts have some very serious issues, and I’ve lost a lot of time trying to get them to work as advertised. This posting is to share what I’ve [...]

Atmel kindly gave me an Xplain Xmega board at one of their Xmega seminars. It’s a useful tool for ATXmega development, but it does have a couple of problems. I thought I’d mention the ones I’ve tripped over, in case anybody else sees the same problems.
Board Doesn’t Restart Properly
I’ve found that when the AVRISP2 programmer [...]

This is a surprisingly common question.  When using WinAVR, how do you get printf() working on an Atmel Xmega processor?  Hopefully this post will help explain how.
First of all, this documentation page has some good information regarding the different flavours of WinAVR printf:
http://www.nongnu.org/avr-libc/user-manual/group__avr__stdio.html
Note the existence of the printf_P() function, which makes it easy to work [...]

A little while ago I wrote about implementing fast JPEG encoding on an Analog Devices Blackfin. See the original post here:
Blackfin Fast JPEG Encoding
Since then I’ve moved to a new hardware platform, with a different blackfin processor and a different image sensor, which has caused me to revisit this code. I found that with the [...]

Recently I’ve been doing some Atmel AVR Xmega work. The Atmel website says that their low-cost programmer, the AVRISP2, can be used to program an xmega device. But their (current) documentation would appear to tell a very different story. If you read the documentation, you’d reasonably conclude that it wouldn’t work at all.
In fact the [...]

Those in the know, know, that if you want to play with analog circuits, using a simulator first is a really good idea. There are many analog circuit simulators out there, some free, some mega-bucks, but the most common of all is SPICE. There are many different versions of SPICE available, and lately I’ve been [...]

Here’s a little known fact about SD Cards. The little “lock” switch on the side of the card? It doesn’t lock the card.

This is a photo of a pretty typical SD card. On the left you can see the “lock” switch. You’d think that sliding this switch downwards, into the locked position, would write-protect the [...]

One of the most frustrating and annoying programs on my Windows computers used to be the Adobe PDF reader. Back in its early versions it was a fast, light, useful program. Then a few years ago somebody at Adobe drank a bottle of liquid stupid, and the program’s been hurtling downhill ever since.
The problems with [...]

Recently I’ve been doing a lot of embedded uClinux programming for the Analog Devices Blackfin BF537 processor. Writing drivers, application code, things like that. It’s a lot of fun.

One of the things I’d been battling with was finding a reasonably fast JPEG encoder. Now you need to understand that the BF537 doesn’t have a JPG [...]

Last year I was in the market for a cheap digital oscilloscope. After much looking around I finally settled on a Wittig Welec W2022A oscilloscope.  www.welec.de 2 channels, colour VGA display, 1 GS/sec sampling rate, it looked awesome.
I purchased mine off ebay from tek4you_eu and it arrived in a week or so.
The big problem I [...]