Year: 2012
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CNC milling custom 40DP timing belt “gears”/pulleys
Woo, it’s been a long time since I messed with pick & place stuff. Bad Tim. An irritation I have been having is making everything work using reliably sourceable, off-the-shelf parts (not lucky eBay/surplus finds). In particular I’ve found small “tin can” stepper motors are hard to source in small quantities repeatably, and once you…
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Fun with cheap TV-tuner dongles and Software Defined Radio (SDR)
So, last week I joined the bandwagon of exploring software-defined radio (SDR) via one of those super-cheap Chinese TV tuner USB sticks. In a nutshell, the idea of SDR is that, rather than the traditional approach of building dedicated radio receiver hardware for each possible RF band and modulation type (here’s your AM radio, here’s…
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Notes to myself: Using EnergyMicro EFM32 with GCC open-source toolchain
The EFMs can be used with many different toolchains after installing EnergyMicro’s “Simplicity Studio” package, which includes board/chip support packages and some code examples. EnergyMicro’s application note AN0023 has an overall good overview of setting up an Eclipse + GCC (CodeSourcery) toolchain. Nevertheless, in attempting to replicate this process on my Win7 system (work PC;…
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The IOC, Trademark Law and You
Yes, it’s true! With the London Olympic Games and Paralympic Games Act 2006 (UK), and similar laws pushed through in other countries as a condition of hosting a certain large quadrennial event (US- Amateur Sports Act of 1978; Canada- Olympic and Paralympics Marks Act), any infringing use of IOC ‘properties’ (similar to, but stronger than,…
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Buying Parts
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Solved: Can’t connect to high (>10) Windows COM ports / cleaning out unused COM ports
Problem: Windows, and many Windows apps that use serial (COM) ports, have various problems accessing “high” numbered COM ports. I cannot find an authoritative or quantatative definition of “high” (and it may depend on your app), but I have seen apps start failing after COM8, COM9, COM15… anything in the 20s is asking for trouble.…
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Solved: SL4A force close when calling recognizeSpeech
Problem: SL4A crashes upon the first call to recognizeSpeech() : com.googlecode.android_scripting stopped unexpectedly (Force Close). The corresponding Android log via adb shell #logcat: D/AndroidRuntime( 2785): Shutting down VM W/dalvikvm( 2785): threadid=1: thread exiting with uncaught exception (group=0x4 0018560) I/ActivityManager( 1429): Starting: Intent { act=android.speech.action.RECOGNIZE _SPEECH } from pid 2785 E/AndroidRuntime( 2785): FATAL EXCEPTION: main E/AndroidRuntime(…