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…
Free SPICE Analog Circuit Simulator
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…
SD Card Locks Don’t Lock
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…
Adobe PDF Alternative
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 Remarkable Sentence
Reading through the websitebaker themes website, I came across this rather remarkable, and amusing, sentence, and felt compelled to post it here: Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod…
Blackfin Fast JPEG Encoding
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…
Welec Oscilloscope – Watch Out
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…