If you’re designing an electronics product that will ultimately be sold, you need to comply with EMI rules. FCC, CE / CISPR, whatever it might be in your market, these regulations set limits to how much EMI your product can…
TI Chronos Watch – Custom Firmware
Texas Instruments has a very cool little MSP430 development kit, in the form of a watch. It’s called the Chronos. At the recent MSP430 seminars they had a 50% off offer, so for $25 I purchased one with the intent…
DDS Based Signal Generator
This was a fun and short little project that I’ve recently updated. If you’re thinking about building a cheap signal generator that’ll work to 20 MHz or so, and would be DDS (direct digital synthesis) based, take a look at…
Atmel Xmega HD44780 LCD Support
Over on AVRfreaks there are a lot of code snippets describing how to connect an AVR to a character LCD display, such as a standard HD44780-compatible display. But not a lot talking about how to do the same using an…
USB to Serial – Fast and Easy
It seems that every little widget (processor or whatever) I work with has a serial port on it, which is extremely handy for printing status and debugging information, etc. These serial ports are of course “TTL” level, which means they’re…
Followup to Atmel Xmega ADC Problems
Time marches on and we’ve had to perform a new PCB revision for the board containing the Atmel Xmega part. So I had the opportunity to add an external voltage reference to the chip. This was one of the things…
Atmel Xmega ADC Problems & Solutions
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…
Atmel Xplain Xmega board Gotchas
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…
Atmel Xmega printf HowTo
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…
Blackfin JPEG Encoding – an update
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…